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The word slave never appears
The fight over the count
Northern states, where slavery was mostly dead or dying, wanted enslaved people left out of the count entirely, since they had nothing to gain from it. Southern states wanted them counted. Virginia had almost 450,000 free citizens and a further 300,000 enslaved, and by the 1790 census 43 percent of South Carolinians were enslaved. Counting them would significantly increase Southern power in Congress.
In 1783 the Congress of the Confederation had passed a toothless revenue measure based on population and had tried counting half of enslaved people, then three-fourths, before landing on three-fifths. That precedent returned in Article I, Section 2, which adds to the whole number of free persons three-fifths of all other persons. Persons was the convention's euphemism.
The word left out
John Dickinson, who had unconditionally freed the dozens of people he once enslaved out of Quaker belief and devotion to liberty, wrote privately that omitting the word would be regarded as an endeavor to conceal a principle of which the delegates were ashamed. He asked what would be said of founding a right to govern free men on a power derived from slaves.
Anti-slavery delegates were a minority, and they went along with a bargain recognizing the hard facts of political life, since the South would otherwise walk. James Madison identified the real fault line of the convention: the great division lay between the Northern and Southern states, from the effects of their having or not having slaves.
How did the clause affect presidential elections?
Each state's electoral votes equal its number of House members plus its two senators, and House seats were based partly on the three-fifths count. That gave slaveholding states extra seats and extra electors. Historians often point to the 1800 election as an example, since Thomas Jefferson's win over John Adams depended on electoral votes the Southern states gained from the count. Southern states held the presidency for most of the early republic's first decades.
Where did the three-fifths ratio come from?
The ratio was proposed in 1783 by the Congress of the Confederation as a way to divide war costs among the states, and it was widely discussed. The states never ratified that amendment, but the formula survived in the delegates' memory. At the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania suggested using it for representation, and the delegates agreed.
When did the clause stop applying?
Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, replaced the three-fifths rule by counting the whole number of persons in each state. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery in 1865. The word slavery itself first appears in the Constitution in that amendment.
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