I’ve got a few pet peeves, and Condoleezza Rice has been giving voice to one of them.   As Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Postreports, in speeches overseas Rice regularly tells audiences “In the original U.S. Constitution, I was only three-fifths of a person."

This is a misreading of history.  The Constitution (which she’s been sworn, several times,  to uphold—an oath that implies a prior duty to understand) does not say that slaves are three-fifths of a person.  You can find that three-fifths fraction in the Constitution, true; but as with most truths, context is everything.  And African Americans would have been worse off if the number had been five fifths. A little history shows why.

Article I, section 2 of The U. S. Constitution clearly says:  

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.

This is the section that describes how the House of Representatives is going to be set up.   The more residents a state has, the more representatives it will get in Congress.  Who counts as resident for purposes of apportioning Congressional seats?  This paragraph says: indentured servants, yes; native Americans “not taxed,” no; and slaves are a different matter entirely.

At the Constitutional Convention, representatives of the anti-slavery north, and some few enlightened representatives elsewhere, wanted slaves NOT to be counted for purposes of Congressional apportionment.  Many in the north, and some in the south, wanted slavery abolished.  Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, knew that slavery was wrong and wanted it abolished; in his original draft of the Declaration, he had listed among King George's actionable offenses the King's encouragement of the slave trade.  This passage was excised by the review committee, for several reasons:  The language is flamboyant and unrestrained, and out of character with the clean, crisp, neutrally reportorial language in which the other elements of the indictment are brought.  And more to the point, a sizable portion of the southern aristocracy had no wish to charge King George with a crime for promoting a slave trade that they themselves wanted to see continue.  So they insisted it be cut.

Attendees at the Constitutional Convention knew that slavery was an immense and troubling issue, one that could prevent the formation of the Union--and one that would, eventually, tend to drive a nascent union apart.    

Excluding slaves from the apportionment census would have minimized the representation of slave-owning states, giving the free states of the North more power in Congress.  That position was roundly rejected by slave states, including Virginia--which was, along with New York, one of the two largest states.  It is fair to say that if either Virginia or New York had rejected the Constitution, there would have been no United States.  Everyone at the Convention knew that the approval of the voters of these two states would be crucial.  

And so a deal was struck, the famous three-fifths compromise.  The north wouldn't get what it wanted, which was no counting of slaves at all.  The south wouldn't get what it wanted, which was counting slaves one-for-one toward increased representation in Congress.  For purposes of Congressional apportionment, the population of slaves would be reduced by two-fifths. The abolitionist north fought the slave power on this issue, and the three-fifths compromise was the best they could get.  

Had this compromise not been achieved, the Union would likely never have come together. And if the "slavocracy" of the south had had its way--counting each slave as a whole person for purposes of apportionment--the slave states would have exercised more power in Congress, further resisting and retarding the movement toward abolition that came to a head with Lincoln's nomination a little more than a half-century later.  

Thus, when contemporary Americans bewail the compromise as having told blacks they are "three-fifths a man," they are wrong.  It was in the enslaved blacks' best interests not to be counted at all for this purpose.  Why an elected official of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution, persists in misrepresenting Constitutional history is a matter for future historians to ponder.