7 Interesting facts about Frederick Douglass

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Supported the Three-fifths compromise

Many in the modern United States look poorly on the U.S. Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, which held that slave states could count three-fifths of their enslaved population toward their representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Some have argued that the compromise made enslaved blacks only count as three-fifths of a person, thus showing that the Constitution is inherently racist.

However, Douglass was a supporter of the compromise, defending that part of the Constitution in an 1860 speech before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society in Glasgow, Scotland.

“It is a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding States; one which deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation. A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution,” stated Douglass.

“Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States. So much for the three-fifths clause; taking it at is worst, it still leans to freedom, not slavery.”