CALLER: I notice you reference the founding fathers a lot, and to me it’s kind of offensive because most of those guys were slave owners, the Constitution that they wrote up — they didn’t even recognize my people as even human. [...]
BECK: That is a common misconception. …
Uh oh. This really isn't going to end well.
BECK: Do you know who wanted slaves to be counted as a full person? … Slave owners. … The reason why they wanted that is because of the balance of power. The South could control the numbers in Congress. Their representation would go through the roof. … That’s why, in the Constitution, African-Americans were deemed three-fifths people, because the Founders wanted to end slavery and they knew if the South could count slaves as full individuals you would never get the control to be able to abolish it.
Totally. That's why the Founding Fathers did that when they wrote The Constitution 100 years before the south - north battle over slavery. Good point.
Moron.
2 comments:
You see, these things are confusing for people like Beck. It doesn't matter the difference in years, because it involves a number! Numbers are confusing! Hell, I know; I'm a math major. The difference here is here is that people like Beck are too fucking lazy to figure out the math. They associate times based upon visual identifiers. The dress between the Civil War and Revolutionary War strikes some resemblances, therefore, Glenn Beck makes the conclusion that these events were very close in years to each other.
Hate to say it, but he's partially accurate with this. The 3/5ths compromise was done to prevent the southern states from having massive representation in the House. The northern states did not want to recognize slaves in the population count for the House of Representatives at all -- which is reasonable since slaves weren't going to be allowed to have any of the rights that come with representation.
However, to suggest that slave owners wanted to give full status to slaves is ridiculous. They wanted slaves to count towards the headcount, but not be able to vote or get a trial by jury, etc. The north wanted to abolish slavery, but couldn't do it since they knew the south would never ratify the constitution otherwise.
So in short -- some of the founding fathers wanted slaves to get -treated- like people, and some of them just wanted slaves to get -counted- like people...
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