The Article[157] enacts:
"Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this union according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons."
By the apparently simple but very pregnant words, "all other persons," of whom three-fifths were to be added, were meant the slaves, who, although they were not themselves accorded any citizenship or right to vote, were thus counted in determining the number of the representatives who were to be accredited to and elected by the State in which they were held in slavery.
As slavery was, in 1787, legal in some of the States and illegal in others, it also became necessary, in order to gain the acceptance of the union by the slave-owning States, that provision should be made for the legal return to their owners of any slaves who might escape from a slave-owning to a free State, and a clause guaranteeing the rendition of fugitive slaves was therefore embodied in the constitution. It was enacted:
"No person held to service or labour in one State—under the laws thereof—escaping to another shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service of labour may be due."[158]
It is stated on the authority of Madison,[159] "the father of the constitution," that the words used in each case in the original drafts of these clauses was "servitude," but it was afterwards changed to "service."
The expulsion of the words, although it might appear better to the eye, did not alter the fact that the whole of the States, which then framed their Union, although they did not all practise slavery, yet every one of them then consented to its perpetuation. Thus it came that slavery existed legally under the Stars and Stripes from 1787 until 1865, when happily it was terminated[160] by the proclamation of Lincoln and the constitutional amendment.
Such is the story of the slave's "freedom" under the national flag of the United States.
We may now turn to the story of his freedom under the Union Jack in Canada.