Fox's Mark Levin: The Three-Fifths clause wasn't about slaves being “three-fifths of a person. They knew they were people, even among the slave holders, as diabolical as they were”
Levin: “It was for addressing the number of seats that will be in the House of Representatives”
Published
Fox's Mark Levin: The Three-Fifths clause wasn't about slaves being "three-fifths of a person. They knew they were people, even among the slave holders, as diabolical as they were"
Citation
From the July 13, 2023, edition of Westwood One's The Mark Levin Show
MARK LEVIN (HOST): Where in the Constitution is slavery mentioned? Nowhere. Where in the Declaration is slavery mentioned? Well, it had originally been in a draft but they had to remove it due to Georgia and South Carolina, or they wouldn't have been able to have unity in their war against Britain. But it's nowhere in the Declaration. As a matter of fact, the Declaration talks about unalienable rights and so forth for every human being. Every human being.
And when he says, Mystal, that Blacks didn't have any say, the scholarship that I researched says that anywhere from 5 to 10 states -- 5 to 10 states, Black people voted, and voted to ratify the Constitution of the United States.
As for Blacks being viewed as property in the Constitution, where? Another lie. The three-fifths enumeration that I've talked about many, many, many times, till I'm blue in the face, had to do with representation. Representation. In other words, the South wanted to count slaves as an individual citizen for purposes of gaining more seats in the House of Representatives. It was the North that said no. That said no, you can't treat these people as property and then treat them as people for purposes of empowering yourselves, and so the Three-fifths compromise came to be.
It wasn't that they were three-fifths of a person. They knew they were people, even among the slave holders, as diabolical as they were. It was for addressing the number of seats that will be in the House of Representatives.