20 year old Black youths and 25 and 17 year old Black women. A decade later he owned 15 enslaved people. His elder brother, Edward Lucas, who had also studied to become a lawyer but never actually practiced law, instead became a politician, and in 1837 superintendent then paymaster at the U.S. military arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Voters had elected Edward to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat in 1832 and re-elected him in 1834, when he narrowly defeated John R. Cooke of the newly organized Whig Party. Fellow Democrat James Murray Mason served a single term between the Lucas brothers. Although Whig candidates swept the county in 1836, Jefferson County voters elected William Lucas as one of their representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates (a part-time position) in 1837. He served a single term before winning election as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives in 1838, the seat his brother had previously held. However, he lost his bid for re-election in 1840 to Whig Richard W. Barton, a prominent lawyer in Winchester. Undeterred, Lucas again ran for Congress, despite the district's boundaries being changed after the census (and Virginia losing population). Voters from what had become Virginia's 10th Congressional district sent him back to the House in 1842. However, Lucas again failed to win re-election, but was succeeded by his former law student and brother-in-law, Henry Bedinger (who would serve two terms). Lucas also narrowly escaped death on February 28, 1844, when he was among the prominent politicians on the 'Princeton' when a gun exploded, killing two members of President Tyler's cabinet, among many other casualties. Lucas resumed his lucrative legal practice as well as farmed. Voters elected him as a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1850 and 1851, as one of four delegates elected from the northern Shenandoah Valley delegate district consisting of Jefferson and nearby Berkeley and Clarke Counties. A decade later Lucas ran for the last time, this time on a States' Rights platform to become one of Jefferson County's delegates to the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. He and Andrew Hunter lost overwhelmingly to Union Conservative Candidates Alfred M. Barbour of Monongalia County and Logan Osburn (who received 1433 and 1350 votes compared to 467 for Hunter and only 430 for Lucas). During the war, six Lucas family members enlisted as privates in the 1st Virginia Cavalry Regiment and William