System or self: the role of slaveholding on Congressional behavior in the US North, 1789−1861

We use the 2022 Washington Post’s database of congressional enslavers to ask how much the direct interest of Northern politicians in slavery affected voting. Comparing systemic to self-interest parallels efforts to replace vocabulary, e.g., slaveholder with enslaver, which emphasizes individual agency (and culpability) over societal constraints. Northern slaveholders voted differently from their non-slaveholding Northern colleagues. But this gap was much smaller than the overall North−South divide. Slaveholding had minimal explanatory power over voting in both chambers, except for two periods in the Senate, notably in the 1850s with a slaveholding cluster. But the rise of the GOP diminished their power.