Rep. John Botts
Former Representative for Virginia’s 6th District
![Photo of Rep. John Botts [W-VA6, 1847-1849]](/static/legislator-photos/401618-200px.jpeg)
Legislators who enslaved Black people
Botts 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by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.
Botts was one of them.
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Dec 1839 to Mar 1849, Botts missed 1,051 of 2,203 roll call votes, which is 47.7%. This is much worse than the median of 24.5% among the lifetime records of representatives serving in Mar 1849. 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
