Jesse Durbin Ward was an Ohio lawyer, politician, newspaper publisher, and American Civil War officer.
Early life and career
Ward was born in Augusta, Kentucky. His mother, Rebecca Patterson, named him in honor of the Rev. John Price Durbin, a noted Methodist preacher, who was a school mate of hers. Around 1823, the family moved to Fayette County, Indiana, in the southeastern part of that state. Josiah Morrow, the historian of Warren County, wrote of Ward: He attended for two years Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, one county east of Fayette and across the state line, then taught school in Warren County and settled there. He studied law under Judge George J. Smith and Thomas Corwin, a Lebanon attorney who later was Governor of Ohio. After he was admitted to practice, he was Corwin's law partner. In 1845, Ward, a Whig, was elected Warren County's seventh Prosecuting Attorney, an office once held by Governor Corwin. He served from 1846 to 1850. From 1853 to 1854, he represented Warren County in the Fiftieth General Assembly, the first held under the new state constitution adopted in 1851. He served only one two-year term in the legislature. During that time, he sponsored legislation for the state to abandon the unprofitable Warren County Canal that connected Lebanon to the Miami and Erie Canal at Middletown. Upon his retirement from the legislature, he opened a law office in Cincinnati, Ohio, but continued to live at Lebanon. Ward switched to the Democratic Party about this time and was its nominee for Congress in 1856 and Attorney General in 1858. In 1860, he supported Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas for President.
When President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers to fight in the Civil War, Ward was the first in his congressional district to enlist. He entered the army as a private, declining a commission. He rose to be a major in the 17th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and saw action at Mill Springs, Corinth, Stone River, Hoover's Gap, and Chickamauga. At Chickamauga, his left arm was wounded and permanently crippled. Ward was appointed colonel of the 17th Ohio Volunteer Infantry on March 1, 1864. He resigned his commission on November 8, 1864. On January 13, 1866 President Andrew Johnson nominated Ward for appointment to the grade of brevetbrigadier general, to rank from October 18, 1865, for his "gallant and meritorious conduct at the battle of Chickamauga," and the United States Senate confirmed the appointment on March 12, 1866.
