EWING, THOMAS

born Dec. 28, 1789, near West Liberty, Va., U.S. died Oct. 26, 1871, Lancaster, Ohio first U.S. secretary of the interior (184950), who was also a senator from Ohio (183137; 185051) and secretary of the treasury (1841). He was both the adoptive father (never formally) and the father-in-law of William Tecumseh Sherman, Union Army general in the U.S. Civil War. After graduation from Ohio University, Athens (1815), Ewing practiced law at Lancaster, Ohio, and entered politics as a Whig. He lost both of his briefly held Cabinet posts upon the deaths of the presidents who had appointed him: William Henry Harrison (d. 1841) and Zachary Taylor (d. 1850). He closed his political career by completing Thomas Corwin's unexpired term in the Senate. Ewing, a friend of Sherman's deceased father, took the nine-year-old Sherman into his home in 1829. Sherman and Ewing's daughter Ellen were married in 1850.