XII.  Why the Electoral College?  What's is its purpose?  Where did it come from?  What's its future? The US Constitution's provisions on slavery -- including the three-fifths clause, the continued slave trade for 20 years, and the Electoral College -- shaped the nation's history fundamentally through the Civil War and even until our own times. This episode of Historic Matters features a reading of four recent columns -- by Professors Sean Wilentz of Princeton, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School, and Alan Singer of Hofstra, and by political analyst John Avlon -- that offer a very valuable primer the origins and purposes of the Electoral College and on a central theme of the American past.