He resigned from the Ohio State Treasurer's office in disgrace after failing to report his predecessor for theft, but redeemed his reputation in war.

He was brevetted Brigadier General of the Union Army's 49th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War.

He was raised in a family that valued hard work, plain dress, temperance and sympathy for the unfortunate and opposed slavery and "social gilded livery.

[3] On his mother's side, Gibson was descended from Robert Coe who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 aboard the ship the Francis.

He had five brothers and five older sisters (Sally, Polly, Hetty, Patty, Eliza, Robert McDowell, Moses Coe, John Kendall, Benjamin, and James Allen).

[9] Gibson attended the first school organized in Seneca County, Ohio in 1826 with his brothers Robert, Benjamin and James Allen.

[10] The Lathams later donated land and asked the community to help build a one-room log schoolhouse, which became known as Craw's Hill School.

Among Gibson's early schoolmates were Anson Burlingame (diplomat), Consul Wilshire Butterfield (author and historian), O. D. Conger (U.S.

[15] In 1841 when William Harvey Gibson petitioned the law firm of Rawson & Pennington to join their firm, he was following in the steps of his older brother John Kendall Gibson who had studied law at Washington & Jefferson College and during the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1840, campaigned alongside General William Henry Harrison.

[16] Gibson was admitted to the Ohio bar and his first case was defending a client against racial slurs before Judge Reuben Wood.

[19] During the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1844, he gave stump speeches for Henry Clay due to the Whig Party's platform that opposed admitting Texas into the Union because it was a slave state.

[20] In the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1848, Gibson supported Whig candidate, "Rough and Ready" General Zachary Taylor.

However, he was concerned about the Whig Party's lack of opposition to the abolition of slavery and personally visited Henry Clay at his home in Ashland, Kentucky in 1848 to discuss this issue.

[28] Breslin had moved to Canada to avoid prosecution,[29] and Gibson returned to Tiffin and opened a law office.

Impelled by the events of the past week, and assured from Washington that a regiment will be accepted, if enrolled and tendered, I have resolved to organize THE BUCKEYE GUARDS, in northern Ohio.

Let us as patriotic citizens, of adjoining counties, form a regiment that shall be an honor to the State, the exploits of which, in defense of constitutional liberty, shall be recounted with pride by ourselves and our children.

In 1868, Gibson was nominated for Ohio's 9th congressional district, but lost to Democrat Edward F. Dickinson,[38] with his biographer alleging voting fraud.

In the 1880s, Gibson was made a preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was appointed Ohio Adjutant General by Governor Foster.

On the lecture platform, at hundreds of Grand Army camp-fires, and in the pulpit, wherever duty called him, General Gibson made fitting responses.

On May 25, 1847, Gibson was married in the Presbyterian Church to Martha Matilda Creeger of Tiffin, Ohio, who was born in Maryland.