He had already chosen the profession of the law, as the work of his life, and immediately entered the Cincinnati Law School, from which he was graduated in 1855. The next year he married Ellen E. Cox, a daughter of Rev. Wm. Cox, a Presbyterian minister of Piqua, Ohio, celebrated for his eloquence and zeal, and in the fall of ’56 removed to Leavenworth, Kansas, which he had chosen as the opening point of his professional career. His partners in the first firm whose sign-board bore his name, were two gentlemen afterwards to win great distinction in a war then farther off in the minds of men than in the dread certainties of fact—General Dan McCook, who afterwards fell at Kenesaw, and William T. Sherman, whose recent death the world is yet lamenting. The name of the firm was Sherman, Ewing & McCook. The success of Mr. Ewing was brilliant from the start. He had not only the magnetic presence by which friends are made, but the “natural genius for law” that made him a safe counsellor, a brilliant pleader, and a wary contestant in the varied fields of litigation. He was soon one of the recognized leaders of the bar of Kansas, and it was inevitable that he should soon be called to a commanding place in the field of politics as well. It was a time and place where no man could be silent, and when the most sluggish was compelled to become partisan. The young advocate from Ohio left no one in doubt as to which side he took in the struggle to make Kansas a free State. He bore an active and conspicuous part in the struggle on the side of freedom, and was one of the Republican leaders of the West. He represented Kansas in the Peace Conference, which assembled in Washington on the call of Virginia in 1860, and at the early age of twenty-nine was elected the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of his State—a position he ably held for two years, until the great rebellion swept him from the bench into the ranks of the Union army. Some more detailed mention of General Ewing’s part in that great historic struggle to make Kansas a free State is needed, to fully explain the public service he rendered in those days of danger. In the fall of 1857, the Pro-Slavery constitutional convention of Kansas, formed the Lecompton constitution, of which only the slavery cause was submitted to popular vote. The question thus left to the people was whether they would accept a fundamental law with slavery, or without. Thus the voter was compelled to favor the Lecompton constitution if he voted at all—a constitution hateful to the Free State majority, as it had been framed by a fraudulently chosen convention, composed largely of residents of Missouri. It was also provided in this document, that if the majority voted for it and rejected slavery, then the slaves already held in Kansas, should remain such for life.