Certainly, politics make for strange bedfellows, of which those that were formerly the thirteen colonies, who had bravely fought for their freedom, thus decided that they needed to have a new Constitution to replace their Articles of Confederation. One of the main difficulties in getting these thirteen colonies to agree, though, and to ratify the Constitution, was the issue of slavery. Indeed, these colonies recognized that if an acceptable accommodation could not be reached which permitted those of the Southern States to agree to that Constitution, than America before it was even truly formed, would subsequently have been divided between North and South, which in and of itself, could have led to European nations, such as France, Spain, and England to exploit such differences and troubles for their own European benefit. So then, while there were lots of ideas debated and expressed during that convention, somehow it was decided that they who were legally considered to be personal property were when it came to congressional representation, to be designated as three-fifths of a person, which definitely made a difference upon that representation, which thus permitted the Southern States to have fourteen additional seats in the Second Congress. Those Southern seats would continue to be augmented over the subsequent census years of 1820 and 1830 and beyond. This thus meant that those who most supported slavery had a bigger voice than their population of free people actually represented.
While in this modern age we clearly recognize the injustice that slavery so represented, it has to be acknowledged that back in that time and age, slavery was something that not only existed, but when it came to the Southern States there was a strong belief that only with slavery would they be able to turn a tidy profit on the production of cotton, tobacco, and agricultural goods. Further to the point, the South recognized that those immigrating from Europe had a strong affinity to immigrate to the Northern States, because it was these States which were far more industrialized and thereby provided a much better pathway for good employment and overall opportunity, so that the demographics of the South necessitated, especially in the Southern mind the need to have their population representative numbers as high as possible or else they could find themselves to be outnumbered in the question of not only slavery but also in other areas of interest and thereby without an effective voice in governance.
History tells us that while the three-fifths compromise did permit the thirteen colonies to become the United States, it did not, though, bring forth a nation that truly supported justice, equality, and opportunity for all. This meant that there would come a time when those of the South who were scared that their peculiar institution would be under assault from the national government decided that their best move was to rebel against that government under the wrong belief that not only were they right for doing so, but that they could enact their supposed Constitutional right to disband what had been joined together.
Indeed, the State representatives who got together for that initial Constitutional convention were some of the best and brightest, of which there probably wasn’t any way to come to a successful agreement without compromises, but in that Southern compromise, the die would be fatefully cast, which would ultimately result in a great reckoning, and thankfully, a new birth of freedom.