[The Decider]

Quote by: Milton Bradley When I read "all men are created equal", I don't see a lot of wiggle room.

Here's the "wiggle"--slaves were considered 3/5 of a man. Does 3/5 = 1 in Ohio?

"There is no gentle way to put it. The enslavement of blacks in America was of great concern to the men at the convention. Some genuinely felt that the black man was as much "man" as the white man. But this was a minority view. Southern delegates had one thing in mind when it came to slavery: to keep it going to prop up the Southern economy. Indeed, many of the largest slave holders in the United States were at the Convention. Most Northern delegates did not like slavery, but that does not mean they cared for blacks either. Many felt that the larger the black populations in the South grew, the larger the threat that that population would revolt against their masters and march north to exact revenge on the people who bought the goods they had been driven to tend.

For some, slavery itself was at least tolerable, but the slave trade, the importation of new people from Africa, was deplorable. Some felt it was deplorable because trafficking in human lives is simply deplorable. Others felt it deplorable because it diminished the value of their surplus slaves in the slave market.

First we will address the capitation (counting) of slaves in the Constitution. On June 11, Roger Sherman suggested that representation be based on a count of all free men. The South wanted their slaves counted as whole persons, but that would never happen. James Wilson wanted to get the issue out of the way quickly, and asked the Convention to adopt the same standard as that in the Articles: slaves would count as three-fifths persons. This issue would rise again on July 9, when some began to realize that the South could increase their representation in the Congress by simply importing new slaves. Recall, too, that everyone expected the extreme Southern states to grow in white population as well, over the next few decades. The notion was frightening to many from the North, and Northern states banded together on July 11 to completely remove slaves from the population counts.

In the end, both side got something they wanted. Through what some have theorized was a complicated bargain between Northern and Southern delegates to the Convention and Northern and Southern representatives to the Congress, taxation and representation were tied together (the Congress comes into the story, because on July 12, the day after the compromise was reached, the Northwest Ordinance was passed, detailing the carving up of the north western wilderness of North America, and granting the South fugitive slave rules). The deal allowed the South to keep the three-fifths count for representation that had been used under the Articles for calculation of state levies, as long as they also had a three-fifths count for calculation of taxes."

Constitutional Topic: The Constitutional Convention - The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.net

Black people only became whole "men" (1:1) after the passage of the 14th Amendment (following the Civil War that made the 14th Amendment possible). Women got full rights as human beings much later--with the suffrage movement.