Letters: slavery and the founding fathers

The politically biased attack on Michele Bachmann by columnist Kavitha Rajagopalan ["Forging ahead without a grasp on our past," Opinion, July 8] is classic hypocrisy. John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, was a witness to every aspect of the birth of the American Revolution. More important, he was, more than most, intimately familiar with the founding principles so eloquently shaped by his father at the Constitutional Convention and was key in directing the future of this country in its early formative years, serving as one of its first diplomats and later as president.

It was he, as was correctly pointed out by Bachmann, who helped lay the groundwork for the abolition movement to end slavery. To say that he was not a "founder" because he did not take his pen to the Declaration of Independence completely, and intentionally, misses the point.

John F. Picciano, Westbury
 

Kavitha Rajagopalan reiterates the commonly misunderstood three-fifths compromise, implying that being counted as only three-fifths of a person was the kind of reckoning that African-Americans fought an uphill battle against.

The fact is, the Southern states would have preferred to count slaves as four-fifths of a person, or better yet, five-fifths. Northerners wanted those "not free" (the word "slave" is actually never used in the Constitution) to be counted as little as possible -- as two-fifths or ideally not at all.

You have to remember what the count was for. It was not to determine a general census, as many people incorrectly think. It was used to determine how much representation the states would have in the House of Representatives.

Since the population of slaves was far greater in the South, the more slaves who were counted, the more political say Southern states would have had in the federal government.

The slaves themselves had no vote, so for them, it was a horrific reverse representation: The more they were "counted," the more power they gave to the slave-owning states, and the more easily their rights and best interests could be trampled on and ignored.

Craig T. Robertson, Huntington Station