The first-ever list of enslavers in Congress
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. On today’s episode of “Post Reports,” 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’t 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’s still useful, and powerful.
“You 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,” Julie said. “And what does that mean for us now?”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, all. |
| 0:03.4 | Before we get started, you should know this episode mentions sexual assault and physical |
| 0:08.6 | abuse. |
| 0:10.2 | Please take care. |
| 0:13.0 | When you think about political power and the link between people in power and slavery, |
| 0:22.6 | you do start looking for parallels around you in the world today. |
| 0:25.6 | You start thinking, okay, we have these fights over access to the ballot. |
| 0:30.4 | Well, who had the right to vote and how has that changed over time and how did the way |
| 0:35.7 | it all began influence the way it's going now? |
| 0:38.6 | You can look at a lot of issues through this prism of we started as a country where the |
| 0:44.2 | people who held power were so often the same people who held slaves. |
| 0:49.4 | And what does that mean for us now? |
| 0:54.5 | In the summer of 2020, reporter Julie Wilde came across this huge gap in our knowledge of |
| 1:00.9 | American history. |
| 1:03.0 | This project first started when DC did something that a lot of cities did around the summer |
| 1:08.2 | of 2020 and created a list of all the public buildings and parks and schools that could |
| 1:15.1 | be renamed because of various wrongdoing on the part of the people they were named for. |
| 1:21.4 | My job at the Washington Post is covering DC's local government, so I looked at DC's list |
| 1:26.0 | and I tried to figure out who these people were and why they were on the list. |
| 1:29.9 | I realized that several of them were in Congress and several of the people on the list separately |
| 1:35.7 | were slave owners and that was why they were listed. |
| 1:38.4 | So I thought, well, maybe these members of Congress were slaveholders and I googled members |
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