The Libertarian Party of Indiana denounced recent remarks from the state’s lieutenant governor regarding the Three-Fifths Compromise. The party issued a statement on Monday calling the comments historically ignorant and morally disturbing.
In its statement, the party describes Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith’s remarks as “an insult to anyone who has lived the consequences of systemic racism” and condemns his characterization of the Three-Fifths Compromise as a “great move.” Party Chair Evan McMahon compared the comments “to trying to sell shackles as freedom bracelets” and rejected what he described as spin intended to turn the “codification of human beings as fractional property into a moral victory.”
Beckwith made the remarks following a debate over Senate Bill 289 last week. The bill restricts diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the state, allowing public university trustees and presidents to remove such offices or officials. Beckwith claimed in a video posted to social media that the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved individuals as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional representation, helped move the country toward freedom.
The full press release can be read below:
Libertarian Party of Indiana
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Libertarians reject Beckwith’s revisionist history and authoritarian mindset
Lieutenant Governor’s Three-Fifths Compromise comments are insultingLieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith’s recent comments praising the Three-Fifths Compromise as a “great move” reflect both a profound ignorance of history and a disturbing comfort with government-sanctioned dehumanization.
“No amount of spin can turn the codification of human beings as fractional property into a moral victory,” said Evan McMahon, Chair of the Libertarian Party of Indiana.
The Libertarian Party stands unequivocally for individual liberty, equal natural rights, and the dignity of every human being under the law. The Three-Fifths Compromise was not a step toward freedom. It was a political calculation that preserved and expanded the power of slaveholding states, delaying abolition and embedding injustice into the very framework of the U.S. government.
“Trying to call the Three-Fifths Compromise ‘a great move’ is like trying to sell shackles as freedom bracelets,” McMahon said. “It’s an insult to anyone who has lived the consequences of systemic racism as well as anyone who values liberty over government power.”
Per Wikipedia, the slave trade was first abolished in a portion of India in the 3rd century BC.
My reading of American history is that in the absence of the 3/5 compromise the US would not have formed and the freed colonies would have been more prone to European conquest, for example in the war of 1812. What would have happened then is not clear; the UK had at that point abolished the slave trade, but slavery persisted in various British colonies. France and Spain were quite the same in that regard as well. Britain offered to free any American slaves who would not fight for US independence in a proclamation in 1779, but that would not necessarily have applied if they reestablished their colonies after a period of independence.
Subsequent to slaves being legally freed in the USA, they were counted as full people for apportionment, but soon disenfranchised again in the former slave states and kept so for nearly a century, as well as in many cases effectively reenslaved under convict leasing and sharecropping. Slavery in the US remains legal for prisoners today, and remains as an illegal practice in the US and throughout the world.
Indeed, when the Constitution was adopted, the only state of the original 13 in which the importation of slaves was not illegal was Georgia. There were slaves in most states (slavery was effectively illegal in Massachusetts starting in the early 1780s) but they were no longer being imported from abroad.
The US was not the first country to abolish the slave trade. The UK abolished it in 1807. Slavery was abolished in Haiti in 1793. Etc.
I’m a libertarian but this press release is ignorant wokism masquerading as “principled” political points-scoring. So sad what the LP has become. Without compromises, which included allowing the ABOLITION of the slave trade in 1808, the first country in the world to do so, there would have been no US at all, and probably longer term slavery in North America. Had the Indiana LP run the constitutional convention nothing would have been accomplished except alienating everyone.
What is the evidence that “systemic racism” (as apparently meant by this group or person) exists?
It\s interesting to note that after the Civil War the South’s representation in Congress became proportionally better, and gave them more relative power in Congress than they had previously. Of course, the knew this, and leveraged it by finding ways to frustrate freedmen from voting.
Do they realize the compromise was between those who supported slavery and wanted slaves fully counted and those who opposed slavery and didn’t want slaves counted at all? The “fractional property” language might lead one to think that they don’t.
Actually, it did. Otherwise, the South would have had more representation and thus, slavery would have lasted longer.