Over 1,800 U.S. congresspeople owned slaves: report

NEW YORK, March 11 (Xinhua) -- From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation's laws were current or former slave owners, The Washington Post (WP) has reported, citing its database of slaveholding members of Congress.

"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in their lives," according to a WP investigation based on the examination of thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.

"The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools," said the report.

Enslavers in the U.S. Congress represented 38 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states, according to the report.

Particularly, for the first 30 years of American lawmaking, from 1789 to 1819, more than half the men elected to Congress each session were slaveholders, it added.