"Second, what were the alternatives?"

The alternative is painfully obvious. Slaves should have been counted as whole people, because they *were* whole people, and they should have been given the right to vote (along with all their other rights). I suspect that progress towards abolition would have been pretty rapid if the millions of slaves literally building the country were given a fair say in how it was run.

The only way your question makes sense is if you haven’t considered that *not* keeping human beings as slaves was an available option all along, the people of the time were simply too selfish, greedy, and in some cases, evil to consider it.

The point you seem to be missing about whether black people we're considered 3/5ths of a person or not human beings at all in the constitution, is that they *were* treated as property, legally, for generations, and then treated as subhuman for generations more. It doesn't really matter what the constitution says when that's the reality, does it?

And yes, I consider the distinction between slaves and black people in 1780s America to be pretty academic. So would you if you'd been living back then. I mean, think about it; how confident would you have felt about your freedom if you were black and living in 1780s America? Find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time and you'd be sold into slavery pretty quickly. And who would you ask for help? The police?