A view of the Constitution

The famous three-fifths clause that counted slaves for purposes of both legislative representation and proportionate tax liability/contribution of the slave states was a compromise provision reached by agreement of northern and southern delegates. However, Finkelman points out that when the compromise was first agreed to there was no "quid pro quo" from the South on the representation issue and that the taxation portion of the provision was added only later in the convention. Debate on the provision was ostensibly on big- vs. small-state legislative representation, but the dominating subtext was how much power the slave states, which had more population by virtue of their large slave populations, would get to wield on matters of national policy. The pattern of negotiation that Finkelman describes shows the delega

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ing of Madison's original vision of the new republic as a consequence of the convention, focusing on the results of the meetings from the standpoint of the structure of government that emerged in 1787. Banning's method is to focus on what he interprets as Madison's moderate republican ideology, arguing that Madison came to the Constitutional Convention determined to establish a mechanism of effective governance (169) that would both reinforce the political intention of the Revolution and be a beneficial method of public administration and social organization. In particular, he wanted to avoid two polarities that he felt could destroy the vision of the Revolution: "fragmentation of the Union or excessive concentration of authority in federal hands" (170). Fragmentation would have meant that the states, whether as a group or separately, would have so much power as to make central government impossible to run, yet the concentration of political power in the hands of an executive (namely, the king) and its agents had occasioned the revolution in the first place. Madison's idea appears to have been to enshrine proportional representation of the states along population lines. Here is Finkelman's point of departure, which became vexed
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Approximate Word count = 1644
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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