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[[File:washington.jpg|left|thumbnail|300px|Washington at the Constitutional Convention ]] The meeting that led to the drafting of the United States Constitution took place eleven years after the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Treaty of Paris (1783). The impetus for the Constitutional Convention was to develop a compact that strengthened the United States of America, one that provided more of national glue than the weak Articles of Confederation. The United States Constitution is widely heralded as the document that makes America whole. Historians argue that it essentially prevented a fledging nation from disintegrating just as soon as it had been created. Along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution continues to be a privileged site of explorations of American exceptionalism. Much like the Declaration, however, the document contains a complicated relationship to what some have called the United States’s original sin: slavery.
===Context===
Yet, the world “slavery” never appears in the document. There has been much speculation about why, but as the pre-eminent historian on this question, David Waldstreicher has pointed out, that while the world slavery is omitted, enslaved people were not. In his book, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009), Waldstreicher points out the ways in which the peculiar institution informed and was reflected by the thinking of the framers.
[[File:constitution.jpg|left|thumbnail|400px|The United States Constitution ]]
===The Three-Fifth’s Compromise===
The much discussed and debated three-fifths compromise was a critical one in the context of the Constitutional Convention. While there are those who cite it to show that America at its outset sought to deny the citizenship, and the very humanity of enslaved persons, its actual use was much more complicated than that.
The question of counting enslaved people as “three-fifths” of a person was decidedly about the taxation and representation. Fearful of the power of larger states, slave states vied for assuring that their political interests would be protected by asserting that “persons held to service” be counted. This immediately added to the number of representations that would be gained from southern states, as the House of Representatives was formed through proportional representation. Article I, Section 2 reads “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” <ref> David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 4.</ref>
Arguing against the compromise were those who few who held antislavery beliefs. But those representing states like South Carolina and Georgia had threatened to walk out of the Convention, without this key compromise. As such, it was adopted. While counting enslaved peoples as one person might have seemed desirable on its face (especially to those today, who saw it as some moral wrong to count enslaved people as three fifths), the reality was that it would have further strengthened the south, which was so committed to the institution of slavery.
