More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people.

[David Lockmiller]

Headline of Washington Post (1/10/2022): More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people.

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.

John McLean, an Ohio congressman and, later, a Supreme Court justice, dissented in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the high court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution. McLean was once an enslaver.

[GustD45]

I think in the early 20th century a lot of individuals in congress could have been former slave holders or related to former slave holders.