William Dennison was born in the city of Cincinnati, on the 9th day of November, 1815. His father was well known through more than half a century as a popular and prosperous innkeeper in the young and rapidly growing city, no citizen in the whole community being more respected for probity and general worth among the pioneer settlers of Ohio and their descendants. He took great pride in his promising son, young William, and largely devoted his pecuniary means to secure the boy a thorough and solid classical education. In preparation for his college course he had the benefit of the best schools and teachers in his native city, and in the year 1831 he entered freshman in the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, then and now a flourishing and highly-respected institution, which has educated many of the most prominent and powerful minds of the great and populous region north of the Ohio River, among whom are Caleb B. Smith, late Secretary of the Interior and formerly United States judge in Indiana, now deceased, Major-General Robert C. Schenck, Samuel Galloway, William S. Groesbeck, George E. Pugh, and others of equal note. In September, 1835, near the close of his twentieth year, he graduated with high honor to himself and the university, then under the long successful presidency of the Rev. R. H. Bishop, D.D., a learned and venerated Presbyterian clergyman, who had early been induced to migrate from Scotland to the Northern United States by the solicitation and in the company of a renowned divine, John Mason, of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York, who at that time brought over a very useful and famous little clerical colony to this country. Young Dennison then immediately returned to Cincinnati, and there commenced the study of law in the office of Hon. Nathaniel G. Pendleton (father of the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency) and Stephen Fales, one of the most eminent lawyers of the West, in his youth a classmate of Daniel Webster at Dartmouth College and always his intimate personal friend. Completing his legal studies and admitted to the bar, he began the practice of his profession in his native city. Soon afterwards he married the beautiful and highly-educated daughter of William Neil, of Columbus (the State capital), a famous and extensive mail-contractor throughout the Northwest, whose name was very familiar to travellers and newspaper-readers twenty or thirty years ago, in the days of stage-coaches, when railroad enterprise was in its infancy at the West.