6/8/2023 0 Comments James Madison by Garry Wills![]() Jefferson proposed three-quarters, northerners countered-none too willingly-with half, and in the end a compromise was reached that held that a slave was worth three-fifths of a white man for voting purposes. As Wills lays it out, Jefferson and several other southerners refused to ratify the Constitution until that document allowed slaves to be “represented” in Congress by some formula that accounted them as less than free whites, but that recognized their numbers nonetheless. In this newsworthy account, Wills ( James Madison, 2002, etc.) turns up a little-studied wrinkle in early constitutional history: the invention of “slave power” as a political tool. ![]() Thomas Jefferson may have agonized privately over keeping slaves, writes Pulitzer-winning historian Wills, but he didn’t think twice about putting them to work defending the institution of slavery. ![]()
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