Slaveholding Congressmen

The Washington Post recently released an article with the title, “More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation.” For this article, the researcher/reporter, Julie Zauzmer Weil, started with a list of every person elected to Congress who was born before 1840 (over 5500 of them!) – meaning he had reached 21 by the time the last census before the Civil War was conducted in 1860. She then researched each person on that list, examining a variety of sources.

The data that she gathered is publicly available here - https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-congress-slaveowners/

The article she wrote draws a number of interesting conclusions which I will not repeat here. But just look at the below chart which gives the percentage of congressmen from each state who were slaveholders in each year of congress. While it’s obvious that the southern states overwhelmingly elected slaveholders prior to the Civil War, it’s also interesting that every state in New England had slaveholders elected to congress in the early years of our country. (Note that the percentage of slaveholders did not drop to zero after the Civil War, as the men being elected were still ones who had owned slaves earlier in their lives.)

[Congressional slaveholders by year/state]

 

 

As a genealogist, I am particularly interested in finding any of my relatives in the database. Since my ancestors were nearly entirely from Connecticut and Massachusetts before that, I pulled all the entries from CT, MA, and one person from NY who I recognized as a relative. I’d like to comment on these individuals as a continuation of a several blog posts I wrote previously on this subject (see here, here, and here). One genealogist friend had noted that when looking for slaveholders in New England, “look for the doctors, lawyers, and ministers. They often owned slaves.” This analysis in the Washington Post reinforces that statement as then, like now, the individuals in Congress tend to be individuals from those professions. Here are those slaveholder congressmen which I’d like to look at:

[Congressional slaveholders in CT, MA, and one in NY]

 

 

Let’s look at each of these men individually. All are from CT except as noted. (The date is the year of their birth, the nomenclature “nCmX” is shorthand for “nth cousin, m times removed”, and the “via” is our common ancestor.)

·        Elijah Boardman (1760), 1C7X via Daniel Boardman

·        Sylvester Gilbert (1755), 6C6X via Robert Fuller

·        Elizur Goodrich (1761), 4C7X via Daniel Hubbard 

·        James Hillhouse (1754), 4C7X via Thomas Fitch

·        William Samuel Johnson (1727), 4C8X via Francis Bushnell

·        Andrew Thompson Judson (1784), 4C6X via Joseph Judson

·        Amasa Learned (1750), 5C5X via William Heath

·        Stephen Mix Mitchell (1743), 3C8X via Nathaniel Turner

·        Jonathan Ogden Moseley (1762), 5C6X via Jasper Crane

·        Samuel Burr Sherwood (1779), 4C7X via Thomas Sherwood

·        Jonathan Sturges (1740), 4C7X via Thomas Fitch

·        Benjamin Tallmadge (1754), 3C6X via Samuel Hooker

·        Gideon Tomlinson (1780), 1C7X via Zachariah Tomlinson

·        Jeremiah Wadsworth (1743), 4C8X via John Talcott

·        Tristram Dalton (MA) (1738), 3C9X via Henry Palmer

·        Theodore Sedgwick (MA) (1746), 2C7X via Joseph Thompson

·        Aaron Burr (NY) (1756), 2C6X via James Pierpont

As I anticipated, because of my deep New England roots, all 17 of these men are cousins of mine. While it’s nice to find so many connections in my extended family tree to such notable individuals, the connection to slaveholders in the early days of the New England states continues to be a bit discomforting. Even though most of the “slaves” owned by these men tended to be household servants and not the field laborers such as those in southern cotton fields, the fact that they were treated as “property” instead of as fellow men/women is bothersome. I realize that I cannot impose current-day standards on past generations. But I still wish that these things had not happened.