Some long time readers may recall that the first op-ed I ever wrote — not counting my Pulitzer-ignored college work! — was in November of 1994 for the WSJ. It was on why we should enlarge the House of Representatives (Bonus no-prize for anyone who can find the darn thing on the web). I’ve returned to this subject a few times, including in today’s column.

One email complaint already coming in is in response to this passage:

There is, of course, an important principle here, and if all of Montana’s residents were black, it would be easier for everyone to see it. Montanans’ votes don’t count as much as Rhode Islanders’ — in fact, a Montanan’s vote only counts for about three-fifths of a Rhode Islander’s. 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. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi last month hopes to force Congress to remedy the status quo’s assault on the one-person, one-vote principle by increasing Congress to as many as a paltry 1,761 members.

The complaint is that I don’t understand the origins of the 3/5ths clause. For example, this reader speaks for a few:

Jonah,
This is the first time I’ve seen you off-base. You wrote “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.” You seem to misunderstand the purpose of that original clause. The southern slave-owners wanted the slaves to be counted in the population, since that would give the south more congressional representation. They would have happily counted them as whole people or even double people. The north, in turn, wanted not to count the slaves for purposes of apportionment for the same reason. The north was far more populous than the south, and would have overwhelmed the south in the congress if slaves did not count at all in the apportionment. So the compromise was the famous 3/5 clause. It’s an error to think this was an insult to the slaves.
Your faithful reader,

But here’s the thing. I know about the origins of the 3/5ths clause. I’ve written about it somewhere around here before and it’s come up on the Corner a few times (the best essay ever on the subject is Bob Goldwin’s Why Blacks, Women and Jews Aren’t Mentioned in the Constitution). But I think there’s a problem here. Conservatives often rightly correct liberals who complain that the Constitution thought blacks counted as three-fifths as a white. For the reasons the reader lays out, the anti-slavery position was for slaves to be counted not at all. But this misses the basic fact that the Constitution still contained a terrible compromise with slavery which itself was a profoundly evil institution. That compromise was better than what the slaveholders wanted, but one can’t argue it was itself a good thing.