Jordan, Johnson H.

Born: 1817-12-29 Ohio

Died: 1891-03-06 Hancock County, Ohio

Flourished: 1858 to 1861 Cincinnati, Ohio

Johnson H. Jordan, physician and editor, lived in Illinois as a boy. He graduated from the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati in 1848, and was appointed head of that city’s cholera hospital the following year during an outbreak of the disease. In 1850 Jordan was named professor of the principles and practices of surgery at the American Reform Medical Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, and in 1851 he served for a year as the institution’s dean and as editor of the periodical, Medical Era. During the mid-1850s Jordan lived in New Orleans for about two years, and by 1858 he was again in Cincinnati. Politically, Jordan was a Free Soil sympathizer who initially supported Martin Van Buren in the election of 1848, but ultimately urged Van Buren Whigs to join him in voting for Zachary Taylor in order to secure a victory. He was later a Republican, and in 1860 he campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and was an editor of the pro-Lincoln Cincinnati newspaper, the Rail Splitter. Around 1863 Jordan relocated to Indianapolis, where he edited the Republican Indianapolis Daily Gazette until he sold the newspaper in 1866. He married Mary Briggs in 1860. Jordan died in Findlay, Ohio.

Johnson H. Jordan to Abraham Lincoln; Alexander Wilder, History of Medicine (Augusta, ME: Maine Farmer, 1904), 601-2; Ohio State Journal (Columbus), 2 November 1848, 2:1; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 3, Dayton, Montgomery County, OH, 188; The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 19 July 1850, 3:1; 10 February 1856, 2:5; New Orleans Daily Delta (LA), 1 April 1855, 5:1; Johnson H. Jordan to Abraham Lincoln; Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993, 21 April 1860, Hancock County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2016); U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 5, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, OH, 73; The Rail Splitter (Cincinnati, OH), 22 August 1860, 2:1; Cincinnati Daily Commercial (OH), 3 September 1860, 3:4; 4 October 1860, 2:7; 19 October 1860, 2:6; 25 October 1860, 2:6; Chicago Daily Tribune (IL), 26 September 1862, 4:3; H. H. Dodd & Co.’s Indianapolis City Directory and Business Mirror for 1863 (Indianapolis, IN: H. H. Dodd, [1863]), 42; New-York Daily Tribune (NY), 1 January 1866, 6:5; Indianapolis Daily Journal (IN), 3 May 1866, 4:2; 31 May 1866, 4:2; Findlay Weekly Jeffersonian (OH), 12 March 1891, 5:4; Gravestone, Maple Grove Cemetery, Findlay, OH.