Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Second, Republicans understood that the abolition of slavery—prospective in 1863 and real by the end of 1865—meant that the southern states, if readmitted to the Union without Black men’s enfranchisement, could emerge more powerful than ever before in the US government. This was because the end of slavery meant the end of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. While slavery existed, enslaved people had been counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of enumeration. With slavery abolished, freedpeople would be counted whole, thus increasing the size of the enumerated population in the southern states. If white southerners denied Black men the equal right to vote, not only would they dominate their own states’ politics, but their priorities would be more heavily weighted than ever in Congress and the electoral college.