1

William McKinley, Ohioan

It is generally believed by strangers that the most interesting and significant part of Ohio’s history lies in the part the state has played in national politics—as a “barometer” state and as the home of political leaders. Ohio has produced many men of political importance, and has sent seven native sons to the presidency—Grant, Garfield, Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding. However, Ohio’s industrial life overshadows its politics.… Ohio’s major importance—and major interest—lies in a large and varied industrialism.

The Ohio Guide (WPA)

 

William McKinley was born in Ohio in 1843, mostly educated there, fought the Civil War in a Buckeye regiment, represented an Ohio district in Congress, and sat in the governor’s chair in Columbus. He loved the state. His God, loved even more, was the benign God of an Ohio Methodist Sunday School. His career is only understandable as the career of a proud and well-connected middle-class Ohioan. Factory whistles were his Mozart wind concertos, tariff schedules his Plato’s Republic, and Civil War recollections his Herodotus.

Nineteenth-century Ohio, however, was not just a place but a phenomenon. No retrospective on America’s twenty-fifth president can begin without a comprehension of the state’s spectacular emergence as a center of U.S. political and economic gravity during the fifty-eight years between McKinley’s birth and death. Like Virginia earlier, Ohio became a “Mother of Presidents.” It was also the first crucible of the Old Northwest. In the year McKinley was born, four other future GOP presidents called Ohio home—Ulysses Grant, just out of West Point, Rutherford Hayes, a year past his Kenyon College graduation, the twelve-year-old James Garfield, working to support his widowed mother, and Benjamin Harrison, a schoolboy in North Bend.

None, obviously, had any youthful inkling of the Ohio regime to come, of how from 1868 to 1900, no Republican would be elected president who was not born in the Buckeye State. Those of other origins tried in vain: New Yorkers, Hoosiers, state of Maine men, anyone. Even the three leading Northern generals in the Civil War were Ohio-born: Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. Ohio itself was the sole Northern state central enough to be a bridge from the war’s eastern theater of operations in next-door Virginia to its western theater spanning the Ohio-Mississippi river system. The late nineteenth century was Ohio’s great period, the Buckeye hour in history.

This unique molding and mentoring helped to sculpt McKinley’s political rise and influence. The state’s economic vigor and innovation, besides underpinning its national importance, also gave McKinley his principal career theme: first, the blessings of a protective tariff system, and then the reforms it would need to meet the twentieth century. Lacking the patina that other Ohio GOP presidents got at Williams College (Garfield), Yale (Taft), or Harvard Law School (Hayes), little about McKinley did not reflect his middle-class, midcountry origins.

DRUMS TO DYNAMOS ALONG THE OHIO

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ohio was the doorstep of the New West, the open, rich land closest to Virginia and the original Northern states. Steamboats were common on the Ohio River by the 1820s. By 1830 and 1840, the center of national population was speeding westward across Virginia. In 1850 it hovered near Parkersburg, West Virginia, on the south bank of the Ohio River. Then, like Eliza, the fugitive slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it leaped across the river, coming to rest in 1860 about fifteen miles from Chillicothe.

Ohio had gone from territory to state in 1803, just as Thomas Jefferson was arranging the Louisiana Purchase. The early settlers, disproportionately from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, concentrated near the river that had taken most of them west. Cincinnati, its “Queen City,” became the state’s major urban and commercial center, although its streets were often clogged by noisy, dirty hogs on their way to the slaughterhouses.

Then in the 1830s, courtesy of New York’s Erie Canal, a new population movement began to fill up the northern and central parts of the state with Yankees, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and German, British, and Irish immigrants. At midcentury, Cincinnati still had a huge edge over Yankee Cleveland on Lake Erie—a population of some 115,000 versus just 17,000. But growth in northern Ohio was accelerating like one of the new Philadelphia-built locomotives on the Mad River and Lake Erie Railway.

Ohio was a new type of state, a composition board of converging migrations from all three major U.S. eighteenth-century coastal regions—New England, the Middle Atlantic (mostly Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers), and the South (principally Virginians, Carolinians, and migrants from Tennessee and Kentucky). Ohio’s northeast, the former Western Reserve of Connecticut, had welcomed a small first wave of Yankee settlers in the 1780s and 1790s at the same time as larger numbers of Appalachian Scots-Irish crossed the Pennsylvania and Virginia borders.

As settlement swelled, Ohio’s population jumped from 230,000 in 1810—Shawnee and Wyandot war parties still prowled the state’s northwest—to some 900,000 in 1830. A further flood more than doubled the population to nearly 2 million in 1850. Ohio became to the canal, steamboat, and Conestoga wagon era what California would be to the automobile and airplane in the decades after World War II: not just a beacon but a national symbol of westward migration.

“The immigration to the North Central section,” concluded historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “had a special significance. In the Atlantic states, from the colonial days, the rule of the older stock was well-established, and institutions, manners and customs—the cultural life of the sections—had been largely fixed by tradition. But in the New West, society was plastic and democratic. All elements were suddenly coming in, together, to form the section. It would be a mistake to think that social classes and distinctions were obliterated, but in general, no such stratification existed as was to be found, especially, in New England.”1

Buckeye agriculture complemented Jacksonian democracy, being small-holder based and a far cry from plantations of the Cotton South or the quasi-feudal land holdings of New York’s Hudson Valley. Farmers were lured by the fifty to sixty bushels an acre corn yields of the fertile Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami valleys, two or three times what they could grow on hillside or tidewater plots back east. By the 1840s, two extensive state-built waterways connected Ohio farmlands to Lake Erie and the Erie Canal, opening up the Eastern U.S. and European corn and wheat markets. Higher crop prices followed.

Additional help came from the reaper and other new farm machinery. In 1840, Ohio was the leading wheat-producing state ranked by yield. This slipped to second in 1850 and fourth in 1860 as the grain belt moved west.2 In corn, however, Ohio had been fourth in 1840, but rose to first place in 1850. Corn was marketed largely on the hoof—cattle and hogs fed on it, then were slaughtered, packed, and sent east or abroad.

Not surprisingly, Ohio led the nation in livestock in 1850. Meatpacking Cincinnati had already won the nickname “Porkopolis,” and Ohio’s sheep-raising eastern counties likewise made it the number one wool-raising state. A century later, one would err taking Ohio as the heart of the Farm Belt, but not in the years of McKinley’s boyhood.

Biblical land of Goshen as the state might seem, abundant crops did not always lead to prosperity. That had been proved in the late 1830s and 1840s when banks failed and low meat and grain prices barely exceeded production costs. Prosperity returned in the 1850s, but by the late sixties and early seventies, Washington’s acquiescence in a post–Civil War contraction of the currency was provoking crop and livestock districts alike.

As president, McKinley would fondly reminisce about how, as a barefoot nine-year-old, he took his family’s cows to and from pasture. Yet from the start, his part of Ohio was also industrial. At the time of McKinley’s birth, the Niles Tribune-Chronicle later recalled, the town had included “3 churches, 3 stores, 1 blast furnace, rolling mill, nail factory forge and about 300 inhabitants.”3 Even in 1820, only Pennsylvania and New York surpassed Ohio in the value of manufactured goods, and this kind of interspersed small-scale industry characterized the Ohio countryside until the Civil War.

McKinley’s grandfather James, and his father, William, were iron makers by trade. In the early nineteenth century, they came to Ohio from Pennsylvania, where Scots-Irish iron masters, aroused by prohibitions in the British Iron Act of 1750 against colonials making pig iron into ironware and machinery, had been a mainstay of the American Revolution. In 1804, Daniel Heaton built Ohio’s first smelting furnace on Yellow Creek, near the present site of Youngstown. This was the forerunner of the Mahoning Valley steel industry, at its twentieth-century peak second only to that of nearby Pittsburgh.

Iron quickly became Ohio’s leading manufacturing industry, with the 1850 census ranking state pig-iron output second only to Pennsylvania’s. Coal and iron production both concentrated in the eastern counties where the McKinleys always had a small furnace or two.

Turnpikes, canals, and railroads crisscrossed the area where McKinley grew up. By the 1850s, the railroad concentrations of northeastern Ohio rivaled those centered on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.4 At the Civil War’s outbreak, Ohio led the nation in railroad mileage, and when Buckeye soldiers got leave, all they had to do was reach the Baltimore & Ohio line in the east or the Louisville & Cincinnati in the west. Home would be only hours away.

Like Ohio’s centrality in late-nineteenth-century politics, its significance to U.S. manufacturing is hard to exaggerate. Between young Will McKinley’s birth and his election to the presidency in 1896, the state’s industrial innovation was the stuff of record books—literally.

Cleveland had John D. Rockefeller at work in the Ohio oilfields and refinery district, as well as Charles Brush, whose invention of the arc light illuminated America’s cities. Young Thomas A. Edison spent some of his boyhood puttering in the town of Milan. Charles Martin Hall, based in Oberlin, in 1886 discovered the electrolytic process for making aluminum. Toledo to the northwest claimed Edward Libbey and Michael Owens, whose inventions and local company, Libby-Owens-Ford, revolutionized the glass and bottle business.

Dayton boasted the Wright brothers, who tinkered with the forerunners of flying machines in their local bicycle shop, as well as the Patterson brothers who started National Cash Register in 1884. The inventions of Charles Kettering, who started Delco, ranged from electric starters for automobiles to the iron lung. Fifty miles to the south, candle molder William Procter and soap maker James Gamble were already building the company that eventually made Cincinnati a household-product word.

In McKinley’s own backyard, B. F. Goodrich and Harvey Firestone made Akron the rubber capital of the world in the 1870s and 1880s. The National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, located there, has been described by the Wall Street Journal as “a Cooperstown for gadgeteers and tinkerers.” The Studebaker brothers grew up in Wooster before building their cars. J. Ward Packard produced electrical equipment in Warren before putting his name on a luxury automobile.

Few remember Joshua Gibbs, whose newfangled iron plows turned Canton, Ohio, into the nation’s leading pre–Civil War producer of farm machinery. Without that base, the city might not have lured youthful lawyer McKinley in 1869. William H. Hoover developed the vacuum cleaner, and his company remains a Canton institution.

Small wonder that innovation became part of McKinley’s argument for the protective system. “It encourages the development of skill and inventive genius as part of the great productive forces,” he said as a young man awed by what he saw around him. He identified the tariff with national development and patriotism, and, in the words of biographer H. Wayne Morgan, “through the dull tax [tariff] schedules that bored other men, he found the romance of history in the unfolding development of the nation’s wealth.”5

The best parallel is to the Britain of 1750 to 1820, with its early Industrial Revolution convergence of communications, foundries, factories, and, most of all, innovations. The most notable were James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), James Watt’s steam engine (1768), Henry Cort’s patents for puddling and rolling iron (1783–84), and Richard Arkwright’s power loom (1787). Like post–Civil War Ohio, early industrial Britain had secured and mobilized itself with tariffs, strict patent laws, government assistance, and military procurement, as well as the Navigation Acts that gave preference to British shipping and parliamentary statutes that sought to prohibit skilled workers and engineers from leaving the country.

Born and bred in such innovative surroundings, McKinley’s speeches about enterprise and the fruits of the protective tariff system often sounded trite, like paeans from a chamber of commerce brochure. But they had a base in reality. When he came home from the war, factories belched smoke where only a few sheep had grazed. A decade later, when Rutherford Hayes recommended that the new congressman hook his career to a specialty in tariffs, McKinley’s own district was practically a casebook; witness the 1860 to 1900 population explosion in three of its manufacturing cities: Youngstown—2500 percent, Akron—1300 percent, Canton—1200 percent.

However, if Ohio politics and commerce were powerful in molding McKinley, so were two other home-state institutions: the Methodist Church and Abraham Lincoln’s boys in blue, the Ohio Volunteers and the Grand Army of the Republic.

OHIO AS THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIDDLE AMERICA

The Ohio of McKinley’s youth reflected the just-past-the-frontier culture of the burgeoning Midwest: a new unpolished middle class given to teetotaling Methodism, religious camp meetings, and small-town values, typically light-years distant from the sophistication of upper-class Eastern universities, salons, and clubs.

Some biographers have dealt condescendingly with his midwestern manners, his fondness for homilies, his open religiosity, his middle-class taste, his unflagging commitment to “the people,” and a liking for popular hymns, sentimental poetry, and patriotic odes. His devotion to his invalid wife, counted entirely genuine even by foes, drew a certain mockery for its Victorian syrup of language and expression, including gestures like his effort as governor always to wave to her window at three o’clock in the afternoon.

These attributes, however, also had a positive effect: they helped to give William McKinley, Jr., the greatest personal popularity of any president since Lincoln. His success on the stump, his ability to draw crowds everywhere, and his obvious personal following would be used to rebuild executive power that a generation of lesser presidents—some able to read Kant or Plutarch in the original—had lost to Congress. In late-nineteenth-century politics, his personality was a pillar of his success, whatever disdain it might evoke among later sophisticates.

Religiosity was part of that drawing power. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, the McKinleys had been Scots-Irish Presbyterians committed to kirk and covenant. But not long after arriving in Ohio, they became Methodists, caught up in the revivalism of the early nineteenth century. By 1844, when the Methodist Church divided between north and south, Methodism had become America’s most popular creed, with over a million members and almost twelve thousand local and itinerant preachers.6 This itinerant capacity, together with emphasis on camp meetings—so named for the tents that provided early housing—particularly equipped the Methodists to evangelize a moving frontier.

Ohio was one of their strongholds, and among those recruited to atonement, grace, and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit was young Will McKinley, who requested baptism after a series of camp meetings in 1859. His mother hoped his commitment would lead him to the ministry, but the Civil War intervened. Still, his regiment—the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry, to whom we shall return shortly—was scarcely less religious than his home environs. Nicknamed “the psalm-singers of the Western Reserve,” they followed a routine he described to his sister as “religious exercises in the company twice a day, prayer meetings twice a week, and preaching in the regiment once on a sabbath.”7

As the war lengthened and McKinley rose in rank, he gave up his 1861 habit of referring to himself as a soldier of Jesus, as well as of the North. Even so, religion remained prominent in his speech. As president, his addresses would be sprinkled with phrases like the Lord Most High and Him who is a sovereign of land and sea. In fact, this was common for post–Civil War presidents. James Garfield, as a member of Congress, averted an April 1865 riot in New York City with a biblical invocation: “Mercy and truth shall go before His face. Fellow Citizens! God reigns and the Government at Washington still lives.”8 Louis Auchincloss has pointed out that Theodore Roosevelt, a half century later, “could speak of standing at Armageddon to do battle for the Lord without being laughed off the platform.”9

McKinley’s first minister, Aaron Morton, said he “was not what you would call a ‘shouting Methodist,’ but rather one who was careful of his acts and words.…”10 Upon moving from the Western Reserve several dozen miles south to Canton in 1867, he became president of the local YMCA and stressed devotion, not denomination, gathering young men of every faith for song and prayer.

His devout Methodism did not lead him to concern himself with dogma or denominational differences. The loving kindness of God was McKinley’s religion, and the source of his inner serenity.… He made many friends among Canton’s large Roman Catholic population of German and Irish extraction. In a day of sharp sectarianism, McKinley was devoid of bigotry possessing as a grace of his nature the tolerance that is unconscious of its own virtue.11

Canton and Stark County were more ecumenical than the nearby Western Reserve. Together with the adjacent counties to the east, west, and south, they were Ohio’s principal “Little Pennsylvania,” with a religious heterogeneity to match that which had made William Penn’s Philadelphia the center of eighteenth-century North American toleration. Denominational maps of Ohio in 1850 and 1890 show the counties in McKinley’s congressional district with major concentrations of Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, German Reformed, Presbyterians, Amish, Mennonites, United Brethren, Disciples of Christ, and Quakers. Toleration was almost a necessity.

Pundits of a later date might have called McKinley “Middle American,” and indeed, if the antebellum United States had a Middle America, it was the Buckeye State. Ohio straddled an extended Mason-Dixon Line in both physical geography and mixed Northern-Southern antecedents. Poland, where McKinley lived as a teenager, was a Yankee settlement—replete with a New England town green and several academies—on the southern edge of what had once been Connecticut’s Western Reserve. But it was only twenty miles to the northern loop of the Ohio River, on the other side of which was slaveholding Virginia.

Ohio also stood between the old and more stratified Atlantic coastal sections and the Wisconsin-Iowa-Missouri frontier, and was also middling in respect for the political and economic values of the Eastern elites. Outside of a few university towns, high culture was not an Ohio aspiration. Remarks about effete Easterners were common and occasionally indulged in by the McKinley family.

Politically, the McKinleys were Western Whigs, a different breed from their Eastern compatriots. When Ohio’s William Henry Harrison, scion of an old Southern family, ran as the Whig nominee for president in 1840, he paraded under a banner of log cabins and hard cider. Another local Whig, U.S. Senator Thomas Corwin, took political, if not personal, pleasure in his nickname “the Wagon Boy.” Even Garfield, who went East to college, would later be portrayed as a youthful hauler on the ropes of canal boats.

Midcentury Ohio did not have a refined or bookish culture, and some chroniclers have mistakenly dismissed McKinley’s literacy as well as his taste. Margaret Leech, a generally esteeming biographer, nevertheless stated: “He had few intellectual resources. If he had ever possessed a germ of taste, it died of inanition. In literature and music, he looked for an obvious sentimental, patriotic or religious content.” Worse, by the time he was in his forties, “with the passing years, McKinley’s desire to improve his mind became scarcely more than lip service to a recollected aspiration. After he was elected governor of Ohio, he read two books that [Myron] Herrick sent him as a Christmas present. There is no other mention of his reading, apart from the newspapers.”12

This is simply untrue, and condescending as well as pedantic. “Inanition,” so the dictionary says, means “emptiness, exhaustion from hunger”—from the Latin inanis. Twenty-one years later, biographer Lewis Gould would better describe McKinley’s habits: “[H]e frequently read late into the night. Novels, works of history and the endless reports were his reading materials. McKinley was far more bookish and better informed than his reputation as a non-reading president would seem to indicate.”13

Indeed, Leech’s dismissal of his reading follows only two dozen pages after a kindred opening. She begins her biography in 1896 with the governor of Ohio returning to Canton after two successful terms, happily coming back to his former house on North Market Street—a midsized white frame structure of no particular cachet. His chosen furnishings included a worn but reupholstered lounge, an old McKinley favorite, for his library. Newly added was an elaborately carved sitting-room table made from many different Ohio woods—maple, hop hornbeam, oak, wild cherry, hickory, poplar, sassafras, among others—that “he had set his heart on owning” after seeing it at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. “In all America,” the author confides, “there was no mansion so fine and costly that it was to be compared in McKinley’s mind with that snug cottage on North Market Street.”14

This snub may be fair culturally—McKinley obviously didn’t know a Hepplewhite from a Chippendale—but it is unsophisticated politically. Then as now, voters warm to an honest and effective public servant who’d rather live on middle-class Main Street with a devoted spouse than discuss Tolstoy in fashionable salons.

Perhaps more to the point, inasmuch as visitors to nineteenth-century Ohio found even the local middle-class literati stylistically wanting, the lack of style must have extended beyond McKinley. English writer Frances Trollope, after her 1830 visit to Cincinnati, reported that Ohio writers were inferior and “the style of their imaginative compositions was almost always affected and inflated.”15 Ohio novelist William Dean Howells, a contemporary of McKinley who published The Hazard of New Fortunes to considerable acclaim in 1890, received a kindred review a century later on his book’s reissuance. Howells’s characters, said the critic, “remain unimagined; and in an odd way, so does the prose.”

If McKinley’s taste and prose failed to rise to athenaeum standards, it is not so easy to dismiss his intelligence. As governor and president, he often avoided setting out his policy views, but the frequent shrewdness of this tactic will be amplified in chapter 6. Put-downs of his vocabulary also seem tenuous. The language he employed during his career was simple; its uncomplicated directness had been honed in wartime military correspondence and in persuading Stark County jurors who might have spurned a lawyer given to grandiloquent displays. Moreover, a quick scanning of excerpts from the diary that eighteen-year-old Private Will McKinley kept for six months in 1861 turns up words like “oblivious,” “weltering,” “literati,” and “accoutrements.” Presumably he had not yet developed a need to think in terms of juries and electorates.

Although neither abstraction nor dense literature held much appeal to him, he was a quick study. One grade-school teacher required him to sit up front “in order to give other students a chance to plod through what he seemed to learn at a glance.”16 John Hay, his secretary of state, recalled after McKinley’s death that “He had an extraordinary power of marshaling and presenting significant facts, so as to bring conviction to the average mind. His range of reading was not wide; he read only what he might some day find useful, and what he read his memory held like brass.”17

Until recently, the McKinley of 1861 to 1865 did not have a separate biographer, a gap filled in 2000 by William Armstrong’s Major McKinley: William McKinley and the Civil War. Before he went off to fight after just a few months of college, the eighteen-year-old had always been interested in books and reading material. His father had left such things to his mother, who wanted her son to be a churchman, “and the McKinley home received some of the best periodicals of the time: the Atlantic Monthly (young Will McKinley’s favorite), Harper’s Monthly, and Horace Greeley’s New York Weekly Tribune. Each evening, the family gathered in the sitting room where they spent an hour taking turns reading aloud.”18 William McKinley, Sr., to be sure, often preferred the earthier writings of fellow Scotsman Robert Burns.

In 1852, when William was nine, the family moved to nearby Poland, which had a private academy the children could attend. Persevering and diligent, he did well, and after graduation in 1860 went off to Allegheny College, a hundred miles away in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He soon left and came home, as he recalled, because of a nervous condition that turned into depression.19 His father’s subsequent business failure kept him from returning to college after his condition improved, so he taught school, worked in the post office, and in June of 1861, after careful consideration, responded to Lincoln’s call for volunteers. In Poland’s Old Stone Tavern, a Pittsburgh-Cleveland stage stop that dated back to 1804, he enlisted for three years as a private in the Poland Guards, a company filled with his schoolmates. He would get his education, cum laude, in the War for the Preservation of the Union.

MCKINLEY AND THE CIVIL WAR

Mustered in at Ohio’s Camp Jackson, McKinley soon gave up the book of Byron’s poems he had brought along for the more pertinent pages of Hardee’s Tactics—a military manual written by an ex-officer in the U.S. Army turned Confederate general. As the appointed “correspondent” of the Poland Guards company, Private McKinley began writing letters that were published in the Mahoning Register, the newspaper in nearby Youngstown. He wrote to his sister that “the (mealtime) mess which I am in is composed principally of the literati of the company.”20 However, they were soon too busy chasing Confederates around divided West Virginia to do more than read four-day-old newspapers and posted telegraph dispatches. He stopped keeping his diary in November 1861, when he was made quartermaster clerk. He still tried to read on quiet Sundays.

In April 1862, Private McKinley was promoted to the rank of quartermaster sergeant, which required that he keep the regiment provisioned and fed. Come summer, his unit moved to Washington, D.C. On the fourteenth of September, the Ohio Division, with his Twenty-third Regiment out in front, marched along the National Road toward South Mountain in western Maryland, eventually making a successful charge to clear away the Confederates holding the hilltop.

Three days later and a dozen miles farther west, the Twenty-third fought again in the battle of Antietam. Having crossed Antietam Creek, several units were cut off. The nineteen-year-old McKinley, as acting commissary, wanted to get food to the trapped men. He went back behind the lines, rounded up stragglers, and put them to work preparing food and hot coffee. When it was ready, he loaded a wagon, asked for a volunteer to go with him, and prepared to ride through an open field controlled by Confederate fire. As he approached, two officers told him to retire because it was impossible. He went anyway and got through, despite the rear of the wagon being taken off by a small cannonball.

When the Twenty-third again suffered heavy casualties, its commander, Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, the future president, recommended McKinley for a vacant lieutenancy, and he received the commission personally from Ohio Governor David Tod in November. In January 1863, Hayes, now commanding a brigade of Ohioans, made Lieutenant McKinley the brigade quartermaster, supervising clerks, a carpenter, a forage master, a wagon master, a harness master, two blacksmiths, and five teamsters. When he had free time on Sundays, he read histories and biographies of military men, and Colonel Hayes augmented McKinley’s library with a personally inscribed copy of Silas Casey’s Tactics.

Many of the men from northern Ohio, knowing only their flat homelands, filled pages of their diaries with awed descriptions of the West Virginia mountains. Ambrose Bierce, serving in another regiment, later recalled, “I note again their dim, blue billows, ridge after ridge interminable, beyond purple valleys full of sleep.”21 McKinley, though, was now too busy with practical matters—requisitions, forms, and ledgers—to go back to his own diary. His future bent for facts and statistics was unfolding.

Stationed in West Virginia through most of 1863, the Twenty-third saw no major battles, but participated in a number of lesser actions. One successfully ended the last days of Confederate cavalry leader John Morgan’s famous raid into Ohio. In January 1864, Lieutenant McKinley became the assistant adjutant general of Hayes’s brigade, which for the invasion of Virginia was assigned to the division commanded by General George Crook, later a famous Indian fighter. At the battle of Kernstown, McKinley rode through enemy-held positions and shot and shell to give orders to a reserve regiment about to be overrun. He was promoted to captain, and Crook thereupon took him as one of his adjutants in what soon became the Army of West Virginia, part of Philip H. Sheridan’s larger Army of the Shenandoah.

At the battle of Berryville in September 1864, McKinley had a horse shot from under him, and two weeks later, Sheridan and Crook sent McKinley with a message for the commander of the Second Division to bring those troops up to the line. That officer said he would take the recommended route only if ordered by General Crook, at which point Captain McKinley straightened in his saddle and said, “Then by order of General Crook, I command you.”22 Crook accepted his aide’s initiative, but had it failed, McKinley would have been in trouble.

Sheridan credited Crook with turning the tide in the battles of Winchester and Fisher’s Hill. McKinley, in turn, was recognized in Crook’s own report. Staff officers riding to and fro had a high rate of attrition, and in the words of one, they felt “they carried their lives in their hands as well as their dispatches, and if a twig cracked by the roadside, it seemed ominous of bullets and sudden death.”23

At the battle of Cedar Creek, when a returning Sheridan made his famous “wild ride” to rally demoralized Union troops, McKinley, now a brevet major, played a role, as Sheridan recalled in his later Memoirs. Others said that when Sheridan determined to make the ride, it was the young Ohio major who suggested that the general take off his plain overcoat and put on the epaulets that the weary men would recognize.

By this point, McKinley was the chief adjutant in the field with the Army of West Virginia. On Election Day, November 8, 1864, he issued orders for Crook’s corps to join the rest of Sheridan’s army in moving back to Kernstown. Then, at age twenty-one, he voted in his first presidential election at the army ambulance that was the polling place of the Thirty-fourth Ohio Infantry. The men who voted with him were Rutherford Hayes, George Crook, and Philip H. Sheridan.

By the spring of 1865, he was serving as divisional adjutant and chief of staff for a new unit under Major General Samuel S. Carroll. But three days after he joined the division at Winchester, Robert E. Lee surrendered. McKinley’s Civil War was over, and although he thought about staying in the army—a peacetime lieutenancy was offered—he ultimately chose not to do so.

Not surprisingly, he never went back to Allegheny College. His only further education was a term at Albany Law School in New York, following a year in Ohio reading law with Judge Charles Glidden. Despite his complaints at having to learn “the old customs of the Saxons and the Danes,” the months in Albany were bearable, because his was a “war class” said to include veterans of every rank from major general down to private.24 The twenty-three-year-old ex-major would not have stood out.

Murat Halstead, a well-known journalist and eventual McKinley biographer, opined that “the [military] camp was to him a university.… When the combat closed, Major McKinley was an officer and a gentleman, who had built in his diversified education wiser than he knew, and taken a degree beyond any the colleges could confer.”25

If anything, this is an understatement, given McKinley’s shoulder rubbing with men who managed the greatest crisis of nineteenth-century America. Beside their state’s role as a Midwest pivot, part of why Ohioans commanded the mountaintop of national and Republican politics in the half century after Appomattox involved the bonds of their wartime service. Politics in the Midwest had been forged by the war and would divide over its memories for decades. Just as the North’s military success was marshaled by the Ohio-born Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the Republican Party dominated post–Civil War presidential politics in fair measure by nominating Ohioans with battlefield as well as geographic credentials.

This network would be invaluable to McKinley, who began his political career in 1867 campaigning up and down Stark County for the gubernatorial candidacy of his regimental commander, Rutherford Hayes. After Hayes won, McKinley became the Republican county chairman in Stark and organized the county for Grant’s 1868 presidential campaign. The Twenty-third Regiment itself was already an incalculably more important fraternity for McKinley than the Sigma Alpha Epsilon he had briefly joined in 1860.

This one volunteer regiment, with its long casualty list and high reputation, produced two Ohio governors, Hayes and McKinley, who went on to become presidents; two lieutenant governors of Ohio, Robert P. Kennedy and William C. Lyon; four U.S. congressmen, Hayes, McKinley, Kennedy, and William S. Rosecrans; and a U.S. senator who later became an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Stanley Matthews.26 With such attendees, the annual reunions of the Twenty-third often also drew visiting vice presidents, war secretaries, and House speakers.

Both Hayes and McKinley professed to be prouder of those days and the cause they fought for than anything else they did in their lives. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said of that same 1861–65 service that “Through our great fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” Despite their later offices, Hayes liked to be addressed as “Colonel” and McKinley as “Major.” Both rarely missed regimental reunions and were almost always available to fellow veterans who wanted to see them. Part of what seems to have inspired the two future presidents to the commitments of their careers was a sense of how much the United States owed to their comrades in arms from the Twenty-third who never lived to farm a hundred acres outside Canton, teach at Poland Academy, or represent Trumbull County in the state legislature.

THE TRIBULATIONS OF A RISING POLITICIAN

The first elected office McKinley held was that of Stark County prosecutor, which he won in 1869 somewhat by accident, given Stark’s Democratic bias. He failed by a small margin when he sought a second term in 1871. However, his law practice did well, and Governor Hayes was both an ally and a mentor. In 1876, Hayes, as a surprise presidential nominee, carried Ohio but became president only by a one-vote national electoral vote majority arranged through an unseemly North-South political bargain. This haunted Hayes’s single, essentially unsuccessful term. That same year, McKinley won a seat in Congress. His district included Stark, Mahoning, and Columbiana counties, a politically marginal stretch of grainfields, coal mines, iron furnaces, and potteries.

For reasons beyond politics, though, the new congressman left for Washington in 1877 with a heavy heart. Six years earlier, at twenty-eight, he had married Ida Saxton, the very pretty but high-strung daughter of one of Canton’s most prominent families. Their first child, Katie, arrived in December 1871. The next little girl came in 1873, on a day when Ida McKinley, almost simultaneously stricken by news of her own mother’s death, underwent a hard and traumatic labor. The new baby died five months later. Ida McKinley herself developed convulsions that suggested brain damage. She became an epileptic with seizures.

In the summer of 1876, just before McKinley won his House seat, Katie, the daughter who looked so much like her father, also died. These tragedies altered him, biographer Leech concluded: “His buoyant youthfulness was gone. He showed the fortitude and quick compassion that are the grace of those who have greatly suffered, but he also grew guarded and reticent. In the first shock of his trouble, he was sometimes abstracted. There were stories that he forgot important testimony that had been given in court; that his intense gaze became a fixed stare, as though he were mustering all his faculties in an effort at concentration.”27 If McKinley had left college years earlier because of depression, the trauma of the years 1873 to 1876 may have partially reshaped his personality.

The grief-stricken Ohioan was not an ordinary new congressman. He was a protégé of the new president, despite Hayes’s disputed election and minimal standing in Congress. He and Ida saw much of the White House. Although Hayes went back to Ohio after four years, ironically, the 1880 GOP national convention picked a second Ohioan as a compromise nominee after multiple ballots. This one was James A. Garfield, a fellow House member, who sometimes brought his sons to call on the McKinleys at Washington’s Ebbitt House. Six months later, he fell to an assassin’s bullet.

Hard work in Congress helped to take McKinley’s mind off his pain, but his wife’s needs took up most of his evenings. “He was tireless,” says Leech, “in ministering to her mental and physical comfort. He grew soft-voiced and cautious, and developed resources of tact.… He turned an imperturbable face to the pitying eyes of Canton, and his reserve forbade impertinent questioning. In the presence of other people, McKinley’s attitude toward Ida’s repellent symptoms [facial convulsions] was so casual as to appear indifferent. He always sat beside her in the dining room or parlor. At the first sign of rigidity, he was alert. He threw his handkerchief or a napkin over her convulsed face, removing it when she relaxed. McKinley’s matter-of-fact manner forbade a whisper of comment.”28

Cautiousness, refusal to explain or discuss unpleasantness, and a skill in pleasing people were traits McKinley learned during these years and would display through his political career. All too often, such characteristics would be cited to support accusations of weakness, mediocrity, indecision, and seeming dependence on the direction of others. So described, they have plagued his historical memory. At the time, contrarily, these skills helped him win friends, and large numbers of Americans in Ohio and elsewhere came to admire the congressman for the time and attention he devoted to his wife. Julia Foraker, the wife of one of McKinley’s home-state rivals, would later contend that it was the key to his popularity and success.

In any event, these circumstances did nothing to slow down his rise in Congress or national politics. We will look at the tariff issue in chapter 2 and his political rise in chapter 3. However, Ohio Democrats, recognizing him as one of the state’s rising Republican stars, sought to defeat him. They spent the decade after 1881 gerrymandering McKinley’s congressional district whenever they controlled the legislature, attaching his home county of Stark to different sets of adjacent counties. He kept coming back.

Year after year, meanwhile, he saw men born in Ohio win the presidency—Hayes in 1876, Garfield in 1880, Harrison in 1888. Still another Ohioan, U.S. Senator John Sherman, had been an important contender in the Republican presidential nomination contests from 1880 to 1888, although he never won. No other state could have opened such a large window into such high-level national politics, and McKinley took full advantage of his education, both in state and national politics and in the legislating processes of Congress.

In 1889, he came within one vote of being chosen by his party as Speaker of the House of Representatives. The winner, Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine, thereupon appointed McKinley as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Republican floor leader. The irony was that the congressman from Canton was finally about to return home. Put back in control of the Ohio legislature in 1889, the Democrats drew yet another new Eighteenth Congressional District for 1890. This gerrymander pulled McKinley south and west into areas largely settled by Pennsylvania Germans who disliked the Civil War and voted heavily Democratic. Previous re-mappings had failed to achieve the Democrats’ projected vote totals, but this time they inserted one of their two best Ohio counties—Holmes. Civil War buffs will remember “Fort Fizzle,” scene of the 1863 “Holmes County Rebellion,” described in one local history:

When the draft act was passed, many people protested. In Democratic Holmes County a recruiting officer was stoned and his life threatened. When four men were arrested for this attack, a group of residents attempted to secure their release by intimidating the military commander of the district. Finally the military sent a force of 450 soldiers to Glenmont, from which place they marched to a fortified camp nearby. Here 900 men armed with guns and several howitzers awaited them behind a stone barrier in a large orchard. After a few shots were fired the fractious rebels fled; the incident was settled by negotiation, and a few indictments were returned. Colonel Wallace was said to have dubbed the spot Fort Fizzle.29

Interpretations of the election outcome in 1890 depend on one’s viewpoint. The Democratic legislature’s projected majority of three thousand never materialized, even in a year devastating to the Republicans nationally. McKinley fought hard, losing by only three hundred votes. The state’s Republican newspapers hailed his moral victory in a nest of copperheads, as wartime Southern sympathizers were called. They proclaimed him the logical party nominee and near-certain winner in the upcoming 1891 gubernatorial election. Some predicted that Ohio would soon put another Republican in the White House. The final volley from Fort Fizzle was the last election William McKinley would ever lose.