Bucking the trend of older resources being harder to find, the Library of Congress offers the federal legislative documents published from 1774 to 1875 to the public on its A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation website. While this website does not offer a single clearinghouse resource that simply lists votes, it does have several resources that can be used to find congressional voting information.
The most official of these resources are the records of the debates of Congress, which include:
While all of these sources can be searched by keyword, researchers may be better served by browsing the resources, using their indices to find all mentions of the law(s) at issue.
Voting information can also be found in the Journal of the House of Representatives (House Journal) and Journal of the Senate (Senate Journal).
The following resources are available from the Library of Congress.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact the librarians here at the Law Library of Congress via our Ask a Librarian service if you have any questions about this or any other legal topic.
