How Did Slavery Influence The Drafting Of The Constitution

Following the failure of the first attempt at governing the new independent country, the United States, delegates of the Constitutional Convention, including people such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison, took it upon themselves to completely scrap the Articles of Confederation and begin drafting a new constitution from 1787 to 1800. This later became the American Constitution, a complete revision of the power of the government, representation of states, interstate commerce and foreign trade, and issues revolving around slavery. Although slavery isn’t directly stated into the newly drafted constitution, African American and American Indian slaves influenced the drafting of the constitution through compromise between the Northern and Southern states on issues relating to politics and economics.
As a consequence of 25 of the 55 convention delegates being slave owners, whether or not slaves should be counted into the state population was up for debate. Following the Great Compromise, the three-fifths compromise was created in order to allow southern states to count each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person. This extra boost in population gave states such as Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina - where a large percentage of their population was slaves - more representation in the House of Representatives so that neither the northern or southern states fully got their way. Another indirect compromise between the Southern and Northern states and the framers of the constitution was the agreement to not allow the word “slave” to be written directly into the constitution. The inclusion of slavery into their constitution would be contradictory to their political ideas of the American Revolution of