Byron Williams shares this gem from a recent Condoleezza Rice speech:
- And when you think they [Iraqis] aren’t going to make it — when you want to criticize what they’re doing and it’s taking a long time and this and that — just remember, not to this date, have they made a compromise as bad as the one in 1789 that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man. So let’s be humble about what they’re going through.
I was just revving myself up for a blistering denunciation of Secretary Rice’s (apparently frequent) misreading of the 3/5 Compromise when I came across this perfect rebuttal – on the rabidly pro-war Powerlineblog, of all places!!!
- Secretary Rice’s point about the “three-fifths” clause of the Constitution is a frequently repeated canard. The constitutional provision reduced slaves from counting in full for the purpose of allocating congressional representation. As Thomas West explains:
“[T]he Constitution allowed Southern States to count three-fifths of their slaves toward the population that would determine numbers of representatives in the federal legislature. This clause is often singled out today as a sign of black dehumanization: they are only three-fifths human. But the provision applied to slaves, not blacks. That meant that free blacks-–and there were many, North as well as South–-counted the same as whites. More important, the fact that slaves were counted at all was a concession to slave owners. Southerners would have been glad to count their slaves as whole persons. It was the Northerners who did not want them counted, for why should the South be rewarded with more representatives, the more slaves they held?”
In Vindicating the Founders, West further notes that at the Constitutional Convention it was Southerners, not Northerners, who argued that slaves should count equally with white citizens in computing the state’s representatives; Northerners argued that it was wrong “to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing [the Southern states] a representation for their Negroes.” In short, for the purpose of congressional representation, the slave interests wanted to count slaves in full; the opponents of slavery did not want to count slaves at all. The three-fifths clause was a compromise that reflected the disagreement, reducing the representation of slave interests over what they otherwise would have been. This is not too difficult a point to expect sophisticated representatives of the United States to get right.
Indeed. But I have to ask my new pal at Powerline why he expects the Bushies to be more fluent in American history than they are in Iraqi history. Why bother with history at all? As one Bush aide explained so memorably,
- That’s not the way the world really works anymore. … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.