California has 39 million people and two senators. Wyoming has a few dozen people and two senators.

[hunter]

91. I was thinking people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Those are the sorts of people who had to be satisfied if the Union was to succeed.

The motivations of the industrial and mercantile classes were not pure.

Whereas Thomas Jefferson probably thought of himself as the benevolent provider for all the tenants, slaves, women, and children on his estate, making it a matter of course to him that congressional representation should be based on that entire population, the industrial and mercantile class didn't want to cede political power to slave owners in proportion to the number of slaves they owned. By their reckoning a man who owned one or two slaves was the equal of a man who owned a hundred.

By the three-fifths compromise these secular lords like Thomas Jefferson still got the better deal.

As I've expressed myself elsewhere, the entire foundation of the Union was rotten. It could have turned out that slaves weren't even counted as people, which is what happened to the Indians who were specifically excluded from apportionment, the end result being further genocide and dislocation.