Rep. Robert Desha
Former Representative for Tennessee’s 5th District
Legislators who enslaved Black people
Desha 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by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.
Desha was one of them.
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Dec 1827 to Mar 1831, Desha missed 31 of 506 roll call votes, which is 6.1%. This is better than the median of 14.6% among the lifetime records of representatives serving in Mar 1831. 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
