She doesn't think slavery was all that bad.

I did suggest to her she try living as a slave for a while. See if that makes a difference in her opinion.

And if she still thinks it's not so bad, then she can remain a slave the rest of her life. Because it's not all that bad.

because the 3/5 compromise wasn't what most people seem to think it was.

Southern legislators wanted to count all of their slave population for purposes of determining state representation in Congress, even though the slaves couldn't vote, and the northern legislators didn't want them counted at all because they couldn't vote. So the south was trying to strengthen its influence in Congress by counting as a "represented" population a whole bunch of people who had no vote, and who therefore weren't really being represented at all.

I think there is very widespread misunderstanding about the meaning and intent of the so-called 3/5 compromise. Here's some information from an article on the PBS web site - please read before going off on the Emory article.

http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/classroom/index3.html

while ensuring that all those 3/5 human beings would have the kind of representation that would keep them in chains for another 80 years.

It was a horrible solution for everybody but the aristocratic plantation owners in Dixie. Fortunately, immigration soon made sure that the south's disproportionate representation wouldn't count for much for very long.

It was the only way to bring the south into the union. In retrospect, the better way might have been to leave them out until economic conditions and interstate warfare with their neighbors forced them to appeal to join the union without that hideous compromise.

was the only way to keep the South in the union, which was probably true, and maybe it seemed like the only solution at the time. The flip side, of course, was that it only postponed what was bound to happen eventually, and finally did in 1861. My point was simply that people often assume the "3/5" meant that slaves were considered to be only 3/5 of a human, which wasn't what it meant at all - it meant that 3/5 of the total slave population would be counted toward those states' representation in Congress - a bad enough situation, as it turned out, but having nothing to do with the "value" of the individuals.

The factor here is that slaves couldn't vote. So, had they been fully counted for assignment of seats in the House, it would have been like a giant gerrymander, giving the south far more seats than warranted because the congressmen could never be held to account by their slave "constituents" who couldn't vote. Logically, even the 3/5 was a giveaway.

Prisoners, children, people not registered, undocumented individuals are all counted for representation purposes. It was the North who did not want slaves counted as a human being. It was the North who put the 3/5 of a human into the Constitution.

It was the North who did not want slaves counted as a human being.
It was the Southern states who were by far the most aggressive in carrying out a system of racial chattel slavery in which they actually treated slaves like property with no human rights. Unless you're arguing that the Southern states' push for full counting of slaves in Representation, unlike the Northern states, showed that the South wanted to treat slaves as full human beings.

Had the Northern states demanded that slaves be fully counted for purposes of representation, the South would have had even more Representatives in the House. I imagine Southern states would have gleefully accepted this situation.

If anything, it was the most virulent anti-slavery activists who wanted to count only non-slaves for purposes of Representation. Why should slave states get more Representatives by virtue of their slave populations, when it was quite obvious that those extra Representatives would have absolutely no intent to represent the slave populations?

Representatives have no intent of representing non-voters. If you don't vote a representative doesn't care what you think. You must support that or your logic is deeply flawed.

Why should one state get more districts because they have a lot of children, when another one doesn't. It also would serve as an incentive to expand the electorate.

What they will not do is represent people who will never have the ability to vote.

Your apparently preferred solution, a 5/5 Compromise as it were, would have massively skewed the American political system towards slavery (Even more than it already was). Borderline states would have had massive incentives to embrace slavery, since each new slave would increase representation power, even though the slaves were effectively treated as if they were tradeable objects.

I suppose the basic question is: Why do you seem to think it would have been a great idea to skew early American politics even more towards the Slave states? The plight of the slaves would have not been improved one iota by counting them as full persons for purposes of Representation; in fact, you would make their plight even worse, since a 5/5 solution would have given their masters even more power in Congress and at the Electoral College.

As part of the compromise the Constitution outlawed the importation of slaves and everyone knew that meant the death of slavery eventually. I doubt the "increased electoral" power of southern states would have made much difference in the long run. My only point is the concept of a slave being only 3/5 of a human was something that came from the representatives in the north. The south is usually tagged with this by people who don't know American history.

in the total population count for representational purposes. I assume that the "logic" was that they were appropriately represented by their husbands so the fact that they couldn't vote themselves wasn't relevant. By that same logic, were slaves adequately represented by their masters? Not so much. While husbands and wives of the same social class might be assumed to have reasonably congruent interests most of the time (not that this justifies denying women the vote), slaves and their owners had exactly opposite interests. The rich Southern plantation owners depended on slave labor to maintain their prosperity, while the slaves didn't want to be slaves. So the notion that even 3/5 representation was any kind of representation at all was ludicrous.