The first database of slaveholding members of Congress.

January 17, 2022 1:27 PM

The Washington Post has examined thousands of pages of census records and historical documents and found that more than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. People who had been slaveholders continued to serve in Congress well into the 20th century.

It is a great counterpoint to the CRT hysteria Emanuele Barry reported on in a recent episode of This American Life "Talking While Black." where she finds that "... a lot of these parents repeat the same talking points in these meetings across the country... We shouldn't be talking about racism because it's not a thing anymore."

posted by Word_Salad (6 comments total)

Whoa:

Another Democrat, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a suffragist and a white supremacist, was appointed to fill a Senate vacancy in 1922 and briefly represented Georgia at age 87. The first woman ever to serve in the Senate was a former slaveholder.

Also:

History remembers Rep. John McLean, an Ohio congressman and then a longtime Supreme Court justice, as one of two jurists who dissented in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution. Yet McLean was also one of the rare residents of free state Ohio who was recorded as a slaveowner in the 1820 Census, when he was serving on the state’s Supreme Court.

posted by migurski at 1:32 PM on January 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

Since the publication of the database, readers have provided conclusive new information on nearly three dozen more congressmen, in the form of documents ranging from enslaved people’s handwritten birth certificates, to newspaper advertisements placed by congressmen seeking people who had fled their plantations, to a letter one reader’s great-great-great-grandfather wrote home from a Civil War battlefield. As more information comes to light, The Post will continue to update the database.

The citizen historian side of this is really cool.
posted by box at 1:50 PM on January 17, 2022 [14 favorites]

Saying that Felton was a slaveowner is, remarkably, an understatement. She was an ardent white supremacist all her life, who perpetuated myths of White women being at grave risk of being raped by Black men, and frequently encouraged lynchings.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:20 PM on January 17, 2022 [10 favorites]

That TAL episode is really great.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:45 PM on January 17, 2022

Nice. interesting to see the steady rebound of the slave powers, as well as the continuity of slave power in the border states, as opposed to states occupied by the United States Army-where southerners were liberated and fought other southerners.

...Now do the ones who received the benefits of unpaid labor from Jim Crow? Modern Prison Labor?
posted by eustatic at 7:53 PM on January 17, 2022

https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-congress-slaveowners/blob/main/data/congress_slaveowners.csv

no paywall.
posted by james33 at 7:03 AM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]