The net worth of members whose ancestors owned more than 16 slaves was five times greater than that of those whose families owned none, according to findings published on Wednesday in PLoS ONE.
“It’s a sign of how historical injustices continue to affect society today,” PhD student and coauthor Neil Sehgal of the University of Pennsylvania told The Hill.
In keeping with the paper’s theme of family legacies, Sehgal published the paper with his father, Ashwini Sehgal, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve.
The Sehgals’ paper builds on 2023 reporting by Reuters that identified 100 U.S. leaders with slave-owning ancestors — along with nearly every president between George W. Bush and Joe Biden.
The sole presidential exception in that period, Sehgal noted, was former President Trump, whose German-born ancestors arrived in America 20 years after slavery was abolished.
The Reuters dataset showed that members of both parties had slaveholding ancestors, although it was about more common among Republicans (28 percent) than Democrats (8 percent).
But far more important than party, to the Sehgals, was the way that a record of past slaveholding could be a metric of how wealth and power flow together through American history — something that the Reuters research, combined with Congressional members’ mandatory financial disclosures, made possible.
And above all, slavery was a metric of wealth: The amount of capital invested in enslaved people in 1860 was worth more than all railroads and factories, according to The New York Times.
At that time, the antebellum lower Mississippi — America’s plantation heartland — had more millionaires (all of them slaveholders) than anywhere in the country, per The Atlantic.
But wealth isn’t just money: It’s also a matrix of social position and elite connections and “opportunity hoarding,” the Annual Review of Sociology found in 2022.
These factors allowed the slaveholding families whose slaves were freed in 1865, effectively liquidating their wealth, to largely recover their fortunes by 1940, according to a 2021 study in the American Economic Review.
The Sehgals’ research showed that at least in Congress, past wealth in the form of slaves correlated with current wealth.
The Sehgals noted that the relationship between slaveholder ancestors and modern wealth remained even after they controlled for factors like race, age and education – factors that also correlate with wealth.
Of the top 100 wealthiest congressional members, 21 had slaveholding ancestors — and two-thirds of those had held more than 10. The 11 wealthiest members didn’t have slaveholding ancestors.
Some members of Congress have publicly addressed their ancestors’ past connections to slavery.
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), whose ancestors had dozens of slaves, told Reuters in a statement in 2013 that “Slavery is a deplorable part of our history, and I have no bonds with any long-dead relatives connected to it. We must not forget the cruelty visited upon Black Americans over generations as we commit to systemic reform that ensures equal rights for all. That principle has guided my personal life, professional career, and political record.”
The Hill has reached out to Titus.
The full list is available here.
Sehgal emphasized that the point of the research is not to blame “any individual for actions of ancestors.”
Instead, he said, the paper is “showing how historical advantages may have long term effects on wealth.”
