James Wood King (August 13, 1842 – October 9, 1903) was a soldier, government clerk, and newspaper editor from the state of Michigan who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

There, King twice charged ahead of his unit against fortified Confederate positions, entering hand-to-hand combat on the first occasion, and penetrating a gap in Alexander P. Stewart's division on the ridge summit in the second case.

King later returned to the fighting near Atlanta and was wounded again on July 30, 1864, when a chance shot from a distant Confederate cannon exploded over his head and severely injured his left shoulder.

[4] Physically unable to resume farming, King departed for Tennessee to work as a clerk in the Chattanooga quartermaster office of Ezra Benham Kirk in 1865, travelling back to Michigan briefly in October to marry Sarah Jane Babcock.

In the following year, King partnered with the 11th Michigan’s former adjutant, Linus Truman Squire, to lease and run the cotton plantation of Jacob Critz Jr. in Thompson's Station, Tennessee.

[5] After returning north, King worked as a clerk in the office of Michigan’s auditor general, William Humphrey, before leveraging his growing talent in phonography (a form of shorthand), to land a position as city editor of the Lansing Republican newspaper in 1871.

After significant delays in processing, this nomination was retroactively invalidated by a War Department circular of April 1903 that required nominees to be in current, active military service.