The Three-fifths Compromise was a compromise reached among state delegates during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention due to disputes over how enslaved people would be counted when determining a state’s total population.

The Great Compromise settled the method of representation in the legislative branch (the US Congress). Small states wanted equal representation (equality by state), and large states wanted representation based on population (equality by vote). Under the compromise, all states were represented equally in the Senate.

Both compromises dealt with the representation of states in Congress. The Great Compromise settled the disputes between large and sparsely populated states involving Congressional representation, while the Three-Fifths Compromise allowed southern states to count slaves towards representation.

The three-fifths compromise had a major impact on U.S. politics for decades to come. It allowed pro-slavery states to have a disproportionate influence on the presidency, the Supreme Court, and other positions of power. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a pro-slavery state.

Three-fifths compromise, compromise agreement between delegates from the Northern and the Southern states at the United States Constitutional Convention (1787) that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for determining direct taxation and representation in the House of Representatives.

slavery

Mum Bett intervened and received the blow instead. Furious, she left the house and refused to return. When Colonel Ashley appealed to the law for her return, she called on Theodore Sedgewick, a lawyer from Stockbridge who had anti-slavery sentiments, and asked for his help to sue for her freedom.

Family lore suggests that after 40 years of bondage in the Ashley household, Mumbet was prompted to seek her freedom when Annetje attempted to strike Mumbet’s younger sister with a shovel. Whatever the reason, Mumbet turned in 1781 to Theodore Sedgwick, a prominent Stockbridge attorney, to help secure her freedom.

Keckley met her future husband James in St. Louis, but refused to marry him until she and her son were free, because she did not want to have another child born into slavery. When she asked Hugh A. Garland to free them and he refused, she worked for two years to persuade him, agreeing to purchase her freedom.

In the Ashley household, Mum Bett worked in silence, watching over her sister, Lizzie, and her daughter, Young Bett, who was also enslaved by the Ashleys. From that day on, Mum Bett rolled her sleeve up to display the ugly scar.

“Day-to-day resistance” was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging slowdowns, and committing acts of arson and sabotage–all were forms of resistance and expression of slaves’ alienation from their masters.