Pre-Civil War Overrepresentation by Slaveholding States: The Math

IcarusPhoenix

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When discussing secession, it is frequently pointed out that the secession leaders weren't just starting an insurrection based on a "peculiar institution" that's existence wasn't really threatened, but that they were doing so in direct response to an election that they had lost, held under a system to which they had previously consented, and as members of a system of government in which their interests were overrepresented. Frequently, this last is something vociferously denied; many have said that the north had more members of congress, more money, and more power, or they'll make some bizarre modern argument about taxation, fiduciary distribution, or government intursion that isn't based in reality. However, raw numbers can not be denied.

Well, not honestly or successfully, anyway.

Thanks to the 3/5ths clause of the Constitution (the first in a series of compromises in which the slaveholding states got pretty much everything they wanted), 60% of slaves were counted for a state's representation in Congress, despite having no voice themselves in the government. This meant that, automatically, the average citizen of a slaveholding state was already overrepresented, even if they personally owned none. The question, however, is by how much?

In the 1860 census, the population of the US was just over 31 million. The total population of non-slaveholding states was approximately 18.8 million. The total population of slaveholding states was just over 12.2 million. However, nearly 4 million of those were slaves, who had no citizenship, no vote, and no rights. The total represented population of the slaveholding states was, therefore, just short of 8.3 million, and the total free population of the US just over 27.2 million.

(Note: I'm obviously ignoring gender differences here; yes, women didn't have the right to vote in any state yet, but since the gender ratio is as-near-as-makes-no-difference to 1:1, the difference in proportional representation doesn't change to a statistically significant degree.)

In the election of 1860, slaveholding states had 90 seats in the House of Representatives, and non-slaveholding states had 148. Along the same lines, slaveholding states had 120 electoral votes, and non-slaveholding states had 184.

The average member of the House of Representatives had a constituency of just over 114,000 people. However, due to the inherent increased representation given slaveholding states, the average representative of a slaveholding state only had a constituency of only 92,000, whereas a representative of a non-slaveholding state had a constituency of 127,000. Therefore, the average citizen of a slaveholding state had nearly 40% more representation than their fellow Americans in non-slaveholding states.

That is, of course, just the average; at the extreme ends were the examples of Iowa and South Carolina; Iowa's two representatives each had to represent over 337,000 citizens, while South Carolina's six each had a constituency of only 50,000. If having nearly seven times the representation of your fellow citizens isn't over-representation, I don't know what is.

That leads to the Senate, a body in which clever use of the rules can given an extraordinary amount of power to a unified minority, and the slaveholding states had - at the very minimum - a parity of votes in that body until the opening of the 1859 session, with the admissions of Minnesota and Oregon in 1858 and 1859, respectively.

(Note: Many claim that the south lost parity after the 1850 admission of California, but this ignores the fact that Senator William Gwim was openly pro-slavery, thus maintaining parity through a split in the California delegation.)

As for the electoral college share, there was an average of one electoral college vote per approximately 89,500 citizens. Again, however, the disparity is noticeable. Electoral votes from slaveholding states were allocated at a ratio of one per 69,000 citizens, while those from non-slaveholding states were one per 102,000, giving two citizens of a slaveholding state the same electoral power as three of their fellow Americans from non-slaveholding states.

Again, Iowa and South Carolina present the absurd extremes of this: an elector from Iowa was representative of nearly 169,000 citizens, while a South Carolina elector was representative of less than 38,000, a ratio of nearly 9:2.

This pattern had remained similar since the beginning of the Republic, which is why of the seventy-two years since the inauguration of the first president, slaveholders had held the office for forty-nine of them.

In addition, five of the nine Supreme Court justices - Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Associate Justices James Moore Wayne, John Catron, Peter Vivian Daniel, and John Archibald Campbell - were from slaveholding states.

The idea that the slaveholding states were victims of tyranny in a government they often controlled and always held far disproportionate power in is not only historically inaccurate, but as the math shows, both logically and mathematically absurd.
 
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