During the American Civil War, he joined the Confederate States of AmericaArmy, despite living in a state that had remained within the Union. He rose to the rank of lieutenant. Ogden was a first lieutenant of Company D, Sixteenth Regiment, Missouri Infantry, and afterward on the staff of Brigadier General Lewis, Second Brigade, Parsons' division, Missouri Infantry. He was captured and held for one year as a prisoner of war. On June 8, 1865, he was paroled at Shreveport in Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana. There he remained and became a wealthy planter in adjacent Bossier Parish.
In 1879, Ogden was a member of the Louisiana constitutional convention and was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives from Bossier Parish. He was the Speaker from 1884 to 1888. In 1894, he won a special election as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives. The vacancy was created by the resignation of Newton C. Blanchard. Ogden was reelected to the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses, having served from May 12, 1894, to March 3, 1899. He left Congress in 1899 to return to his farm and died six years later in Benton, the Bossier Parish seat of government.