Profs and Pints Online presents: “The Wickedness of the Three-Fifths Clause,” a deep dive into the troubling hidden history of the 1787 federal Constitution, with Rick Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland.

The original United States Constitution looked both ways. Its preamble announces its purpose to secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” an important acknowledgement that liberty is the goal and right of all citizens. Yet, most constitutional scholars regard the 1787 Constitution as being vigorously pro-slavery, something that becomes apparent when we take a long hard look at its infamous Three-Fifths Clause.

Be on hand as Rick Bell, a history professor who has given thrilling Profs and Pints talks on the Hamilton musical and on Benjamin Franklin, returns to the virtual stage to explore how the Three-Fifths Clause came into being. He’ll look at how the Constitutional delegates did their work, reconstruct all of the contemporary opposition that their work generated, and consider the legacy of clauses like Three-Fifths in our post-slavery world.

Far more insidious than is commonly understood, the Three-Fifths Clause wove slaveholder power into the fabric of each of all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—shaping every aspect of federal policy regarding slavery for decades to come. And it turns out that Three-Fifths clause was just one of almost a dozen clauses in the original Constitution that affected the relationships of the government of the United States to slavery and the slave trade. Through the chemistry of those other clauses, the many delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention who were slaveholders themselves, or who were slavery-dependent or slavery-adjacent, worked to prop up and protect that institution. “Considering all circumstances,” one slave-owning delegate later boasted, “we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property it was in our power to make.”

The Bill of Rights, a list of ten amendments added to the Constitution in 1791, recognized freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of petition. Those freedoms would come to serve as major channels for antislavery action and expression in the decades before the Civil War, helping give rise to the forces that eventually would bring an end to slavery and the Three-Fifths Clause. Yet the damage done by that clause haunts us today. (Ticket: $12. A recorded version of this talk will remain available online at the link given here.)

Profs & Pints Online: The Wickedness of the Three-Fifths Clause