But McKinley’s mother was developing stark fears about her son’s wartime fate.
“William, I shall never see you again,” she protested through tears, her arms around her boy as he prepared to leave Poland.
“Mother,” he replied, “you will see me again. I shall come back to you alive and well.”
Though ready for his new role, McKinley was glad he had served in the ranks and lamented in some ways the separation from his old comrades. He later viewed his first wartime year as “a formative period of my life, during which I learned much of men and facts.” He added, “I have always been glad that I entered the service as a private, and served those months in that capacity.”
About this time Hayes was given command of the First Brigade of the Second Kanawha Division, and one of his first actions was to appoint McKinley to the job of acting brigade quartermaster, with responsibility for supplying all brigade needs except weapons. McKinley served this role through most of the inactive winter months, during which the brigade camped at the falls of the great Kanawha River in what later became West Virginia. It was an opportunity to settle into his new officer’s role, read up on war news and political developments, get to know his new commissioned comrades, develop his skills as a horseman, and grow a beard and mustache that turned out to be so thin and scraggly that they added hardly any years to his youthful appearance.
He also had more time for letters home. There wasn’t much news to impart, as each day unfolded rather like the one before. “There is nothing new in camp, all being quiet,” he wrote in spring 1863. “This is Sunday, and consequently have more time than usual, as I suspend all unnecessary business on that day.” He reported a “fine dinner” earlier in the day: “Roast Chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Custard Pudding, Green Apple and Cherry pies, Bread and Butter, &c.” He signed off, “My health is good and spirits fine. Love to all.”
Serious combat activity resumed in late spring of 1863 when Hayes’s unit was sent into Ohio to thwart the guerrilla cavalry exploits of the dashing rebel John Hunt Morgan. After successfully fulfilling that mission, Hayes’s troops joined General George Crook’s forces, charged with neutralizing rebel guerrilla activity between Richmond and the Virginia southwest. This was grueling work in harsh terrain infested with angry rebels. “We penetrated a country where guerrillas were abundant,” McKinley recalled, “and where it was not an unusual thing for our men to be shot from underbrush—murdered in cold blood.” A major battle ensued at Cloyd Mountain, where Union troops routed a Confederate contingent, though casualties were high. Afterward it was back to the grind of forced marches, incessant guerrilla fighting, deprivation of food and sleep. “Out of grub. . . . Live off the countryside,” Hayes wrote in his diary. He described life in the field in stark language: “Stopped and ate, marched and ate, camped about dark and ate all night. We had marched almost continuously for about two months, fighting often, with little food and sleep, crossing three ranges of the Alleghenies four times, the ranges of the Blue Ridge twice, and marching several times all day and all night without sleeping.” McKinley encountered difficulty fulfilling his quartermaster duties on available supplies.
No respite seemed likely when the Twenty-third Ohio was assigned to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to counter the exploits of Confederate General Jubal Early, who was using the valley to stage raids into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Through faulty reconnaissance, General Crook’s force found itself surrounded by Early’s troops near Winchester. The commander ordered a withdrawal, with Hayes’s brigade providing cover from behind a stone wall. As Hayes began his own retreat, he suddenly remembered that no one had delivered word to Colonel William Brown, whose regiment had been positioned in reserve in a nearby orchard. The colonel and his regiment faced almost certain annihilation by advancing enemy troops if he didn’t quickly join the retreat.
Looking for someone to deliver a retreat order, Hayes spotted McKinley. Pointing to the stranded regiment, he asked the young lieutenant to carry the order to Brown. Scarcely had he completed his request before McKinley wheeled his bobtailed horse around and headed toward Brown’s unit at a gallop. Even as he made his request, Hayes figured the messenger’s chances of survival were negligible. Nearby officers shared that perception. “None of us expected to see him again,” recalled Russell Hastings. McKinley spurred his chestnut mare through a harrowing patch of land with bullets flying and shells exploding everywhere. He galloped through open fields, over fences, through ditches. Once an exploding shell generated so much dust and smoke that the young horseman disappeared from sight. But the mists cleared, and there he was, approaching his destination.
McKinley drew up to Brown and delivered the order to retreat, then added, “I suppose you would have gone to the rear without orders.”
“I was concluding I would retire without waiting any longer for orders,” replied Brown. “I am now ready to go wherever you shall lead, but, Lieutenant, I ‘pintedly’ believe I ought to give those fellows a volley or two before I go.”
“Then up and at them as quickly as possible.”
Brown’s regiment administered a punishing volley, followed by rattling musket fire, then slowly worked its way back to safety, with McKinley helping guide the beleaguered brigade along the way. When he reached Hayes to report his mission accomplished, the commander exclaimed with wonder mixed with affection, “I never expected to see you in life again.”
Later that day the retreating troops, pursuing safety from Early’s formidable force, passed through Winchester, where many Union sympathizers watched in solemn silence. One pro-Union Quaker woman known to the troops stood at her doorway with tears streaming down her cheeks. The passing troops didn’t want to console her for fear of agitating her Confederate neighbors, but McKinley offered soothing words in a low voice: “Don’t worry, my dear madam, we are not hurt as much as it seems, and we shall be back here again in a few days.”
At nightfall, as the troops passed a battery of artillery left behind by retreating soldiers, McKinley asked Hayes for permission to retrieve the armaments. When the skeptical commander replied that it would take too much exertion and time, McKinley suggested the Twenty-third Ohio would provide sufficient manpower to get the job done.
“Well, McKinley,” replied Hayes, “ask them.” McKinley promptly went to his old E Company compatriots and collected enough volunteers to haul the guns back to the artillery captain who had left them behind in the haste of retreat. According to one witness, the captain “cried like a baby.”
A week after the battle, McKinley was promoted to captain (some eighteen months after his promotion to first lieutenant), and General Crook sought to get the efficient young officer into his command. Hayes didn’t want to lose him but could hardly refuse the general’s request, and so William McKinley, at age twenty-one, became acting adjutant general of Crook’s army, the unit’s leading administrative officer.
By this time things began to change in the Shenandoah, where the wily and relentless General Phil Sheridan was put in charge of all nearby troops and ordered to destroy Early’s force, as well as the Shenandoah Valley itself as a source of supplies for Confederate forces. General Early still had plenty of fight in him, though, and with a superior force he accosted Crook’s army in early September near Berryville, Virginia. But Crook and Hayes maneuvered themselves adroitly. “We whipped them,” Hayes recalled. McKinley’s job as a general’s staff officer during the encounter was to act as a high-grade messenger, darting through the battlefield carrying new or revised orders. It was hazardous work; McKinley once had his horse shot from under him.
Two weeks later the two armies clashed at Opequon Creek, and Sheridan logged his first big Shenandoah triumph, though the early indications didn’t look good for the Union men. At one point, McKinley was ordered to ride toward a contingent of troops on a distant hillside to determine if they were blue or gray. Russell Hastings remembered, “Away went McKinley, accompanied by his orderly, down the hill, through a cornfield, o
ver an open field, getting closer and closer to this body of cavalry. Soon he was seen to halt, hesitate a moment and then turn and ride rapidly away, toward his command. Now there was no need to question who these troopers were, as a heavy carbine fire was opened upon McKinley, and his orderly was seen to reel and fall from his saddle.”
Also during this battle, McKinley was sent to deliver verbal orders to General Isaac Duval to move his Second Division to the right of Sheridan’s main force. Duval promptly asked, “By what route shall I move my command?”
McKinley had not been told what orders to convey on Duval’s route. Hesitating, he looked around and replied, “I would go up this creek.” Duval grew queasy in the absence of specific orders; he didn’t want to make a faulty decision and later take the blame.
“I will not budge without definite orders,” he insisted. McKinley knew there was no time for any such explicit instructions. He quickly concluded he must ignore rank.
“This is a case of great emergency, General,” he declared. “I order you, by command of General Crook, to move your command up this ravine to a position on the right of the army.”
The general complied.
The young captain’s judgment was confirmed when the First Division commander, choosing his own route to the same point on the battlefield, arrived a half hour after Duval’s unit was firmly in place. But McKinley could have been in serious trouble if things had gone awry after he issued his demand in the name of General Crook but without any specific instruction from the general.
Sheridan spent October—“brown October,” as it became known—devastating the entire Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, fields, crops, and many farmhouses. “This valley will feed and forage no more rebel armies,” declared Hayes in a letter to his wife. But Jubal Early hadn’t given up, and on October 19 he unleashed a surprise attack at Cedar Creek that nearly overran the Union forces before they could be rallied by Sheridan, who had returned from a Washington conference the day before and was now twenty miles away in Winchester. As soon as he gleaned the seriousness of the situation, Sheridan rushed to the battlefront in one of the most storied rides of the Civil War, covering the last twelve miles at full gallop atop his legendary black stallion, Rienzi.
As he neared the battlefield, he ran into young McKinley, returning from an assignment to move an artillery battery to a more advantageous position. The captain took the general to Crook’s headquarters, and the top officers promptly repaired to a nearby red barn, where Sheridan gave orders for a major charge. McKinley later recalled, “Then it was suggested that Sheridan should ride down the lines of the disheartened troops.” His overcoat was pulled off, his epaulettes placed upon his shoulders, and he set out to rally his army. The subsequent charge reversed the battlefield fortunes and destroyed Early’s army and his ability to wage war in the Shenandoah. By destroying the primary supply source for most of Lee’s army, Sheridan’s victory put a squeeze on the entire Southern military effort.
This dramatic turnaround bolstered President Lincoln’s political standing and contributed to his solid reelection victory two weeks later. The officers and men of General Crook’s army cast their votes in the field and had them collected by election judges going wagon to wagon as the column was on the march. An ambulance served as an election booth, and ballots were tossed into an empty candle box. By this time McKinley had been promoted to brevet major for “gallant and meritorious service in West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.”
With Early’s army neutralized and the Shenandoah subdued, Sheridan’s valley campaign ended, and Crook’s army went quietly into winter quarters near Winchester. It was a cold winter, “colder than any huckleberry pudding I know of,” as Hayes put it. But warm clothing arrived soon, and turkeys were issued on Thanksgiving Day “at the rate of a pound to a man.” By the time spring arrived, it was clear that the North would be victorious and that the officers and men of the Shenandoah would face no more harrowing exploits to test the fates.
* * *
THE CIVIL WAR transformed young William McKinley much as his father’s white-hot forges transformed crude iron ore into ingots of pig iron ready for more sophisticated uses. He went to war as an unseasoned teenager with only a vague sense of who he was or what he would do with his life. He left the army an adult who had been severely tested in questions of intellect, administrative ability, leadership, and courage. He had passed these tests and demonstrated that men gravitated naturally to his side—and that many older men were drawn into roles of solicitous mentorship. As Hayes said of the young man, “I did literally and in fact know him like a book and love him like a brother.” For McKinley, the questions that bedevil many young men seeking a start in life—What is my worth? What can I accomplish? How far can I go?—had now been answered. There didn’t seem to be any need to place limits on his ambitions or plans.
Yet this new confidence and sense of self settled upon him softly, without ostentation or bravado. It meshed with a simplicity of temperament to produce a demeanor of heavy quiet. He learned the power of mystique, of leaving unsaid that which didn’t need explicit expression, of keeping people guessing as to his intentions or motives. If this led some to underestimate his intellect or resolve, he didn’t seem bothered by it. Thus emerged some of the enigmatic elements of his persona—a congenial and easygoing demeanor shrouding an increasingly restless ambition.
Upon entering the army, he received valuable counsel from an old veteran who took the young recruit under his wing. “Now, William,” he had said, “. . . you can easily make yourself so valuable to your superior that he cannot get along without you. Do little things not exactly under your supervision. Be conscientious in all your duties, and be faithful, and it will not be long until your superior officer will consider you an indispensable assistant.” McKinley embraced that advice, and it fueled a military rise that would help define him in later life. In discussing the war afterward, he seldom talked about his own experiences and never about his exploits of bravery. His focus was the meaning of the war, the sanctity of the Union, the evil of slavery, sometimes the joys of camaraderie. Yet everyone knew, even as he rose in American politics and gained national recognition, that the rank he attained in the war remained a point of pride. Asked once, after he had become U.S. president-elect following stints as a successful lawyer, a prominent congressman, and a big-state governor, how he wished to be addressed, he replied, “Call me Major. I earned that. I am not so sure of the rest.”
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Life and Work
PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS, PERSONAL ANGUISH
On August 28, 1865, barely a month after leaving the military, Will McKinley sat down at his parents’ home in Poland, Ohio, and crafted a letter to his army friend Russell Hastings. In a pensive but lighthearted mood, McKinley wrote, “How are my old fellows this blessed morning? I imagine I see you in a large rocking chair at home nursing your feet.” His imagination had free rein also with regard to himself. “I dream of lands, tenements and hereditaments,” he wrote, “and wake up [to] think I am an heir. Isn’t that strange?” He revealed that he was “getting along much better than I expected. Poland is very tame, but I have banished myself.” He had become “once more a ‘rustic youth,’ wrapped in the mysteries of law. ‘The solemnities of the marriage contract’ [and] the old customs of the Saxons & Danes are continually flitting through my brain.”
Having survived war’s carnage, McKinley set his sights on a legal career. By year’s end he had entered a training regimen in the firm of Charles E. Glidden, the same lawyer who had led the rousing rally at Poland back in June 1861 to get young men into the Union army. McKinley studied under Glidden’s tutelage for a year. Then, at the urging of his sister Anna, he enrolled in the Albany Law School in New York. An old friend from his Poland Seminary days, Robert L. Walker, loaned him money for the academic pursuit.
At Albany McKinley shared rooms with another aspiring lawyer, George Arrel, who later described his roommate as a dogged fel
low given to studying until one or two in the morning. He showed no interest in athletics or physical activity but enjoyed the theater and good company. He was a “jolly” companion, “always good-natured and looked at the bright side of everything.” He “despised vulgarity” but avoided quarrels and evinced a quiet determination that commanded respect. He made no secret of his ambition: to become a member of Congress like his wartime mentor, Rutherford Hayes, who had captured a House seat for Ohio in 1864.
While at Albany McKinley sent Hayes a letter revealing his interest in the law. The congressman, remembering McKinley’s organizational talents, replied that he would have recommended a career in railroading or some other industrial enterprise. “A man in any of our western towns with half your wit ought to be independent at forty in business,” wrote Hayes. “As a lawyer, a man sacrifices independence to ambition which is a bad bargain at the best.” He added, “However, you have decided for the present your profession, so I must hush.” McKinley carefully preserved the letter but discarded the advice.
After a year at Albany, McKinley returned to Ohio and passed his bar examination in March 1867. He settled in Canton, seat of Stark County, where his sister Anna had become a schoolteacher. Located about sixty miles south of Cleveland, Canton boasted a growing population that had hit 5,000 by war’s end. It was surrounded by rich agricultural lands and enjoyed close proximity to coal mines that fueled industrial expansion in the area. McKinley saw abundant prospects for financial betterment, and besides it was a charming and congenial place to live.
He rented office space in a building just off Market Street, the main city thoroughfare, and hung out his shingle as attorney at law. Soon his personal solidity and winning temperament gained attention and a smattering of clients. George Belden, a prominent lawyer and former judge whose office was in the same building, reacted with interest when McKinley inquired about joining Belden’s firm. “Do you know a young man by the name of McKinley (brother of our Miss McKinley), recently admitted to the Bar?” Belden asked his law partner, Joseph Frease. “Inquire as to this man McKinley, so that you can let me know all about him.”
President McKinley Page 4