The Hunt for Abraham Lincoln’s Congressional Pay Records

Lincoln pay and mileage account for the First Session of the 30th Congress, National Archives

There's an utterly fascinating post, by David J Gerleman, at the National Archive Prologue blog on the search for Lincoln's Congressional pay records. I love Treasury Department treasure hunts.

Ironically, it was Lincoln’s great rival, Stephen A. Douglas, who helped set off an intense search for pay records of the 30th Congress. While hunting through an odd cache of files in the Auditors of the Treasury Records in pursuit of a Lincoln document involving “Coffee Mill Guns,” I stumbled across a handful of Douglas’s Senate pay vouchers from 1848. This small discovery reignited my hope that other Treasury records might yield up the elusive congressional pay files; thus began a test of archival digging that all dedicated historical researchers know well.

Read the whole post here.