US elites' slaveholder links abound

More than 100 US leaders — including President Joe Biden and every living former US president except Donald Trump, along with Supreme Court judges, members of the last sitting Congress and governors — have a slaveholding ancestor, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The investigation examining the ancestral history of US lawmakers and presidents found that Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — through his white mother's side, two of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — also have direct ancestors who enslaved black people.

Trump's ancestors arrived in the United States after slavery had been abolished.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined that at least 100 Democrats and Republicans descend from slaveholders. They include Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, and Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth and Jeanne Shaheen.

At least 8 percent of Democrats in the last Congress and 28 percent of Republicans have such ancestors, Reuters found.

Last year, the governors of 11 of the 50 US states were descendants of slaveholders, Reuters reported. They include eight chief executives of the 11 states that formed the Confederate States of America, which seceded and waged war to preserve slavery. Two are seeking the Republican nomination for president: Asa Hutchinson, former Arkansas governor, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

Family ties

Reuters said it notified the political leaders of their family ties to slaveholding, and identified which of their ancestors enslaved people, how many people that ancestor enslaved, and how many generations removed that ancestor was from them.

It also sought comment from each public official to "understand how learning about their family connection might affect them personally, and whether the knowledge might inform their views on policy matters".

Biden, Obama and Clinton declined to comment about the information provided by Reuters.

A spokesperson for Carter said, "We have to decline an interview as the family is focusing on his health during hospice care."

Henry Louis Gates Jr, a professor at Harvard University who focuses on African and African American research and hosts the popular television genealogy show Finding Your Roots on PBS, told Reuters that identifying family connections to slaveholders is not another chapter in the blame game. "We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors' actions," he said.

"It's just to say: Look at how closely linked we are to the institution of slavery, and how it informed the lives of the ancestors of people who represent us in the United States Congress today. This is a learning opportunity for each individual. It is also a learning opportunity for their constituency and for the American people as a whole."

To trace the lineages of the political leaders, Reuters said it assembled tens of thousands of pieces of information contained in thousands of pages of documents. Reporters only considered evidence of slaveholding that occurred after the founding of the US. They also limited their research to direct lineal descendants of the present-day leaders rather than building family trees that included distant cousins.