Sen. Benjamin Hill
Former Senator for Georgia
![Photo of Sen. Benjamin Hill [D-GA, 1877-1883]](/static/legislator-photos/405449-200px.jpeg)
Legislators who enslaved Black people
Hill was among more than 1,800 legislators who enslaved Black people.
The Washington Post compiled the
first database of slaveholding members of Congress
by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.
Hill was one of them.
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Mar 1877 to Aug 1882, Hill missed 816 of 1,737 roll call votes, which is 47.0%. This is much worse than the median of 30.8% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Aug 1882. The chart below reports missed votes over time.
We don’t track why legislators miss votes, but it’s often due to medical absenses, major life events, and running for higher office.
Primary Sources
The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including:
- unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community project gathering congressional information
- United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 by Howard L. Rosenthal and Keith T. Poole.
- Martis’s “The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress”, via Keith Poole’s roll call votes data set, for political party affiliation for Members of Congress from 1789 through about year 2000
- Biographical Directory of the United States Congress for the photo
