Northerners opposed counting slaves as part of the population if they had no rights, while southerners supported counting slaves. According to the compromise, five slaves would count as three free persons when calculating how many representatives each state received in the House of Representatives.
Explanation:
The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise established during the 1787 Philadelphia Convention between the colonies of the North and the South. This compromise considered, in the rules for counting people represented in the House of Representatives, that a slave was counted up to three fifths of a free man.
The question was important, as the population count would then be used to determine the number of seats each state would have in the US House of Representatives. The Compromise gave a disproportionate representation of the slave states in the House of Representatives compared to the voters in the free states until the Civil War.
