Tennessee lawmaker falsely suggests infamous 3/5ths compromise was to help end slavery
CNN
A Tennessee Republican lawmaker wrongly suggested on Tuesday that the infamous three-fifths compromise was an effort by Northern states to curtail the power of Southern slave-owning states with the ultimate aim of ending slavery, when in fact historians say it was the opposite, a dehumanizing concession that had the impact of giving more power to slave-owning states.
In remarks on the Tennessee House floor, state Rep. Justin Lafferty claimed that "the three-fifths compromise was a direct effort to ensure that Southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country." "By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery," he argued.More Related News