According to Their Abilities: Capacity, Labor, and the Three-Fifths Compromise

The broad terrain of this essay explores the ways in which questions of ability and disability, both mental and physical, figured into larger conversations about citizenship during the American Revolution. Under the crown, the rights and obligations of colonial subjects were determined by where they fit into a fixed hierarchy formed on the basis of birth, status, and inheritance. Under republican rule, the basis for the rights and obligations of citizens was an open question, and many argued that it should be based not on who a person was, but rather on what they could do. Access to citizenship and possession and exercise of basic rights were framed as a matter of ability and disability.

Drawing on debates over the three-fifths clause during the drafting and ratification of the US Constitution, the paper focuses most sharply on the ability to labor. Following scholars such as Jan Lewis, Robin Einhorn, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and David Waldstreicher, the paper explores how questions surrounding the proper means of representing and taxing the enslaved evolved into a larger debate about the kinds of labor requisite of republican citizens. Southerners argued that old men and infants in the North could not possibly contribute to creation of property in the fashion of healthy enslaved workers in their prime. Northerners argued that the fertile soils of South meant that one could grow crops without industry and ingenuity, characteristics deemed central to citizenship. In the end, the labor question at once opened the theoretical possibility of a citizenship tied to “productive” work and just as rapidly became framed in ways that excluded not only the enslaved, but a host of others, from fully joining the emerging polity.