ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Three Fifths Compromise,

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an agreement with only a fraction of sense. [a woman holding a plate with a cupcake on it]

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Yeah, like that.

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All right, check out this excerpt.

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[ mumbles ]

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[ mumbling continues ]

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All right, and the question:

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Which of the following acts was passed

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due to the inclusion of this clause [man narrating a question]

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in the Constitution?

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And here are your potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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[ mumbling continues ]

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Okay.

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Well, as groundbreaking as they were, the Founding Fathers

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did everything in their power to side-step [image of a group of people having a discussion]

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the issue of slavery while writing the Constitution.

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Still, a decision needed to be made on how to count slaves

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as population for representation in the House, [image of a map in the background]

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resulting in the ill-fated Three Fifths Compromise.

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Hmm.

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All right, well did the inclusion of this

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clause in the Constitution

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lead to the eventual passage of A -

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the Northwest Ordinance? [image of a land with a small water passage]

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Well, actually, the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery

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in the newly acquired Northwest Territory,

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so those folks were busy converting fractions into whole numbers.

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So cross out A.

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Did the Three Fifths Compromise result in the passage of the [a woman calculating a math problem]

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B - Proclamation of Neutrality?

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That's foreign policy, not domestic,

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since the Proclamation of Neutrality

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declared the U.S. a neutral party in the growing conflict

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between France and Britain. [image of flags, of France, Britain and The U.S]

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And it goes for Pinckney's Treaty,

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which established relaciones

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between the U.S. and Spain. (Relationship.) Yeah.

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That knocks out B and D.

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Which means that the Three Fifths Compromise [man continues narrating]

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resulted in the eventual passage of C -

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the Missouri Compromise.

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After slavery was banned in the Northwest Territory,

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people on each side of the slavery debate began to freak out

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over the admittance of new states to the Union. [two men playing tug of war]

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The Missouri Compromise was one of the first

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acts to try and even things out

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between free and slave states

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all in the hopes of maintaining a balance of power in Congress.

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So C is the right answer.

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The Founding Fathers may have had the greatest intentions, [two men talking about the quantity of salads on their plate]

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but the Three Fifths Compromise didn't make it seem like

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all men were created equal.

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