A Democrat who was elected before the birth of the Republican Party, Jones served over ten years in the Senate, from December 7, 1848 to March 3, 1859.

[1] He was the son of John Rice Jones, who became active in efforts directed toward the introduction of slavery to the country north of the Ohio River.

[2] When George was six years old, his father moved the family to Missouri Territory, recently acquired from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

[2] In 1832, Jones fought the Sauk and Fox Indians in the Black Hawk War,[1] in which his brother-in-law Felix St. Vrain was killed.

The outpouring of anger over four Congressmen being involved in a fatal duel led to a House committee recommending censure for Jones and expulsion for Graves, but no such action was taken before the end of the session.

[8] In September 1838, Jones lost an election to James Duane Doty to serve as the Wisconsin Territory's delegate to Congress.

[6][9] At the opening of the session, Isaac Crary of Michigan moved that Doty, also in attendance, be seated, and the matter was referred to the Committee on Elections.

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.

In 1858, the Democratic Party in Iowa, like those in other northern states, was bitterly divided over the support that its own president, James Buchanan, gave for the adoption by Kansas Territory and Congress of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution.

[12] In 1859, President Buchanan appointed Jones as Minister Resident of the United States to New Granada (encompassing modern Colombia and Panama), requiring his relocation to Bogotá.

[3] On his ninetieth birthday in 1894, Governor Frank D. Jackson and the Iowa General Assembly gave Jones a public reception in recognition of his valuable services in the formative periods of the Territory and State.

[15][16] In 1912, the State Historical Society of Iowa published the biography George Wallace Jones, by John Carl Parish.