The Capitol Dome

41 THE CAPITOL DOME bore the exact same title as the previous bill. As August 1848 began, a palpable sense of the rapidly approaching end of the legislative session can be sensed in the pages of the House Journal from the stepped up pace of finalizing leg- islation. H.R. 599 was read a first and second time, and aer further amendments, was ordered to be engrossed, read a third time, and passed so that the Clerk could request the concurrence of the Senate. 31 On 10 August the Senate took up consideration of H.R. 599, passed it the next day with amendments, and requested the return concurrence of the House. On 12 August the altered bill returned to the House, which agreed to some word changes and to 27 amendments, but disagreed with six others. 32 It went back to the Senate, which promptly agreed to change one amend- ment and to "recede" from the remainder of their requested alterations. 33 e morning of Monday, 14 August 1848 was hectic as Congress was set to adjourn at mid-day. To speed up matters and insure that the backlog of "mature" legis- lation secured enactment, the House suspended "the 17th joint rule of the two Houses" so as to permit "all bills that have already passed both Houses, or may this day pass, to be sent to the President of the United States." H. R. 599 was officially reported as enrolled and signed by the Speaker of the House and then sent to the Senate for the signature of the president pro tempore. e now-complete legislation was then dispatched to President James K. Polk, waiting in the vice president's office in the Capitol, who signed it into law before the session closed at noon. 34 Representative Lincoln remained in Washington until early September to assist the Whig executive committee in preparing for the upcoming presidential election. He then departed on a speaking tour of New England and New York before returning home via Chicago. He returned to the cap- ital on December 7 a few days aer the second session had already gotten underway. 35 Lincoln's roundabout route back to Illinois during the recess would enmesh him in one of the national scandals concerning travel allowances that mushroomed into an embarrassment tarnishing nearly every Member of Con- gress. e second session had barely begun when newly- installed Whig Member Horace Greeley—serving a short stint in Congress even while continuing as editor of the New York Tribune—publicly reproached Members in print for taking less-than-direct routes to and from their districts. 36 Congressional pay was based on a per diem basis stemming from an 1818 law by which Members received $8 per day and $8 per twenty miles traveled to and from their districts, although the legislation did not specify the shortest route. Finding the original pay and mileage records from which Greeley drew his data proved to be one of the most daunt- ing challenges of all the questions regarding the irtieth Congress. Although nineteenth-century ledgers contain- ing salary and travel accounts for senators were discovered in a Capitol basement storeroom in 2002, corresponding records for House Members were far more difficult to locate. Ironically, it was Lincoln's perennial foe, Stephen A. Douglas, who helped set off an intense search for the irtieth Congress's pay records: while hunting through an odd cache of files in the Auditors of the Treasury Records, a handful of Douglas's Senate pay vouchers from 1848 came to light. is small discovery reignited hopes that Treasury holdings rather than legislative records might yield up the elusive congressional pay files—if they still existed. Before a targeted search could be made, the initial hurdle of reconstructing exactly how nineteenth-century Members of Congress were paid had to be overcome; if that could be achieved, it might indicate where the pay records ended up. is was not an easy task, as even the modern House Histo- rian's Office could not say precisely how the process worked in the 1840s, which are a known gap for the Clerk 's dis- bursement reports. The records of the Committee on Fig. 11. is page of "A Bill to establish certain post roads" (H.R . 260) shows Lincoln's proposed amendments for Illinois.

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