Thomas Ewing Jr. (7 August 1829 – 21 January 1896) was a Union Army Major-General during the American Civil War and a member of the US House of Representatives (D-OH 12) from 4 March 1877 to 3 March 1879 (succeeding Ansel T. Walling and preceding Henry S. Neal) and from OH-10 from 4 March 1879 to 3 March 1881 (succeeding Charles Foster and preceding John B. Rice)
Biography[]
Thomas Ewing Jr. was born in Lancaster, Ohio in 1829, the son of US Senator Thomas Ewing, the brother of Charles Ewing and Hugh Boyle Ewing, and the foster brother of William T. Sherman. He served as private secretary to President Zachary Taylor from 1849 to 1850 and became a lawyer in Cincinnati in 1852. Ewing moved to Leavenworth, Kansas in 1856 and became a member of the Leavenworth Constitutional Convention in 1858, advocating the construction of a transcontinental railroad, while holding moderate views on slavery. From 1861 to 1862, he served as Chief Justice of Kansas, but he resigned his judgeship and recruited the 11th Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment for the Union during the American Civil War. On 13 March 1863, he was promoted to Brigadier-General, and he was given command of the Union armies in Kansas and western Missouri. Ewing was responsible for General Order No. 11, which evicted all Confederate sympathizers from four Missouri counties in an effort to combat bushwhackers; the Union forces shot several people on sight, left tens of thousands of people homeless, and reduced large sections of Missouri to rubble. In 1864, Ewing defeated Sterling Price's Confederate invasion at Fort Davidson. After the war, he represented three defendants in the trial of Abraham Lincoln's assassination conspirators, saving them from the gallows. From 1865 to 1870, he practiced law in Washington DC, and he defended Andrew Johnson against impeachment efforts. Ewing went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1877 to 1881, but he failed in his 1880 Ohio gubernatorial bid. He later moved to New York City to continue practicing law, and he was struck and killed by an omnibus in 1896.