Compare And Contrast The Three Fifths Compromise

To replace the problematic Articles of Confederation, Washington, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, and others organized the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and started to compose a new law of the country, the United States Constitution. However, it wasn’t easy to make every state come into an agreement on things written in the Constitution, since all the state wanted to make sure they were equally and fairly treated. As a result, several major compromises in the ratified version of the Constitution, including the Great Compromise, Three-Fifths Compromise, Slave Trade Compromise and the compromise on the Bill of Rights.
The Great Compromise is the a compromise about state representatives, and it was made between large states and small states. Before the

The Three-Fifths Compromise is between the North and the South. The issue they were arguing over is whether a slave should be counted as a part of the state’s population, which determines how many representatives the state can select. The North had a population mostly that was comprise of white man. They believed that slaves shouldn’t be counted as a person since they were not citizens and didn’t have the rights to vote. However, the South disagreed because the majority of their population was slaves. If the slaves didn’t count as a person, the states in South would only have much smaller populations in according state representatives. The majority of the states would not be represent in the Congress, and basically slaves would not be involved in any kind of decision making on political issues, since they couldn’t vote either. During this debate, there were even outspoke critics of slavery. According to A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry questioned, “Are [the slaves] admitted as Citizens? Then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens? Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted to the computation?”. Despite the fact that slaves also deserve equality to other people, it was impossible for the congress to grant

In Massachusetts, the Anti-Federalists, led by James Madison, argued that the Bill of Rights was necessary to protect people rights from the government because the government might get too powerful and hurt people’s rights and freedom. They had this fear because they suffered from the British tyranny and worried that the highly centralized government would make the miserable history happen again. Nevertheless, in favor of the government, the Federalists insisted that the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because the Constitution already limited the power of government, so it would not get too powerful. Also, they worried that people might forget to list certain rights in the Bill of Rights, so if later they were fighting for their rights that were not written in the document, the government might use it against them. Eventually, a compromise was made through a vote in Massachusetts; Anti-Federalists agreed to ratify the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, but they should also submit amendments for the Congress to consider adding the Bill of Rights. This compromise sparked people’s thoughts to protect their rights and freedom from the powerful government, and finally, the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution in