John Morgan Walden (February 11, 1831 – January 21, 1914) was an American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He also gained notability as a newspaper editor and journalist, as a State Superintendent of Education in Kansas, as an officer in the Union Army, and as an Official in his Christian denomination. Birth and family John Morgan Walden was born in Lebanon, Ohio, the son of Jesse and Matilda (née Morgan) Walden. The family moved to Hamilton County, Ohio in 1832. John was of Virginian ancestry, his great-grandfather Walden having moved from Culpeper County, Virginia to Kentucky in 1770, and his grandfather Benjamin to Ohio in 1802. After the death of his mother in 1833. John went to live with relatives near Cincinnati. John married Martha Young of Cheviot, Ohio July 3, 1859. They had five children. Education and early life Walden attended a local school in Cincinnati until 1844, when he went to work. Becoming a wandering laborer, he found employment as a carpenter. He became interested in the writings of Thomas Paine, whereby Walden became a skeptic. He read Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Goldsmith. His own early romantic stories were published under the pen name "Ned Law" in the Hamilton, Ohio Telegraph from 1849 until 1853. After attending Farmers' College in College Hill, Ohio in 1849, Walden taught school for a year in Miami County, Ohio. It was there that he was converted by a Methodist Circuit Rider. Returning to Farmers' College, Walden graduated in 1852. He then continued to teach there for two years. Journalism career and Kansas In 1854 John went to Fairfield, Illinois, where he published the Independent Press. In his editorials he opposed the liquor traffic and so-called "squatter sovereignty." Illinoisans starved him out by refusing to support his paper, and in 1855 he returned to Ohio, where he became a reporter with the Cincinnati Commercial. John became deeply interested in the Kansas troubles while reporting from the Democratic National Convention of 1856. Indeed, he went to Kansas, where he established the Quindaro Chindowan, a Free-Soil paper in the Free State port-of-entry town of Quindaro. He was a delegate to five Free-State conventions, including the Leavenworth Constitutional Convention of 1858. That same year he campaigned over half the Territory, opposing the Lecompton Constitution. John Morgan Walden served in the Kansas Territorial Legislature in 1857. He also was the State Superintendent of Education for