The first-ever list of enslavers in Congress
More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. On today\u2019s episode of \u201cPost Reports,\u201d the first database of those slaveholding congressmen. And how those politicians shaped the nation.
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For the first seven decades of its existence, Congress returned again and again to one acrimonious topic: slavery. Many of the lawmakers arguing in Washington were enslavers themselves. But until recently, the world didn\u2019t know how many.
Last week, The Post published the first-ever list of every slaveholding member of the U.S. Congress. More than 1,700 of them were elected to Congress over a period of well over a century.
To create the database, reporter Julie Zauzmer Weil combed through 18th- and 19th-century census records and other documents, including wills, journal articles and plantation records. And while she says that the work is not yet complete, it\u2019s still useful, and powerful.
\u201cYou can look at a lot of issues through this prism of where we started as a country, and where the people who held power were so often the same people who held slaves,\u201d Julie said. \u201cAnd what does that mean for us now?\u201d