President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  But the cousins weren’t inclined to get caught up in the fervor that soon descended upon little Poland, even when they witnessed the scene that materialized at the Sparrow House tavern one June day shortly after the attack on Fort Sumter. People congregated from points near and far to raise a rousing call for the preservation of the Union and stir local lads into action. Flags and bunting festooned the boulevard, which was lined with teary-eyed women intently fluttering their fans and men and boys worked up into patriotic excitement. Rousing cheers rolled over the assemblage until the town’s leading lawyer, Charles Glidden, ascended the front steps and called for silence, preparatory to an impassioned plea for Poland volunteers to join the regiments that Ohio soon would send into battle.

  One by one the lads stepped up and signed on for what quickly became known as the Ohio Guards. Young women moved forward to pin red, white, and blue badges upon their chests, and in a few days, after drill practice at Poland, the young men were marched in formation to nearby Youngstown, where they would be mustered in and thence sent to Columbus for basic training. McKinley and Osborne, resisting the civic fever of the moment, resolved to think the matter over carefully, weighing family obligations against national imperatives. They watched the military drills at a nearby church green and followed the troops to Youngstown in a buggy to check out the situation and witness the unit’s departure for Columbus. On the return trip, it became clear that there was only one course of action they could live with.

  “Bill,” said McKinley to his cousin, “we can’t stay out of this war. We must get in.” Osborne agreed and suggested they go immediately to inform their families. Nancy McKinley didn’t protest. “Well, boys,” she said, “if you think it is your duty to fight for your country, I think you ought to go.” She was willing, she said, to place her son “into the hands of the good Lord.” It turned out that when an angry Will McKinley had told his Southern college classmate that he would fight treason on Southern soil if necessary, he had meant it. The young man took pride in both his decision and his manner of arriving at it. “I came to a deliberative conclusion,” he recalled, “and have never been sorry for it.”

  — 2 —

  The Forge of War

  TEST OF INTELLECT, LEADERSHIP, AND COURAGE

  When young Will McKinley entered the U.S. military in June 1861, he harbored no expectation that it would transform his life. Like nearly all the provincial lads he encountered on his way to war, he didn’t anticipate significant promotion, or any remuneration beyond the “paltry pittance of pay” that was the lot of the soldier, or any particular glory. Like them, he joined up simply to save the Union. And like them, he adjusted as best he could to the new military life and sought to come to terms with the mortal dangers he likely would soon encounter. The aim was to get on with it and return as soon as possible to the lives they knew before the war.

  Upon making their decision to join up, McKinley and his cousin Bill Osborne set out for Camp Jackson (later Camp Chase) near Columbus. There Osborne learned a physical impairment precluded his service, and he returned home. McKinley was sworn into the army as a private on June 11. He had intended to sign on for three months, but those enlistments had been filled and only three-year commitments were available. When camp officers explained the situation, all would-be recruits save one opted for the longer service. The lone holdout was a divinity student eager to embrace his calling, but he later thought better of the matter and reversed his decision.

  Military records described young McKinley thus: height five feet, seven inches; hair brown; eyes gray; complexion light. His occupation was listed as “student.” He ended up in Company E of the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, led by an impressive array of officers pulled from Ohio’s dynamic civilian society. Colonel William S. Rosecrans, a West Point graduate who had thrived as a businessman and inventor, soon would move on to an impressive wartime career as a general. Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Matthews would become a U.S. senator from Ohio after the war and serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Major Rutherford B. Hayes would serve courageously during the war, sustain five war wounds, get promoted to general, and later become governor of Ohio and then U.S. president.

  McKinley viewed Hayes particularly as a man to respect and emulate. He appreciated the officer’s solemn reading of the Declaration of Independence to his recruits at camp, and he liked the way the major handled an episode in which some chagrined soldiers, including McKinley, resisted the weapons placed in their hands—clunky old muskets dating back to the War of 1812, converted to percussion caps from flints. They deserved better, protested the troops, and wouldn’t accept these outmoded relics. The officers were aghast at such defiance, particularly since General John C. Frémont, the great pathfinder and former presidential candidate, was scheduled shortly to review the troops. At the entreaty of their officers, the troops agreed to accept the rifles, but only for the inspection.

  McKinley later reported being awed by Frémont, “a great man to me” based on “the story of his wonderful adventures in the west.” The private was thrilled during the review when the great man “pounded my chest and looked square into my eyes, and finally pronounced me fit to be a soldier.”

  But upon Frémont’s departure, the matter of the rifles reemerged, and the standoff began to look ominous. Lieutenant Colonel Matthews warned his troops that the penalty for refusing to accept the old muskets would be a firing squad; he added firmly, “Depend on it.” But Hayes took a different tack. Far from taking umbrage at the troops’ defiance, he opted for persuasion over coercion. He explained with considerable patience that this was merely a training expedient and that proper weapons would be available soon. He was persuasive. “From that very moment he had our respect and admiration,” McKinley recalled years later.

  Camp life quickly became a series of dull routines—3,000 troops sleeping on boards in 300 tents, regimented training, rotational guard duty, occasional passes for trips to Columbus to let off steam, frequent prayer meetings for those interested in religious renewal. McKinley regularly attended prayer sessions. “[They have] a good effect upon our brother soldiers, and are exerting a salutary influence,” he explained in a letter to a Poland newspaper. To home he wrote, “It seems to be the determination of most, if not all, of our company, to preserve the good morals they brought with them, by avoiding the many temptations which necessarily surround them in Camp.” This sentence doesn’t seem credible. Perhaps the priggish young private didn’t want his straitlaced family to know about the kinds of activities that inevitably emerged among young colts preparing for war, or perhaps the straitlaced lad himself had remained oblivious to what was going on around him. As for himself, the strongest drink he imbibed was lemonade, though he did develop a fondness for cigars. He spent much of his free time reading and following developments in the war and in politics, but he did receive visitors from home occasionally. He indulged his youthful romantic spirit by reading poems by Lord Byron.

  He found that he took well to the hardships of military life. “I enjoyed sleeping on a rough board much better than I expected, with nought but an overcoat and a blanket to cover me,” he wrote in a diary he maintained during this time. He was thoroughly imbued with the idealism of the cause, which he likened to the legacy of “our Revolutionary fathers.” In a letter home he embraced the imperative “to hand down to posterity this government as free, as pure, and as spotless as our sires transmitted it to us.”

  In late July the training phase ended, and the Twenty-third Ohio trekked to Virginia to root out any guerrilla forces operating in the area. Traveling largely on foot, the troops bedded down at night upon the rough, cold ground and soon found themselves in unfamiliar mountainous terrain, far different from the flatlands of Ohio—“hills, high, such as I never witnessed before,” as McKinley wrote in his diary. As the march drew the troops closer to guerrilla territory, McKinley’s thoughts turned to the dangers of combat. “Tomorrow morning’s sun,” he confided to his diary, �
��will undoubtedly find me on a march. It may be I will never see the light of another day.” Displaying his youthful earnestness and religious conviction, he went on:

  Should this be my fate I fall in a good cause and hope to fall in the arms of my blessed redeemer. This record I want to be left behind, that I not only fell as a soldier for my Country, but also as a Soldier of Jesus. . . . In this emergency let . . . my parents, brothers and sisters, and friends have their anxiety removed by the thought that I am in the discharge of my duty, that I am doing nothing but [that which] my revolutionary fathers before me have done, and also let them be consoled with the solacing thought that if we never meet again on earth, we will meet around God’s throne in Heaven.

  The Twenty-third Ohio finally made camp at Glenville, Virginia (later West Virginia), where no guerrilla activities were in evidence. The unit settled into a deadening routine of make-work activities, false alarms about enemy sightings, and sagging morale. McKinley retained his sense of humor in a letter home, writing about a sequence of events after a night patrol returned to camp with an exciting report that the enemy had been heard crossing a nearby bridge, their sabers clattering in the dark. The next night a young lieutenant led four men, including McKinley, into the wild to intercept the rebels. Hearing a noise in a dense thicket, the neophyte lieutenant thrust his bayonet into the brush—and apparently pierced a skunk, manifest in the “venomous smell [that] instantly issued from the bushes.” Later, reaching the designated bridge, the troops secreted themselves in a nearby cornfield, their muskets cocked at the ready, and waited for the rebels. By dawn they had spied a lost calf and an itinerant hog. “We returned in the morning,” wrote McKinley, “sleepy, tired, and not as full of romance as the night before.”

  Within a few weeks, however, both sides had amassed enough troops in the area that a set-piece battle seemed inevitable. It occurred on September 10, when Confederate general John Floyd crossed the Gauley River and positioned his sizable contingent on a plateau, not far from a place called Carnifex Ferry. The Twenty-third Ohio was given the job of attacking part of Floyd’s force and driving it back south of the Gauley. The Union troops didn’t manage to dislodge the intruders before nightfall, and McKinley’s unit found itself at a river crossing it couldn’t navigate because of devastating enemy fire. The men ended up crouching in water and mud as enemy bullets and cannonballs whizzed by overhead. When darkness came, they cautiously wended their way back to safety but found little comfort in their new surroundings. “With no blankets for a covering, no food to satisfy our almost starved bodies, we succeeded in procuring some straw which we laid upon,” McKinley wrote in his diary.

  In the meantime, Floyd realized the vulnerability of his position and got his troops back across the Gauley under cover of night. It wasn’t much of a battle, but McKinley perceived value in the experience of facing enemy fire for the first time. “It gave us confidence in ourselves and faith in our commander,” he wrote. “We learned that we could fight and whip the rebels on their own ground.”

  It wasn’t until the next year, after the Twenty-third Ohio huddled in winter quarters for several months, that the regiment saw real action. In spring 1862 it was sent to Washington to help General George McClellan protect the national capital from Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. This became particularly crucial after Northern defeats in August at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas left both McClellan’s force and Washington vulnerable to Confederate attack. McClellan quickly moved his army into a defensive position in Maryland to parry Lee’s anticipated thrust into the North.

  By this time, McKinley’s military career had taken a significant upward turn, spurred by his superiors’ perception that he possessed rare managerial skills. This got him assigned to the quartermaster corps, charged with distributing all nonweapon supplies, including food, clothing, blankets, and fodder for horses. And in April he was promoted to commissary sergeant. Hayes, now commander of the Twenty-third Ohio, took note of the young man who seemed able to keep things moving smoothly and quickly. The commander later recalled, “We soon found that in business, in executive ability, young McKinley was a man of rare capacity, of unusual and unsurpassed capacity, especially for a boy of his age.”

  He displayed more than executive ability on September 17, the single bloodiest day in American military history, when Lee’s and McClellan’s armies came together at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. During the preceding days McClellan had enjoyed partial success in a number of smaller engagements, and now he launched an attack designed to cut off Lee’s escape route. The battle began at dawn, described by McKinley later as “a lovely September day—an ideal Sunday morning.” The fighting raged all day and into the night. Early that morning, the brigade of Colonel Eliakim Parker Scammon, including the Twenty-third Ohio, had taken an important bridge across Antietam Creek but later found itself pinned down on the far side of the creek. Worse, the men had begun the battle without breakfast and had had no access to food or water throughout the day. Famished and thirsty by midafternoon, the troops found their fighting ability waning ominously.

  When Commissary Sergeant McKinley, posted two miles behind the lines, heard of the brigade’s plight, he resolved to get sustenance to the beleaguered unit. He recruited a number of battle stragglers to help him load a wagon with provisions, including cooked meats, pork and beans, hardtack crackers, and barrels of water and coffee. He hitched the wagon to two horses and then asked for volunteers to help him get the wagon to Scammon’s brigade. He got one affirmative response, from a young man named John Harvey. The two set off on a narrow road through a thick stretch of forest and into a dangerous clearing in the woods. Twice they encountered Union officers who ordered them back, one saying the enemy position was too well fortified to afford any chance of passage. But after the officers left, McKinley ignored their orders and kept going. When Scammon’s regiment was almost in sight, Harvey remembered, McKinley “made one more appeal to me to run the blockade; he himself risking his life in taking the lead . . . and the horses going at full speed past the blockade.” The back of the wagon was shot away by a cannonball, but within a few minutes they found themselves “safe in the midst of the half-famished regiment.”

  A cheer went up among the men, and one battlefield veteran exclaimed, “God bless the lad.” Major James Comley, commanding the Twenty-third Ohio in the absence of Hayes (who was recuperating from a battlefield wound), promptly wrote a note to Hayes describing McKinley’s action and recommending that he be promoted to second lieutenant. McKinley himself shared the sentiment and issued an appeal to the regimental surgeon, Dr. Joseph Webb, who happened to be Hayes’s brother-in-law. Demonstrating a high self-regard and robust ambition beneath his modest demeanor, McKinley asked Webb to intervene with Hayes in his behalf. Webb readily complied, writing to Hayes, “Our young friend, William McKinley, commissary sergeant, would be pleased of promotion, and would not object to your recommendation for same. Without wishing to interfere in this matter, it strikes me he is about the brightest chap spoken of for the place.”

  Hayes agreed. Convalescing in Ohio from his battlefield injury, he brought the matter up with Governor David Tod, who initiated actions to cite the resourceful sergeant for military valor and give him a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant. The newly minted officer got word of his elevation during a visit to Ohio on furlough and to perform some military recruiting duties. Visiting Hayes in Columbus on his way to Poland, he was given his letter of promotion. Years later he wrote to Hayes that that was “the proudest and happiest moment of my life.”

  He stopped off in Cleveland to visit a friend named Russell Hastings, a talented young captain also on recruiting duty. Hastings quickly learned that McKinley had sufficient funds to get home but not enough to get himself outfitted in a new officer’s uniform.

  “McKinley,” said Hastings, “how would you like to go home to your mother in your second lieutenant’s uniform, with your sword by your side? You ought
to and you shall. Stay with me two or three days, and I will fit you out.” Hastings later reported that the young man’s eyes sparkled at the prospect. “What a proud boy he was when he donned his uniform,” recalled Hastings. McKinley’s sister Sarah reported that, later in Poland, her brother was “bubbling over with enthusiasm” at his new status. At a stopover at Gallipolis, Ohio, the young lieutenant had a photograph made of himself in his new uniform, standing erect, holding his military cap at his side. It presents the picture of a serious young man, hardly more than a boy, who appears self-possessed and ready for responsibility. Upon McKinley’s return to his unit, Hayes wrote in his diary, “Our new second lieutenant, McKinley, returned to-day—an exceedingly bright, intelligent, and gentlemanly young officer. He promises to be one of the best.” He speculated in a letter to his wife that the young officer could become one of the “generals of the next war.”

  Antietam changed McKinley’s perception of the war, and war in general, but didn’t seem to blunt his idealistic view of the conflict. Years later he spoke publicly of the “carnage” he witnessed, of “fallen comrades” and “our stricken comrades.” He decried the losses, far greater in number and as a percentage of battlefield soldiers than anyone had anticipated—and certainly greater than other armies of recent European wars had suffered. But such reminiscences always came with references to the hallowed cause at the heart of the killing and the idealism of those who died to save the Union. Though sickened by numbingly routine scenes of death, he steeled himself for more of the same by concentrating on the tasks before him. He didn’t seem to think much about his own mortality.