Scope and Content Note
The Thomas Ewing Family Papers span the years 1757-1941, with the bulk of the material dating from 1815 to 1896. The collection contains original and transcribed correspondence, letterbooks, telegrams, autographs, diaries, journals, legal files, military records, drafts and printed copies of speeches, lectures, articles, essays, books, poems, and reports, as well as notes, scrapbooks, biographical material, college lecture notes, commonplace books, financial records, genealogies, photographs, printed matter, and maps. The papers are arranged in thirteen series: General Correspondence; Special Correspondence; Transcribed Correspondence; Letterbooks; Diaries, Journals, and Related Material; Legal File; Military Records; Speech, Article, and Book File; Subject File; Scrapbooks; Miscellany; Addition; and Oversize.
Included in the collection are papers of several generations of the Ewing family, including Thomas Ewing (1789-1871), senator from Ohio and cabinet member under William H. Harrison, John Tyler, and Zachary Taylor; Thomas Ewing (1829-1896), Union general during the Civil War and congressman from Ohio; Ellen Ewing Sherman and her husband, William T. Sherman, Civil War general; and Thomas Ewing (1862-1942), lawyer, writer, and United States commissioner of patents.
The collection documents various aspects of American political, economic, and social life, including westward expansion and frontier life, the disposal of public lands and land speculation, the practice of law in Ohio, local Ohio and national Whig politics, anti-Jacksonianism and the Bank of the United States, the organization of the Department of the Interior, the California gold rush, the rise of the Republican Party and sectionalism, Kansas statehood, the Peace Convention of 1861, the Civil War in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the currency question and Greenback movement, the Ohio centennial, and the development and administration of patent law from 1913 to 1917.
Prominent correspondents include Philemon Beecher, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), James Gillespie Blaine, Orville Hickman Browning, Henry Clay, Thomas Corwin, John J. Crittenden, Charles B. Goddard, Horace Greeley, William Henry Harrison, Britton Armstrong Hill, Hocking H. Hunter, Reverdy Johnson, Abbott Lawrence, Abraham Lincoln, John McLean (1785-1861), Richard Olney, Thomas Collier Platt, S. C. Pomeroy, William S. Rosecrans, William Henry Seward, John Sherman, William T. Sherman, Henry Stanbery, Noah Haynes Swayne, Allen Granbery Thurman, John Tyler, Samuel Finley Vinton, and Daniel Webster. A card file summarizing the contents of correspondence is available in the Manuscript Division reading room.