(Aug. 29, 1819-June 21, 1891). Joseph Ewing McDonald was born in Butler County, Ohio, to John McDonald, a farmer of Scotch ancestry and Eleanor Piatt McDonald. McDonald’s father died during his infancy. Several years later, McDonald’s mother married John Kerr, a widower with seven children, and the family moved to Montgomery County, Indiana, in 1826. When McDonald was 12 years old, he started an almost six-year apprenticeship with a saddler in Lafayette, Indiana.
McDonald attended Wabash College from 1837 to 1840. He relied on the skills he learned as a saddler to support himself during college. He also worked with the engineer corps of the State of Indiana in its effort to survey the Wabash and Erie Canal in the spring of 1839. In early 1840, McDonald entered Indiana Asbury University (now DePauw University), where he stayed for six months. He finished the year in Crawfordville, where he taught school for one term.
In the spring of 1841, McDonald became a clerk in a store his brother owned in Williamsport, Indiana, before returning to Lafayette in 1842 to study law with Zebulon Beard. After passing the bar in 1843, he began his legal practice. He served as prosecuting attorney in Lafayette from 1843 to 1847 and married Nancy Ruth Buell in 1844. In 1848, McDonald and his wife moved to Crawfordsville, where he practiced law until 1859.
In 1848, McDonald was elected to the 31st Congress and served in the House of Representatives from 1849 to 1851. He was elected Indiana’s attorney general in 1856 and reelected in 1858.
McDonald moved to Indianapolis in 1859. Here he established a legal partnership with . He launched an unsuccessful run as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of Indiana against the Republican incumbent in 1864. He was chairman of the Democratic State Convention of 1868 and of the State Central Committee during the campaigns of 1868 and 1874.
Still practicing law, McDonald’s son Ezekiel M. McDonald joined his practice from 1868 until the younger McDonald’s death in 1873, at which point McDonald’s youngest son Frank B. McDonald joined the partnership. On January 1, 1871, John M. Butler joined the partnership, changing the name of the firm to McDonald, Butler & McDonald.
With the death of McDonald’s wife on September 7, 1872, he married Araminta W. Vance on September 15, 1874. She died less than five months later, on February 2, 1875. McDonald married Josephine F. Barnard in January 1881.
McDonald was elected to the United States Senate during the 46th Congressional Session from 1875 to 1881, where he served on several committees. He served as chairman of the Committee of Public Lands. In 1876, he was part of a senate committee that visited New Orleans to investigate vote-counting fraud in the Louisiana election. He also sat on the Teller-Wallace Committee to investigate campaign funding fraud in the elections in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in 1880.
After retirement from the Senate, McDonald opened a law office in Washington D.C., and divided his time between the nation’s capital and Indianapolis. He litigated many important cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, notably those that grew out of telephone patents and those connected to a lawsuit brought by the Mormon church against the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 that upheld the constitutionality of the illegality of the denomination’s practice of plural marriage.
McDonald sought the party’s nomination for U.S. president at the 1884 Democratic National Convention in Chicago but lost to Grover Cleveland, who won the presidency in the general election.
McDonald suffered from a stomach ailment in the last year of his life. He died at his home at 564 N. Meridian Street. Dr. Haines of and Rev. Joseph A. Milburn administered the sacrament at McDonald’s bedside. He was interred at .
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