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Slaves were not granted liberty in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, parts of the Constitution solidified their less-than-free position. The Constitution strengthened the power of slave states in several important respects. Through the Fugitive Clause, for example, governments of free states were required to help recapture runaway slaves who had escaped their masters' states. Equally disturbing was the three-fifths compromise, established for determining representation in the lower house of the legislature. Slave states wanted to have additional political power based on the number of human beings that they held as slaves. Delegates from free states wouldn't allow such a blatant manipulation of political principles, but the inhumane compromise that resulted meant counting enslaved persons as three-fifths of a free person for the sake of calculating the number of people a state could elect to the House of Representatives. The Constitution also allowed slaves to be imported into the United States until 1808.

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15y ago

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