Compare And Contrast The Three Fifths Compromise

By the fall of 1786, America’s unrest towards their government had reached a tipping point. During this state of political chaos and rebellions, George Washington and James Madison called a meeting to order of five states in Annapolis, Maryland. At this meeting prominent visionaries debated the fate of their country and discussed the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. After meeting in Maryland, the Congress called all the states to a meeting in Philadelphia during May of 1787. In these meetings, the delegates chose to keep incomplete notes and essentially have the meetings in secret to assure that they could speak freely amongst one another. Not soon after the Constitutional Convention began, it became incredibly clear that the panel was

The Three-Fifths Compromise of the Constitution was an agreement between Southern and Northern states in which three-fifths of the population of slaves would be counted for representation purposes for the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the United States House of Representatives. Those who opposed slavery generally wished to count only the free inhabitants of each state. Those who supported slavery wanted to count slaves in their actual numbers. The so-called compromise of counting "all other persons" as only three-fifths was for the benefit of Southern power

Furthermore, the creation of The Constitution caused much debate between the elite and democratic states because they thought that if the Government got all of the power, they would lose their rights. The conflict between the North and South played a major role in the development of this document. The North felt that representation in Congress should be based on the number of total people and South felt that it should be based on number of whites. However, The Three Fifths

The Virginia Plan sparked debate over its legislative representative proposals. The plan proposed representation of the states by population. This proposition favored the larger states. The Jersey Plan also known as the smaller state plan rallied for equal representation for all states. A compromise was finally reached. One house of the legislature would consist of two representatives from each state. This satisfied the small states. The second house of the legislature would consist of representatives based on population, thus satisfying the larger states. The establishment of a fair measure to apply taxation and representation in the legislature was described in the Federalist Papers: The Apportionment of Members among the States. The government would conduct a census that would prevent the states from understating their population for taxation and overstating their population for representation. The “Great Compromise” resolving the issue of representation did not mean that the federalists and anti-federalists had come to agreement on the Constitution.

“Perhaps the greatest debate undertaken by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 centered on how many representatives each state should have in the new government's lawmaking branch, the U.S. Congress. As is often the case in government and politics, resolving a great debate, required a Great Compromise.”(About) The Great Compromise that was reached by Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth on July 16, 1787 incorporated the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan in parts. It formed a bicameral legislature as proposed by the Virginia Plan. It also decided that the lower house would have representatives in proportion to population of each state. These representatives would be elected by the people. However, while deciding on the representation of states in the upper house, as per the tenets of the Great Compromise, each state would have two members, irrespective of its population.

`Great Compromise is first and the key compromise in united states constitution, which was facing a major issue like state represented by congress for two plans. There were two plans get together name also Connecticut compromise as well as those plans made legislative branch that bicameral two-house representative which each state representative of proportion in the state’s population and size. For example, large population has more representative small has less represented. One plan was the Virginia plan which represented by population and another one was the New Jersey plan which was made equal

As a result of the two plans, the Great Compromise was created for the new Constitution and is still used today. The three branches were created with checks and balances to ensure no branch has too much power and two houses of legislature. The number of members of the House of Representatives is based on the population of each state and elected by the people while there are two members of the Senate for each state, elected by the state legislature.

In the period between the drafting of the Constitution and the start of the Civil War, compromise was a main part in the governing of the United States. The Constitution itself is often referred to as a “bundle of compromises” and because of the effectiveness of these compromises it has been able to withstand time and continue to be the main source of our government. Conflict arose even after the Constitution and compromises were made to try to keep the Union together and decrease tensions between the North and South. In this paper, I will discuss the compromises that made up the Constitution as well as the compromises that were implemented leading up until the Civil War.

That is why there were many compromises during this time. The most famous of the compromises was the Great compromise. The Great Compromise took both the Virginia and New Jersey Plans and met in the middle. This was the start of the constitution and our new government plan. The argument was between large states and small states. The large states wanted to base representatives by population while the small states wanted all representation to be equal between states. Eventually James Madison with Benjamin Franklin’s help would come up with the Virginia Plan. The Virginia Plan stated that we were to have a bicameral government that consisted of the House of Representatives, that was based on population (what the large sates wanted), and the Senate, where all states had the same number of representatives. (What the small wanted.) with this bicameral government and the House of Representatives there comes another problem, how do we count slaves? Because the amount of representatives a state was given was based on their population any state with slaves obviously wanted slaves to count towards their population and any state that didn’t have slaves didn’t want them to count towards the population. The two sides in this argument were the North and the South. The South were the ones that wanted to have slaves count towards the population and the

This may have balanced the slave to non-slave state count in the union but it also basically flat out divided the nation based on slavery. Instead of solving the problem it was a temporarily solution that eventually lead to struggles between the North and the South over the introduction of future western states into the union on the issue of slavery. The passing of this compromise was solely due to the people in Congress, and the president and had nothing to do with the Constitution what so ever.

The House of Representatives uses the states' population to determine how many representatives each state receives in the House. In the southern states, they thought that everyone, including slaves, should be counted. The northern states did not think that it was fair to count the slaves in the total population, since there were a lot more slaves in the south than the north. Both sides agreed to the 3/5 Compromise. This compromise said that for every 5 slaves, they would be counted as 3 citizens. Therefore, 60% of the slave population would be used when the states' population is counted. Slavery in the United States lasted until towards the end of the Civil War and even some after the Emancipation Proclamation, since it only freed slaves in the South and not in the North.

On the other hand, delegates from less populous states favored the New Jersey Plan which declared that all states would have an equal amount of votes. This idea goes back to the Articles of Confederation giving each state one vote. Both ideas were strongly reinforced by their respective sides, but they needed to be combined together in a way that would satisfy both large and small states.

The Great Compromise of 1787 settled the debate on representation resulting in the government agreeing to have the Senate equally represented by two officials for each state and the House of Representatives was characterized based on the population of each state. There were two sides to the debate: The Virginia Plan and The New Jersey Plan. Each Plan only benefitted one side or the other because both sides had a different portrayal of equal power. One wanted equal delineation for all, while the other wanted apportionment. The biggest obstacle was attempting to balance the power between the small and large states. The road to a balance of power was long and tedious. Despite the differences in opinions on how power should be divided, they did

There were many disagreements and compromises that occurred while in the process of creating the Constitution. Some were: the debate over slavery, the debate of the Virginia plan and the New Jersey plan, and the disagreement about the amount of time the president should work. There was a huge debate over slavery and the states were torn between abolishing slavery and owning slaves. A three-fifths clause was created so that slaves would be considered part of the state’s population. Three-fifths of the slave population was a compromise where some of the slaves would be counted “in determining each state’s representation in the House of Representatives and its

Beginning on December 7, 1787, five states ratified the Constitution in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve undelegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. The reason why it was so hard to ratify was because it had no bill of rights, states were afraid of losing power, and that the central government would be to strong. Although In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The three-fifths compromise was reached between the northern and southern states which consisted of on how slaves would be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes, this was a major issue because the population number would then be used to determine the number of seats that the state would have. On June 21, 1788 New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document and on April 30, 1789 George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United