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After senate staffers Clare Weeks Amoruso and Douglas Connolly finished cleaning out a storeroom in the subbasement of the U.S. Capitol this past November, they noticed a door to a nearby room ajar. Curious, they walked inside and found floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with dust-covered boxes of decades-old insurance brochures and payroll records. Then the spine of a book bound in cloth and leather caught Connolly’s eye. Stacked carelessly with others on a low shelf, and bearing the dates 1790-1881 in gilt digits, the book was blandly titled Senators Compensation and Mileage.
Opening the large, dusty volume, they found its rag-paper pages covered with notes in ornate script, and column after column of numbers within neat rules, and names in lists, and signatures writ large. "All of a sudden," said Connolly, "there was Thomas Jefferson." Here, too, was Aaron Burr and John Adams, whose signature matched that on the dust jacket of David McCullough’s biography of Adams, which Amoruso was then reading.
"It was an ‘oh my God’ kind of moment," she says. "We couldn’t believe it was real," says Connolly. Even though it was past quitting time, Connolly called the historian of the Senate, Richard Baker, who came running.
One look at the book told Baker that he "was holding something significant" and that he’d better call home to say he’d be working late. Here was the long-lost official payroll and expense register for the Senate’s first 90 years, the one-of-a-kind record of every dollar paid to senators in wages and travel reimbursements. A second look revealed mold on the fore edge, cause for getting the book to a conservation lab.
Not only was it the genuine article, said Baker during a press conference set up by then Majority Leader Tom Daschle, but "there is nothing that comes remotely close to it in the archives of the Senate." Near it were 59 successor volumes of ledgers, books not as dramatic as the ledger dubbed "S1" because they cover later, better-documented times.
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.)
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