. It regards slaves
under the description "of all other _persons_"--as of only
three-fifths of the value of free persons; thus to appearance
undervaluing them in comparison with freemen. But its dark and
involved phraseology seems intended to blind us to the consideration,
that those underrated slaves are merely a _basis_, not the _source_
of representation; that by the laws of all the States where they live,
they are regarded not as _persons_; but as _things_; that they are
not the _constituency_ of the representative, but his property; and
that the necessary effect of this provision of the Constitution is,
to take legislative power out of the hands of _men_, as such, and
give it to the mere possessors of goods and chattels. Fixing upon
thirty thousand persons, as the smallest number that shall send one
member into the House of Representatives, it protects slavery by
distributing legislative power in a free and in a slave State thus:
To a congressional district in South Carolina, containing fifty
thousand slaves, claimed as the property of five hundred whites, who
hold, on an average, one hundred apiece, it gives one Representative
in Congress; to a district in Massachusetts containing a population
of thirty thousand five hundred, one Representative is assigned. But
inasmuch as a slave is never permitted to vote, the fifty thousand
persons in a district in Carolina form no part of "the constituency;"
that is found only in the five hundred free persons. Five hundred
freemen of Carolina could send one Representative to Congress, while
it would take thirty thousand five hundred freemen of Massachusetts,
to do the same thing: that is, one slaveholder in Carolina is
clothed by the Constitution with the same political power and
influence in the Representatives Hall at Washington, as sixty
Massachusetts men like you and me, who "eat their bread in the sweat
of their own brows."

According to the census of 1830, and the ratio of representation
based upon that, slave property added twenty-five members to the
House of Representatives. And as it has been estimated, (as an
approximation to the truth,) that the two and a half million slaves
in the United States are held as property by about two hundred and
fifty thousand persons--giving an average of ten slaves to each
slaveholder, those twenty-five Representatives, each chosen, at most,
by only ten thousand voters, and probably by less than three-fourths
of that number, were the