History found

Last fall, Senate staffers were cleaning out a room in a sub-basement of the Capitol building, when they came across stacks of old, dusty books. Looking closer, they realized they had stumbled across "the long-lost official payroll and expense register for the Senate's first 90 years [1790-1881], the one-of-a-kind record of every dollar paid to senators in wages and travel reimbursement." Smithsonian Magazine has a short piece about the discovery.

The first ledger chronicles spending in the Senate from the time it had 26 members representing the 13 states until it had 76 from 38 states. To historians, its raw data promise a lode of information and insights to be coaxed and tweaked, teased and winkled from its pages. After only a cursory examination, for instance, Baker found notations accompanying entries for Senate stipends during a special session on March 4, 1801, which revealed that the world's greatest deliberative body advised and consented to the appointment of President John Adams? entire cabinet in a single day.

The ledger also shows that senators were paid $6 per day when the legislature was in session. Travel was reimbursed at 30 cents a mile for up to 20 miles a day, the federal government's first per diem perk. (Two centuries later, senators are reimbursed at only 6 cents more a mile for road trips.) In an early instance of paid sick leave, "Mr. [Richard] Potts [of Maryland] was detained last January on the road by sickness" and received $49 more for his pains.

The ledger also reveals that Congress raised a senator's pay in 1816 from the $6 per diem to $1,500 a year - only to see some incumbents voted out by constituents angry over the raise. (Today a senator earns $154,700 a year and a per diem of $165 when traveling.) But the ledger also indicates that senators did pitch in financially during the Civil War. The newfound records prove what historians had suspected but had not been able to prove: every senator paid the 5 percent "war tax" imposed on top-bracket salaries.

Even innocuous-seeming entries in the ledger may prove rich to historians. The book, for instance, includes a rather mundane dunning letter from the presidentially appointed comptroller of the Treasury, Joseph Anderson, to Walter Lowrie, secretary of the Senate, stating that the Senate had claimed too many expenses in 1832 and thus owed $5,845.20. But, in fact, Baker believes, this letter was a salvo in a bitter battle between President Andrew Jackson and the Senate over the national banking system. It appears to be political payback for the Senate's failure to do the president's bidding. Later, the Senate would vote to "censure" Jackson.