"Three-fifths of a man".

ITEM: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's remarks at the Community of Democracies Opening Plenary in Santiago, Chile, were posted by the State Department and carried worldwide. In discussing the "democratization" process Rice said: "For nearly a century after the founding of the United States, millions of black Americans like me were still condemned to the status below that of full citizenship. When the founding fathers of America said, 'We, the people,' they did not mean me. Many of my ancestors were thought to be only three-fifths of a man."

CORRECTION: Secretary Rice is repeating a myth about the derivation of the "three-fifths" phrase that became part of the Constitution. She has used this rhetorical canard before, as have many others. The allusion is often employed to slight the Founding Fathers for their alleged defense of slave interests.

In truth, the "three-fifths" provision was proposed by Roger Sherman of Connecticut at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It became part of a compromise that bridged the differences between the "Virginia Plan" that reflected the interests of the large states (Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania), which sought representation in two houses proportional to population, and the "New Jersey Plan" that called for a unicameral body with equal representation for each state, which smaller states favored.

In the course of deliberations, numerous Northerners argued that slaves should not be counted at all to determine a state's representation in Congress; many Southerners took the opposite view to increase their representatives. The compromise reached was to count only three-fifths of the number of slaves (referred to euphemistically as "other Persons") for representation and taxation. (Free persons and indentured servants were included in the totals; excluded were "Indians not taxed.")

In Vindicating the Founders, Thomas West writes that 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?"

(As an aside, the constitution of the Confederate States of America, despite being made up of slave-owning states, retained virtually the same "three-fifths" language.)

To obtain passage of a governing document for the young country, interests had to be checked and balanced. James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, defended the "three-fifths" compromise in Number 54 of The Federalist Papers, also noting that any tendency for the states to overcount population for representation purposes was largely offset by the desire to minimize taxation.

Not everyone went along with this settlement. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts refused to sign the Constitution, in part, because of this provision. As Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote in her classic Miracle at Philadelphia: "'Blacks are property,' said Gerry, and are used to the southward as horses and cattle to the northward.' Why then should not horses and cattle have the right of representation in the North?"

Mrs. Bowen recounted how the Northerners finally agreed "that slaves would be counted, for the purpose of representations and taxes, in the proportion of five slaves to three free white inhabitants--the 'federal ratio.' In return, the Southern states conceded that the importation of slaves would cease in the year 1808. [Alexander] Hamilton said later that without the federal ratio 'no union could possibly have been formed.' It was true." Because the three-fifths compromise was made, 20 years later, the importation of slaves to the United States--both north and south--was ended. But the constitutional provision that empowered Congress to end this evil trade in 1808 is ignored by those who propagate the three-fifths myth.