Three-Fifths Compromise

If I could change one event in American history that might have prevented the Civil War, I wouldn’t stop the firing on Fort Sumter. By then, it was probably too late.

I would go all the way back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and deal with slavery when the country was first being created.

The Founding Fathers faced an enormous problem. They were trying to unite thirteen states with very different economies and interests into one country. Slavery was one of the biggest obstacles.

Rather than resolve it, they compromised.

The Constitution protected important interests of the slaveholding states. It included the Three-Fifths Compromise for representation and taxation, protected the international slave trade from congressional prohibition until 1808, and required the return of people “held to Service or Labour” who escaped into another state.

Those compromises helped create the United States.

But they also left a time bomb inside it.

If I could change that moment, I would have pushed for a gradual national abolition of slavery, giving the country decades to eliminate it rather than allowing the institution to become even more deeply embedded in the Southern economy.

It wouldn’t have meant freeing every enslaved person overnight. Politically, that probably would have made forming the Union impossible in 1787.

Instead, establish a firm date by which slavery would end. Begin gradual emancipation. Prohibit its expansion. Develop some form of economic transition for states heavily dependent on slave labor.

Most importantly, make it clear from the beginning that slavery had an expiration date in the United States.

Instead, America spent the next 70 years kicking the can down the road.

The Missouri Compromise temporarily quieted the issue. The Compromise of 1850 bought more time. The Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the battle over slavery’s expansion. Bleeding Kansas demonstrated that Americans were already willing to kill one another over the issue. Then the Dred Scott decision made the divide even worse.

Each generation inherited a problem the previous generation had failed to solve.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the country had reached the breaking point. Southern states began seceding primarily because they believed slavery and its future were threatened. A few months later, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter.

The Civil War ultimately killed roughly three-quarters of a million Americans and devastated much of the South.

Could all of that have been avoided?

We’ll never know.

It’s entirely possible that several Southern states would have refused to join the United States in 1787 if the Constitution had required slavery to end. That’s one reason the Founders compromised in the first place.

But imagine if they could have negotiated a solution giving the country 30, 40 or even 50 years to peacefully eliminate slavery.

By 1860, there might not have been a slavery question left to tear the country apart.

That’s why, if I could change one event that might have prevented the Civil War, I would change the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Not because the Constitution caused the Civil War, but because it was America’s greatest opportunity to confront the issue that eventually did.

There’s a lesson in that which goes far beyond the Civil War.

When a country compromises on a fundamental problem without actually solving it, sometimes it isn’t creating peace. It’s simply passing the bill to the next generation.