More than 1,800 congressmen once enslaved Black people.

[David Lockmiller]

Washington Post
Jan. 10, 2022

More than 1,800 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.

Sen. Edward Lloyd V of Maryland enslaved 468 people in 1832 on the same estate where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enslaved as a child.

When 11 Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861, their lawmakers left Congress, and the number of slaveholders dropped accordingly. Still, more than 10 percent of the members who remained in Congress as the country fought the Civil War over slavery were current or former slaveholders.

People who had been slaveholders continued to serve in Congress well into the 20th century. William Richardson, a Democrat who fought for the Confederacy, died in office in 1914 after representing Alabama for 14 years. 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. Rebecca Latimer Felton took the Senate oath of office on Nov. 21, 1922. The next day, she gave a brief speech and then stepped down. She had been a U.S. senator — the first woman to hold the office — for one day. Newspapers gave glowing reviews to her historic moment, calling her “grand,” “poised” and “dainty.” Some noted she also held another record: At 87, she was the oldest freshman senator in history.
None mentioned another historic title she held: Felton — suffragist, writer, political insider and avid white supremacist — was the last member of Congress known to have once enslaved people.

When Congress voted on the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which prohibited the expansion of slavery in the northern half of the country, the House and Senate contained a nearly equal number of slaveholders and non-slaveholders, a Post analysis found. The law was crafted by a slaveholder, Henry Clay, who is so renowned as one of America’s greatest statesmen that 16 counties across the country are named for him.

When Congress voted during the Civil War on the 13th Amendment, which added a ban on slavery to the U.S. Constitution, nine men who had been slaveholders remained in the Senate. Just three of them voted to approve the amendment, while 35 out of 40 non-slaveholders voted yes.