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Florida’s Discount Slavery
May 29th, 2008Being a Southerner by birth and a former Floridian by accident, I’m sensitive to issues and history from either corner of my past … especially when history richocets in ironic ways.
The saddest part of American history was slavery. In modern context we properly revile the very notion. But at the forming of this nation, slaves were a “normal” part of everyday life. Since participation in the new Union by all the former colonies was essential in forming a deterrent to invasions and attempts at recapture by the Brits, certain repugnant compromises were made to keep slaveholders profitable.
Which demonstrates the inanity of the art of compromise.
One power-splitting concession to the south was allowing slaves to counted as lesser people when determining the number of electors a state would have in the new United States. In census population and electoral college counts, each slave was tallied as 3/5th of a human — a discounted denizen if you will. This gave southern states motivation to join the Union and to increase the number of slaves, as each additional slave slowly made a slave-holding state more powerful.
America’s first unintended consequence.
It appears that in proud Democrat tradition, the discounted human theory is being resurrected for the presidential campaign. Lawyers for the DNC have decided that the delegates in the contested states of Florida and Michigan will only get 1/2 of a vote each. Keeping true to their Uncivil War sensibilities, the Democrat Party is creating a lower caste of citizens, this time within their own party.
George Wallace must be grinning from his warm little corner of Hades.
