Sereno Elisha Payne was born on June 26, 1843 in Hamilton, Madison County, New York, United States. He was the son of Betsy (Sears) and William Wallace Payne, a farmer and one-time assemblyman, and the nephew of Henry B. Payne. The family, soon after his birth, removed to Auburn.
Sereno Elisha Payne attended the the Auburn Academy. After graduation at the University of Rochester in 1864, he entered the law office of Cox & Avery in Auburn.
In 1866 Sereno Elisha Payne was admitted to the bar. He immediately opened a law office in Auburn, which he maintained to the end of his life, gradually acquiring a large practice. From the first he was interested in politics, became an active Republican worker, and held a succession of local offices: city clerk of Auburn, 1867 - 1868, supervisor of Cayuga County, 1871 - 1872, district attorney for that county, 1873 - 1879, and member of the Auburn board of education, 1879 - 1882. In the fall of 1882 he was elected to the Forty-eighth Congress, and two years later was reelected, but after the Democrats gerrymandered the district he was defeated for the Fiftieth Congress.
Sereno Elisha Payne was chosen to a vacancy in the Fifty-first Congress caused by the death of Newton W. Nutting and thereafter served continuously until his death. He was proud of his long tenure and achieved a reputation as one of the most faithful, conscientious, and hardworking representatives in Washington. Though a plodding member, without brilliance or dash, a slow, heavy speaker, and handicapped in later years by partial deafness, he gradually advanced to the position of a leader. In the Fifty-first Congress he became a member of the ways and means committee and thereafter devoted his chief attention to the tariff. He helped draft the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and made his first important speech to the House in its behalf. Four years later he was one of the principal opponents of the Wilson Tariff.
When the Dingley Bill was written in 1897, Sereno Elisha Payne stood second in rank on the ways and means committee and had served there longer than any other Republican. He prepared whole schedules of this bill and had the distinction of closing the House debate upon it. In 1899 he served as a member of the American-British joint high commission. When Dingley died that year, he succeeded to the chairmanship of the ways and means committee, and he became one of the so-called "Big Five, " a controlling group that included Cannon, Tawney, Dalzell, and James Sherman. His two principal ambitions were to be speaker and to attach his name to some law of lasting importance. He was denied the first when in 1903 Cannon was chosen presiding officer of the House, the New York Republicans splitting their vote between James Sherman and Payne, either of whom might have succeeded had the other withdrawn. Payne was an effective lieutenant of Cannon, often taking charge of floor strategy.
His second ambition was realized, when in 1909 he gave his name to the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. His work in connection with this much-denounced measure was far more palatable to the country at large than Senator Aldrich's. He conducted long and honest hearings before the ways and means committee, with a close critical comparison of foreign and domestic costs. In introducing the bill he made a detailed explanatory speech, the fullness and conscientiousness of which were in striking contrast with the speeches of McKinley and Dingley in 1890 and 1897 and with Aldrich's speeches in the Senate. The House made no important changes in the bill, the Senate made 847, half of them of substantial importance and generally upward in trend.
Payne showed some resentment, for he had said that duties should be fixed strictly at the difference between the cost in the United States and the cost abroad, and that the best friends of protection were those who tried to keep the rates reasonably protective. He frankly asserted, for example, that the Senate had gone too far in almost doubling the House rates on shingles. In the conference hearings on the Payne-Aldrich Bill he was distinctly more moderate than Tawney and Dalzell. Yet of the bill as finally passed he was a warm defender. In spite of failing health he remained active in the House, and on the day of his death he not only occupied his usual seat but made a short speech on an appropriation bill.
Sereno Elisha Payne died on December 10, 1914, in Washington, D. C.
Sereno Elisha Payne was known for his service as a chairman of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries (Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee (Fifty-fifth through Sixty-first Congresses), and majority leader (Fifty-seventh through Sixty-first Congresses).
Sereno Elisha Payne was a member of Republican party.
On April 23, 1873, Sereno Elisha Payne married Gertrude Knapp of Auburn, who bore him one son.
