George W. Jones - U.S. Senate

U.S. Senate

Jones represented Iowa in the United States Senate from December 7, 1848 to March 4, 1859. For its first two years, the Iowa General Assembly failed to choose Iowa's first U.S. Senators, due to a three-way split that prevented any candidate from earning the required number of 30 legislators' votes. However, after the 1848 elections gave the Democratic Party a greater share of Iowa legislators, Jones became a candidate for one of the two seats, and after four ballots won the Democratic caucuses' nomination for one of the two seats. He won the election and then, by drawing lots, received the seat with the longer term (to expire in four years). He won re-election (to a full six-year term) in 1852, after winning renomination by the Democratic Party by a single vote.

Jones was Chairman of the Committee on Engrossed Bills, the Committee on Pensions, and the Committee on Enrolled Bills. He served two terms before failing to be renominated. Jones had become increasingly unpopular in Iowa, even among those in his own party, because he often voted with southern Senators on slavery-related issues. As a senator, Jones was described by his biographer as a "Democrat in politics and a southerner by instinct." He claimed to oppose slavery (despite his own slaveholding past) but insisted that Congress had no right to forbid it or criticize it where states chose to allow it. Thus, he supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That stance, while unremarkable at the time, ultimately rendered him incapable of re-election in a state whose antislavery, anticompromise faction became dominant midway in Jones' second term, as the new Republican Party. After his term ended, no Iowa Democrat would win election to the U.S. Senate until the 1920s. His ten years in the Senate were not matched by any Iowa Democrat until 1950, after Guy M. Gillette was elected a third time.