Thomas Ewing
	Born:  December 28, 1789 Lancaster, Fairfield Co., OH
	Died:  October 26, 1871 New York City, NY
	Buried:  Saint Mary Cemetery Lancaster Fairfield County Ohio
Thomas Ewing (1789-1871), United States Senator from Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, trusted advisor to the President Andrew Johnson, and a highly successful lawyer, was born near West Liberty, Ohio County, Virginia on December 28, 1789, the sixth child and second son of George and Rachel (Harris) Ewing. He died on October 26, 1871. His father, a school teacher who had served in the Continental Currency, had migrated to Virginia from his home in Cumberland County, New Jersey. Around 1793, the family moved to Waterford, on the Muskingum River, and, in the Spring of 1798, moved once again, this time to Ames Township, now in Athens County, Ohio. Taught to read by an older sister, young Thomas soon demonstrated a healthy appetite for reading and a remarkable memory for what he had read. Until his twentieth year he labored on his father's farm. Nights, he devoted to the past time he enjoyed most -- reading. In August 1808, anxious to secure the funds needed to further his education, he set out for the Kanawha Salt Works, near Charleston, Virginia. For the next sixty-three years there were only a few brief periods when he was not associated with salt-boiling, either as a worker or as an owner. Indeed, "Tom, Ewing, the Salt-Boiler" later became a Whig campaign cry. Returning home, he demonstrated his filial piety by using a portion of his earnings to help pay off the mortgage on his family's farm. With the remainder and subsequent earnings at the Salt Works, he financed his way through college. In May 1815, he and John Hunter became the first to receive B.A. degrees from Ohio University. He then returned home and in July went to Lancaster, Ohio, where, for the next thirteen months, he studied law under Philemon Beecher. In August of 1816, at the age of twenty-six, he was admitted to the Ohio Bar. In 1817 when "Pa" Beecher went to serve in Congress, Ewing was left in charge of the office and he soon had a large practice before the Ohio Supreme Court. From 1818 to 1829, he also served as Prosecuting Attorney for Fairfield County, in which capacity he was concerned primarily with the apprehension and prosecution of counterfeiters. On January 7, 1820, Ewing, himself of Presbyterian stock but with no real church affiliation, married Philemon Beechers' niece, Maria Wills Boyle, a devout Roman Catholic and the daughter of Hugh Boyle, clerk of the court of Common Pleas of Fairfield County. They had seven children: <'td>

Philemon Beecher Ewing	November 3, 1820	April 15, 1896
George Ewing	August 23, 1822	September 28, 1823
Ellen Boyle Ewing	October 24, 1824	November 28, 1888
Hugh Boyle Ewing	October 31, 1826	June 30, 1905
Thomas Ewing	August 7, 1829	January 21, 1896
Charles Ewing	March 6, 1835	June 20, 1883
Maria Theresa Ewing	May 2, 1837	May 11, 1910

In addition to these children of their own, the couple helped raise several others: Charles, Abigail, and Rachel Clark, the children of Ewing's sister Rachel; Lewis Wolfley, whose father was Ewing's cousin; and, the most famous of all, William Tecumseh Sherman, who subsequently married Ewing's daughter Ellen and whose father, Charles R. Sherman, a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, had died suddenly in 1829 leaving a widow and eleven children. A devoted family man, Ewing demonstrated a deep interest in both their education and their pastimes. In 1823, he served as a member of a Committee appointed to revise the General Laws of Ohio. In the same year he also became a trustee of his alma mater, Ohio University, a post he held until 1832. Caught up in the canal building mania of the 1820's, he served as one of the seven commissioners, and for a brief period as President of the Board of Directors, of the Lancaster Lateral Canal Company. The young lawyer, like so many who followed the same profession, soon developed a taste for politics. Defeated in 1823 in a bid for a seat in the Ohio Legislature, for the next few years he devoted his attention to his law practice. However, in the Summer of 1827, he served as a delegate from Ohio to the Harrisburg Convention of Friends of Farming and Manufacturing which drew up a memorial requesting Congressional action to protect domestic industry. In December of the same year, he headed Fairfield County's delegation to the State Convention of Adams' Men at Columbus and served as a member of both the Resolutions Committee and the State Central Committee. Already recognized as a leader of the Ohio Bar, in January of 1828 he was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, joining the company of such brilliant practitioners as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Robert Young Hayne. In the Fall of 1830, he decided to stand as a candidate for United States Senator from Ohio. he was elected on the sixth ballot. On March 4, 1831, Tom Ewing, who in his only other quest for political office had been defeated in a bid for a seat in the Ohio Legislature, took his seat as a member of the Whig Party in the United States Senate. He served until March 3, 1837. Among the most active of his fellow Senators were: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun. Within six weeks of entering the Senate he was elected a member of the important special committee set up to deal with the application of the Bank of the United States for a new charter. When the Ohio legislature "instructed" him to use his influence to prevent the rechartering of the Bank, he disputed their authority to so control his conduct as a Senator, insisting that Senators represented their State, the sovereign power, rather than the Legislature. As a member of the Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads which had been investigating irregularities in the Post Office Department, on June 9, 1834, he delivered to the Senate the majority report which vigorously assailed the abuses and corruption in that Department. In return, he was violently assailed by the administration press, which found a ground of attack conveniently at hand. As a member of a Committee on Revolutionary Claims, Ewing had favored the issuing of land warrants to claimants. However, before entering the Senate he had speculated in Virginia landscrip and thus stood to profit personally from his actions as a Senator. His opponents quickly took up the charge and, indeed, he was not free of such attacks until after the Civil War when he was past seventy. During the last twenty years of his life, he spent his winters in Washington, arguing his cases -- his particular forte was Real Estate Cases -- before the Supreme Court, and the rest of the year, generally, at home in Lancaster, Ohio. In 1856, he refused to support any of the candidates for the Presidency. In 1860, although he preferred John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, he nevertheless supported Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig and political friend, because he felt that in Ohio only Lincoln could defeat Stephen A. Douglas whom he regarded as too reckless. He also felt that the Republican Party, in espousing the Tariff and other old Whig principles, had veered to a more conservative course than it had adopted originally. He did, however, take exception to the anti-slavery tendencies of the Republicans and in his Chillicothe, Ohio speech of September 29, 1860, he urged the party to drop its anti-slavery character. As the Civil War loomed ever nearer on the horizon, Ewing hoped to make moderation and compromise prevail and thus to preserve the Union. In particular, he favored the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Coast. To this end, he participated as a delegate from Ohio in the Peace Conference called by Virginia. The Conference met in Washington on February 4, 1861, and continued for twenty-three days with Ewing playing a conspicuous role. However, neither he nor the others who favored a policy of moderation were able to overcome the determined opposition of the Republican delegates. Once the war began he rendered loyal support to Lincoln's administration. Three of his four sons served as officers in the Union Army, and his son in law and former ward, William Tecumseh Sherman, was second only to Grant in the final stages of the struggle. Trusted by Lincoln for his advice on matters of public policy as well as upon points of law, it was he who urged upon the President the release of the captured Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell. Indeed, his influence with Lincoln was so great that on many occasions, often to the despair of Cabinet members, he was able to secure from the President pardons or other favors for friends and for clients. He died revered by his family and respected by his colleagues. Nine years of his adult life had been spent in public service. The remainder he had devoted to the practice of law. A self-made man, he had risen to great heights both in the service of his country and in the practice of his chosen profession. The decisions of the Supreme Court were greatly enriched by his arguments. Although his early education had been largely informal, he was noted not only for his knowledge of the law but also for the wide range of his genius which embraced the classics, history, poetry, the arts, architecture, and science -- all of which were arranged and classified in his mind with great order and exactness. Indeed, Daniel Webster once said of him that he was the best informed man he had ever met and that he had never conversed with him for five minutes without being wiser for having done so. The esteem in which he was held at the time of his death was amply attested to by the numerous letters and messages of condolence received by his family, as well as by the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States, in an unusual tribute, devoted several pages of their reports (12 Wallace, vii-ix) to an account of his life. My Source: Notre Dame Archives Find A Grave Biography US Senator, Presidential Cabinet Secretary. Born in West Liberty, Virginia, in April 1798, his family moved to Athens County, Ohio. To have money for college, he went to work in the Kanawha salt works. After much hard work he became an operator and the substantial owner of salt works in the Chauncey, Ohio, area. The salt works proved to be profitable and he was able to pay off his father's farm debt and enroll himself into Ohio University in 1809. After leaving for a time and returning to the salt works to make more tuition money, he became Ohio University's first graduate in 1815. It was the first B.A. degree ever granted by any college or university in the Northwest Territory. In July of that year he went to Lancaster, Ohio, where he studied law under Philemon Beecher for a year. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in August of 1816. The following year, when Beecher left to serve in Congress, Thomas Ewing was left in charge of the office and he soon had a large practice before the Ohio Supreme Court. From 1818 to 1829, he also served as Prosecuting Attorney for Fairfield County. He then married Beecher's niece, who bore the couple seven children, among them were three sons who would later reach the rank of General in the Union Army. He and his wife also helped raise several other children, including the three children of his sister, the son of his cousin, and most notably William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman's father, Charles R. Sherman, was a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court who had died suddenly in 1829, leaving a widow and eleven children. Sherman later would become Ewing's son-in-law. Ewing was defeated in 1823 in a bid for a seat in the Ohio Legislature, however in January of 1828 he was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court. In 1830 he was elected a U.S. Senator from Ohio as a Whig, serving until 1837. His intellectual speeches on the Senate floor earned him the title "Logician of the West". Daniel Webster was quoted as saying of Ewing that he was the best informed man he had ever met, and that he had never conversed with him for five minutes without being wiser for having done so. He became one of the leaders of the opposition to President Andrew Jackson's popular administration, leading to Ewing's defeat for re-election. After his failed bid for re-election he returned to his law practice. The Calhoun wing of the party was ready in 1837 to consider him a potential candidate for the Vice Presidency in 1840, however his defeat in 1838 in a bid for a vacated Senate seat ruined his chances for such a place on the ticket. In 1841, he was chosen by President William Henry Harrison, who was an old friend, to be Secretary of the Treasury. The next year, he and many other cabinet members submitted their resignations believing that new president John Tyler had betrayed the Whig Party. He became the first Secretary of the Interior under President Zachary Taylor, in which he was responsible for Indian affairs, patents, pensions, and public land. As Secretary of the Interior Ewing was criticized and blamed for creating department's the culture of corruption by wholesale replacement of officials with political patronage, for which newspapers called him "Butcher Ewing". He held the job, in which he is regarded to have been quite unaffective, until his resignation in August of 1850. President Taylor had died the month before and Ewing felt that he couldn't serve under the new president Millard Fillmore. During his lifetime he was an advisor to four presidents. He knew Abraham Lincoln well, and while serving as Secretary of the Interior had offered him the office of Commissioner of the General Land Office, which Lincoln found necessary to decline. After the assassination of Lincoln he continued as an advisor to President Andrew Johnson. In 1868 Johnson's internal struggle with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton came to a head. Johnson protested a new law, which stated the president could not dismiss anyone who had been appointed or approved to an office by Congress, by firing Stanton. he was nominated to be the new Secretary of War. The Radical Republican controlled Senate, furious at Stanton's firing, refused to confirm the nomination on the grounds that no vacancy existed. The House impeached President Johnson over this affair. Ewing spent the rest of his life practicing law, arguing his cases before the United States Supreme Court. In the fall of 1869, while addressing the Supreme Court, he was stricken and collapsed on the court floor. He remained in ill health for two years, dying at his home in Lancaster, Ohio. Following his death, both the Ohio and the United States Supreme Courts held and published memorial proceedings for him, unprecedented honors for any person not a member of the judicial bodies. Ewing Hall, erected on the campus of Ohio University, was named in his honor and the Alumni Gateway, erected in 1915, was constructed in memory of the centennial of his graduation from that institution. My Source:  Biography by Ugaalltheway