The Truth about the Three-Fifths Clause | The Federalist Papers
Ficklin Media Note: During this current national discussion of the Confederate Flag, it is important to step back and reflect in order to move forward in authentic sankofa fashion.
During the several early iterations of our national structure ( folks conveniently forget that the Articles of Confederation was the first attempt) the debate about what constituted property and how to tax and raise revenues for this new baby nation was in the forefront of the national structuring conversations.
Politicians differed on the slavery question. Forget for a moment about the civil war in which engulfed teenage America. The new baby America was has having pissie fits on how to deal with some people who in some early yet unnamed sensing of quantum theory, were considered people and property at the same time depending upon your perspective.
When you view the Confederate flag weather flying on public property, private property or in a museum, consider that "South" could have and might have won the right to secede and to establish their own nation. They were fighting for their right to leave the confederation of states.
It is easy in retrospect to whitewash and to paint with one color ( pun intended) the varied new baby America landscape. Our America was torn from the beginning with how to categorize, account for and profit from the "natural" resources that the Pilgrims " discovered" and from the wealth that the new world order of the triangular slave trade was importing/exploiting.
I hear the cliche term so often these days of changing mindsets being necessary. I would just posit that
reading the debates regarding the three fifths clause reminds us that perspective, economic interests, philosophies, culture , tradition and culture always intersect and continue to intersect.
Prior to the Civil War which embroiled teen america , the birthing tension of modal intersectionality increased and eventually erupted at Fort Sumpter.
But I ask you as the older teen America in 1896 affirmed that" separate was equal" and not until the now mid life America rendered the 1954 decision rejecting the legal notion of separate but equal, what lays ahead for mature America?
Did the south lose? Will the republican candidates take back America as many of them claim?
Will liberty and justice flow? Can we sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and recognize the schizophrenic, angst ridden, complex and intertwined aging America.
Perhaps the confederate flag is a healthy reminder that the many Americas from sea to shining sea and annexed Hawaiian beaches provides the perfect ongoing living historical experiment of one nation under whose God?
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