In 1787, as America's founders were creating the United States Constitution, they faced a major conflict over slavery, political power, representation, and taxation. The result was the Three-Fifths Compromise. The Constitution did not literally declare that a Black person was only three-fifths of a human being. Instead, it required states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population when determining representation in the House of Representatives and certain federal taxes. Enslaved people themselves had no vote and no political representation, yet Southern states benefited politically from counting them toward their population. The compromise gave slaveholding states additional representation in Congress and greater influence in presidential elections through the Electoral College. The Three-Fifths Compromise demonstrates how deeply slavery was built into the political structure of the early United States. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, replaced the Constitution's three-fifths formula with a different basis for congressional representation. This is the history of the Three-Fifths Compromise—and the uncomfortable truth behind how enslaved people were counted in the formation of the United States.