The debate soon turned rough. The clock was ticking. Were it not for two leaders, James Wilson from Pennsylvania and Charles Pinckney from South Carolina, the convention would have probably nose-dived into chaos.

The Three-Fifths Compromise, written into the Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the new Constitution, was how these two leaders managed the crisis. Non-free persons who display, in the wording of Federalist #54, a “mixed character of persons and of property,” will be counted not as whole persons but as three-fifths of a free person.

The compromise enabled the Constitution to be drafted, and later ratified, by nine of the 13 states comprising the union. It’s the proof that compromises, no matter how horrible, are used to solve seemingly intractable problems – but at a cost.

In 1819, after the Missouri territory applied for statehood, another big crisis shook the nation’s marrow. Would the new state make slavery legal?

At that moment, it was clear that breaking the balance of power between the 11 Northern states that opposed the expansion of slavery and the 11 Southern states that didn’t want to restrict human bondage would put the nation in serious jeopardy.

But the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay from Kentucky – aka the “Great Compromiser” – was able to broker the Missouri Compromise. The idea, this time, was that Missouri would become a state without any restriction over slavery; and Maine, formerly a part of Massachusetts, would enter the union as a state where slavery was outlawed.

On March 6, 1820, President James Monroe signed the compromise into law. Just like Clay, he would emerge from this adventure as the savior of the nation, so much so that he went on to be elected to a second term by an almost unanimous vote.

Slaveholders were appeased, and the union saved. But the Missouri Compromise, like the Three-Fifths Compromise, did nothing to fix the problems that had caused the crises in the first place. Human bondage in the young country persisted.

The history of the United States is fraught with political compromises. Many of them were ugly, at once a success and a failure.

Compromises are often flimsy and abet major problems in the long run. Moreover, by calling the public attention to the few protagonists who play the game, they also distract. The compromise gives a platform to the “heroes” and “saviors” – in the most recent case, Biden and McCarthy.

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