This year, Nevadans will reelect Senator Jacky Rosen or defeat her by electing her challenger. They’ll do it by casting their ballots. They’ll also complain about the money spent and raise allegations of corruption against everybody involved. Interestingly, though, for more than half of American history, we did not elect senators directly. The state legislatures did that until the seventeenth amendment to the United States Constitution took effect in 1913. But if you think the old system worked better and was less corrupt … well, let’s look at the 1899 senate election in Nevada.
William Morris Stewart was seeking a third consecutive term. He also had served for ten years before taking a hiatus. His opponent was Nevada’s lone congressman, Francis Newlands. He had just been reelected to his fourth term in the House, but he wanted to move up.
The race was bitter on a personal level. William Sharon had been a leading figure on the Comstock Lode … a bank executive and political operator. Stewart had been his attorney, but also was close to Central Pacific Railroad officials. To put it another way, my old history professor Russell Elliott titled his biography of Stewart Servant of Power, and he was. When Sharon died while living in San Francisco, Stewart suggested someone in his family move to Nevada for legal and business reasons.
The one who did was Sharon’s son-in-law, Newlands. Stewart then helped Newlands get into politics. They worked together on behalf of the movement to make silver a medium of currency. Stewart also handed off an issue he had been working on: reclamation. Newlands made it his own and later helped pass the Newlands Reclamation Act.
But in 1898, as usual, Stewart and Newlands supported various legislative candidates. The difference was that this time, they were running against each other. Newlands claimed to be backing Stewart, who thought Newlands was biding his time. He won reelection, then declared his candidacy for the Senate, adding that Stewart had worked on behalf of the other major candidate in his race. He attacked Stewart as old and corrupt. Stewart attacked Newlands as ineffectual and physically feeble. When the legislature met in 1899, they would decide between Stewart and Newlands, between the Central Pacific and old Comstock money, between Silverite and Silverite, and between whichever candidate paid them the most.
Stewart won the state senate vote. On January 23, 1899, a test vote in the assembly found it tied—15 all. The next day, at the formal vote, Assemblyman Willard Gillespie of Storey County was missing. He supposedly had been supporting Newlands. The final vote that day was 15 to 14. Stewart had won.
What had happened to the assemblyman? He claimed that he didn’t feel he owed his support to either candidate. Later, journalist and historian Sam P. Davis claimed that Gillespie had been offered a ride to the legislature and instead detoured to the home of a Stewart supporter, where he hid. For his trouble, Gillespie allegedly received $1,800. Did he? We may never know. We do know that Newlands won Nevada’s other Senate seat in 1903, and Stewart retired from office in 1905 rather than lose a reelection bid to a Newlands ally. We also know that Nevadans became leading advocates of the 17th Amendment … for good reason.