Sen. Joseph Chalmers
Former Senator for Mississippi
Chalmers was a senator from Mississippi and was a Democrat. He served from 1845 to 1847.
Legislators who enslaved Black people
Chalmers 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by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.
Chalmers was one of them.
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Dec 1845 to Mar 1847, Chalmers missed 51 of 373 roll call votes, which is 13.7%. This is better than the median of 16.3% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Mar 1847. 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
