Several readers still take exception to my take on the 3/5ths clause. A typical email:

You write:
That compromise was better than what the slaveholders wanted, but one can’t argue it was itself a good thing.
That compromise was one of the biggest hurdles to get the constitution ratified. Without it, as you know, there is no constitution. It was terrible that it had to happen and slavery was and is unconscionably evil and an indelible stain on the otherwise brilliant founders. Sadly, it had to happen. Does the good of the greatest constitutional government in the history of mankind outweigh the evil of slavery? Judging from hindsight it is easy to say yes. I hate to say it, but the 3/5s compromise was, to me, a good thing.

I understand the point and I agree that the Constitution was – and is — a very good thing. But nobody I know thinks that in and of itself counting slaves — or having slaves at all — as less than whites was a good thing.

Here’s what I wrote in my column: “That America’s slave population was counted by the same ratio under the original Constitution is usually cited, rightly, as one of the document’s greatest sins.”

I still see nothing wrong with that. Let’s say you think the Yalta treaty was a good thing (that’s not exactly my view). Surely the bits forcing Eastern Europe into Soviet bondage for generations could still stand as one of the treaty’s greatest sins. Or maybe the part that forced the repatriation of Russian defectors who were so afraid to return to Stalin’s Russia they slit their own throats? Surely even if the Yalta treaty was good, that part could be bad?

I think the same logic can apply to the Constitution. The 3/5ths clause was a necessary compromise with evil. We can salute the greater good of the Constitution and rebut the misuse of the 3/5ths clause by leftist critics of the founding while still recognizing that the compromise in and of itself was a bad, albeit, necessary thing.

Update: This isn’t a bad point, from a reader:

Dear Jonah:
Here is the context in which counting slaves a three-fifths of a person was a good thing:
Slaves had no legal standing, no access to courts. Their family arrangements were subordinate to the whims of their owners. They were thought of as chattel. They were not, at the time and in the sense of their legal status and concomitant rights, viewed as anything like a person. When that is where you are, being redefined as 60 percent of a person, in any legal context, is a step in the RIGHT direction. At the very least, it distinguished them for the first time (in America) as relevantly different from dairy cows.
Remember how long ago this was. The move toward human dignity and legal personhood had to start somewhere.
A Hater of Slavery

Update II: I really don’t want to revist Yalta, but this is from my Voegelin Guy, so I figured I’d post it:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,
Just a slight quibble about your last post. Yalta simply ratified what had already been decided at Tehran. Signing over Eastern Europe was really never in doubt, from the Hitler-Stalin pact on. In fact, one of the main reasons Stalin signed a pact with Hitler rather than Britain was Stalin’s condition that Britain guarantee Stalin’s right to occupy Poland in any war against Hitler. And it’s not that Britain didn’t want to do it. They just could not get Poland to participate in any talks. In any case, the military situation on the ground dictated the political boundaries, not pacts or treaties. Eisenhower, for example, could have taken Berlin before Stalin, and had made plans to do so, but contacted Stalin directly in violation of every precedent to tell him that he would not. He felt no need to take an additional 100,000 casualties, and fully expected to get shelled by the Soviets. Stalin in fact repeatedly made noises about this with thinly veiled threats.
Czechoslovakia is another example in which our troops could have easily occupied the country before the Soviets, but Patton and others were ordered out. I’m not aware of any evidence that this had anything to do with Yalta or Tehran.
Of course we know that the FDR admin was filled with pro-Soviets, but most U.S. generals were extremely anti-British and in effect more pro-Soviet than the White House.