Blacks counted as 3/5 of a person was actually a good thing. See the discussion, here.

Here is an interesting historical tidbit: maybe some of you have heard that the United States considered blacks as 3/5 human. I have read this in black activist publications for years. Well, it turns out that the "3/5 " marker was a good thing, not a bad thing.
Turns out that the government never considered the blacks as 3/5 of a human being, rather, "3/5 of a individual person." Difference? Our House of Representatives is made up of 435 district representatives based on equal population divisions of the nation. The United States is divided, today, into 435 districts. 80 years ago or more, a district was 230,000 people. Today it is around 740,000.

The single greatest political debate in the very early years of our nation was the debate about slavery. Slavery was ALREADY HERE, at the time of our founding . . . . . but most whites did not believe in slavery. By the very early 1800's, slavery had become a very divisive issue. The reason why it could not be dealt with by congress, was because of the slave population and the political power of the South. The South had all or most of the slave population, and consequently, more representation in the House. So, somehow (and I don't know the history on this, yet) Congress passed a bill that ordered the Census Bureau to only count slaves as 3/5 of an individual in order to keep the South from total domination of the House. Under that law, if you count 3 people as being 3/5 of a person, you only have 2 people as far as the House of Representatives is concerned . . . . . a good thing because it reduced the political clout of the South. As the South lost political power, it decided to leave the Union and the Civil War was the result. Anyway, "3/5" was the beginning of the end for slavery. Who knew.

Kind of cool, no ????