William McKinley
William McKinley stepped onto the front porch of his Canton, Ohio, home in the summer of 1896 and met the world. Delegations arrived by train, marching through the streets to hear him speak. The railroads had subsidized the excursion rates so heavily that one pro-silver newspaper complained that visiting McKinley had been made cheaper than staying at home. It was a strange, almost theatrical campaign for the presidency. And yet it worked.
McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until an assassin's bullet ended his life in 1901. He was the last president to have fought in the Civil War, the architect of a tariff that bore his name, and the man who led the country into a short, decisive war with Spain that left the United States in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. He won two presidential elections against the same opponent. He was shot by an anarchist at a public reception he had refused to cancel.
How did a small-town Ohio lawyer become the dominant Republican of his era? What drove him to pursue overseas territories while warning, at his inauguration, against the temptation of territorial aggression? And what does it mean that the man who set the terms of American foreign policy for a generation has been largely overshadowed by the vice president who replaced him?
McKinley was born on the 29th of January 1843 in Niles, Ohio, the seventh of nine children. His family's immigrant ancestor, David McKinley, was born in Dervock, County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland. Both sides of the family had roots in iron making. His father operated foundries across Ohio, in New Lisbon, Niles, Poland, and finally Canton.
The McKinley household was steeped in the abolitionist and Whiggish politics common to Ohio's Western Reserve, and that outlook was reinforced by the family's staunch Methodism. McKinley became active in the local Methodist church at sixteen and remained a pious Methodist for the rest of his life.
In 1852, the family moved from Niles to Poland, Ohio, so the children could attend better schools. McKinley graduated from Poland Seminary in 1859 and enrolled the following year at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He stayed for one year before returning home ill and depressed. Family finances had declined by the time his health recovered, and he could not go back. He worked as a postal clerk and then taught school near Poland before the Civil War swept that quiet life aside.
He also studied at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, where he later served on the board of trustees. The path from the iron-making McKinleys of Antrim to the halls of Congress ran through these modest Ohio towns, and through one more stop: the battlefields of Virginia.
In June 1861, McKinley and his cousin William McKinley Osbourne enlisted as privates in the newly formed Poland Guards. They were consolidated with other units in Columbus to form the 23rd Ohio Infantry. The men were unhappy to learn they would not be permitted to elect their own officers, as earlier Ohio regiments had done. Major Rutherford B. Hayes convinced the men to accept what the government had issued them, and his manner in doing so made a lasting impression on McKinley. Their friendship would endure until Hayes's death in 1893.
The 23rd Ohio's first battle contact came in September 1861 at Carnifex Ferry in what is now West Virginia. McKinley moved through quartermaster and commissary duties, was promoted to sergeant in April 1862, and the regiment was soon called east. The 23rd was the first regiment to encounter the Confederates at the Battle of South Mountain on the 14th of September 1862. They continued to Sharpsburg, where they fought at the Battle of Antietam, one of the bloodiest single days of the war. McKinley came under heavy fire bringing rations to soldiers on the front line.
Promotion came steadily after that. He was commissioned a second lieutenant after Antietam and made captain following the defeat at Kernstown in July 1864. At Berryville, a horse was shot out from under him. At Cedar Creek on the 19th of October 1864, he helped rally retreating troops and helped turn the tide. He voted that November for the first time in a presidential election, casting his ballot for Abraham Lincoln.
He later described the fighting at Cloyd's Mountain on the 9th of May 1864 as "as desperate as any witnessed during the war." Just before the war ended, McKinley received his final promotion, a brevet commission as major. He was the only president who began his Civil War service as an enlisted man and ended it as a brevet major. In July 1865, the Veterans Corps was mustered out, and McKinley returned to Ohio.
After studying law in Poland and briefly at Albany Law School, McKinley was admitted to the bar in Warren, Ohio, in March 1867. He settled in Canton, the county seat of Stark County, and formed a partnership with George W. Belden, an experienced lawyer and former judge. His practice prospered enough that he bought a block of buildings on Main Street, which gave him a small rental income for decades.
In 1876, McKinley was nominated for Ohio's 17th congressional district on the strength of his appeal to blue-collar voters. He defeated the Democratic nominee, Levi L. Lamborn, by 3,300 votes. His main campaign theme was support for protective tariffs.
From his first term in Congress, McKinley was the Republican expert on protection. Canton had prospered as a center for farm equipment manufacturing precisely because of tariff protection, and biographer Margaret Leech noted that this local experience likely shaped his political thinking. When a spot opened on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee after James Garfield was elected president in 1880, McKinley was selected to fill it, gaining the seat after only two terms.
The Democrats gerrymandered McKinley repeatedly. After his district was redrawn in 1878, he won anyway. He was unseated on a contested election after 1882, ran again, and returned. For the 1890 election, the Democrats placed Stark County in the same district as Holmes County, a strongly Democratic area. They estimated the new boundaries would produce a Democratic majority of 2,000 to 3,000 votes. The Republicans sent their best orators to Canton, including Secretary of State Blaine and Speaker Reed. McKinley tirelessly campaigned across the new district, explaining the McKinley Tariff to its 40,000 voters. He lost by 300 votes. It remains notable that the Democrats considered gerrymandering him a higher priority than defeating him in debate.
McKinley won the Ohio governorship in 1891 by some 20,000 votes, then again in 1893 with the largest percentage of any Ohio governor since the Civil War. The Panic of 1893 had struck the nation, and it had also struck McKinley personally. A Youngstown businessman named Robert Walker had lent McKinley money years earlier, and in gratitude McKinley had long guaranteed Walker's borrowings. McKinley had never tracked what he was signing; in February 1893, he was called upon to repay debts exceeding $100,000. He initially proposed to resign as governor and earn the money practicing law.
Instead, wealthy supporters including Mark Hanna and Chicago publisher H. H. Kohlsaat became trustees of a fund to cover the notes. All of the McKinleys' property was placed in the hands of the trustees, and their supporters raised and contributed a substantial sum. All property was returned to them by the end of 1893. When McKinley later asked for the list of contributors so he could repay them, the list was refused him. The episode, rather than damaging his reputation, increased public sympathy.
For the 1896 election, Hanna built McKinley's campaign machinery quietly and early, establishing a presence in the South and border states before other candidates even organized their efforts. McKinley needed 453-and-a-half delegate votes; he secured nearly half that number from the South and border states alone. Senator Platt later lamented that Hanna "had the South practically solid before some of us awakened."
The general election pitted McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, who had electrified the Democratic convention with his Cross of Gold speech. Bryan mounted an unprecedented whistle-stop tour by train. McKinley declined to match him, explaining: "I might just as well set up a trapeze on my front lawn and compete with some professional athlete as go out speaking against Bryan. I have to think when I speak." His front porch campaign in Canton became a legend. On the 3rd of November 1896, McKinley won 51% of the vote and an ample majority in the Electoral College.
Sworn in as president on the 4th of March 1897, McKinley's first major legislative act was the Dingley Tariff, which he signed on the 24th of July 1897, less than five months into his presidency. It raised tariff rates on wool, sugar, and luxury goods.
The Cuba crisis had been simmering for years. When American consul Fitzhugh Lee reported riots in Havana in January 1898, McKinley agreed to send the battleship USS Maine. On the 15th of February, the Maine exploded and sank, killing 266 men. A court of inquiry ruled the ship had been blown up by an underwater mine. McKinley continued negotiating for Cuban independence after the ruling, but Spain refused his proposals. On the 11th of April, McKinley turned the matter over to Congress. Congress declared war on the 20th of April, adding the Teller Amendment to disavow any intention of annexing Cuba.
Within a fortnight, Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay. By the time American troops arrived in the Philippines at the end of June 1898, McKinley had decided Spain would be required to surrender the archipelago. The war in the Caribbean ended when Santiago surrendered on the 17th of July. Puerto Rico fell to an American invasion the same month.
The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 18th of December 1898, transferred Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States. Spain relinquished Cuba. The United States agreed to pay Spain $20 million. The Senate approved the treaty on the 6th of February 1899 by a vote of 57 to 27.
Hawaii followed a different path. McKinley backed a joint resolution rather than a treaty to achieve annexation, foreseeing the difficulty of reaching a two-thirds Senate majority. He told his secretary Cortelyou, "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." The Newlands Resolution passed both houses by wide margins, and McKinley signed it into law on the 8th of July 1898. Hawaii became a territory in 1900. The Philippines, which remained under American control until independence in 1946, were the most consequential and contested of those acquisitions.
McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act on the 14th of March 1900, using a gold pen to do so. The path to that moment had been longer than it might appear. In his first congressional term, McKinley had voted for the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which mandated large government purchases of silver. By 1896 he was advocating "sound money" based on gold, but leaving the door open to bimetallism by international agreement.
American envoy Edward O. Wolcott traveled to London to gauge British interest in bimetallism. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury showed some openness, indicating he would consider reopening Indian mints to silver coinage if the Viceroy's Executive Council there agreed. Indian administrators ultimately rejected the proposal. With that avenue closed, McKinley moved firmly toward the gold standard, and the political pressure for free silver eased anyway as gold strikes in the Yukon and Australia increased the monetary supply.
On civil rights, McKinley's record was one of missed chances. He had spoken out against lynching as governor of Ohio, and most Black voters who could still vote supported him in 1896. In office, he made some appointments of Black Americans to low-level government posts but fewer than his Republican predecessors had. When Black postmasters in Hogansville, Georgia, in 1897, and in Lake City, South Carolina, the following year were assaulted, McKinley issued no statement of condemnation. When white supremacists violently overthrew the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina, on the 10th of November 1898, in what came to be known as the Wilmington insurrection, McKinley refused requests to send federal marshals or troops to protect Black citizens.
He visited Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute during a Southern tour in late 1898 and also visited Confederate memorials. In his tour of the South, McKinley did not mention the racial violence. Historian Lewis Gould concluded that McKinley "lacked the vision to transcend the biases of his day and to point toward a better future for all Americans."
McKinley won re-election on the 6th of November 1900, defeating Bryan a second time and carrying even Bryan's home state of Nebraska. It was the largest Republican presidential victory since 1872. His second term began on the 4th of March 1901.
His personal secretary George Cortelyou had been watching the pattern of anarchist violence in Europe with concern. The previous year, King Umberto I of Italy had been assassinated. Cortelyou twice tried to remove a public reception from McKinley's planned visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley refused both times.
On the 5th of September 1901, McKinley delivered a speech at the fairgrounds to a crowd of 50,000, urging reciprocity treaties to give American manufacturers access to foreign markets. It was intended as a keynote to his second term. In the crowd was Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist who had heard a speech by Emma Goldman in Cleveland and decided to act. He had tried to get close enough to shoot the day before and failed.
On the 6th of September, at the Temple of Music on the exposition grounds, Czolgosz concealed his gun in a handkerchief. When he reached the head of the reception line, he shot McKinley twice in the abdomen at close range. McKinley urged his aides to break the news gently to Ida and to call off the mob that had set upon Czolgosz, a request that may have saved his assassin's life. McKinley died eight days later, on the 14th of September 1901.
Theodore Roosevelt, whose rise McKinley had watched with a cautious eye, was sworn in as president. The territories McKinley acquired, aside from the Philippines, remain under American control today. Historians regard the 1896 election as a realigning moment that ended the political stalemate of the post-Civil War era and inaugurated the Republican-dominated Fourth Party System. McKinley himself is generally ranked in the middle tier of presidents, a judgment shaped in no small part by the outsized shadow cast by the man who replaced him.
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Common questions
Who was William McKinley and when did he serve as president?
William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from the 4th of March 1897 until his death on the 14th of September 1901. He was a Republican from Canton, Ohio, who won two presidential elections against William Jennings Bryan and led the country during the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Who assassinated William McKinley and why?
Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot McKinley twice in the abdomen on the 6th of September 1901 at the Temple of Music during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Czolgosz had been inspired by a speech from anarchist Emma Goldman in Cleveland and believed his act would advance the anarchist cause. McKinley died eight days later, on the 14th of September 1901.
What territories did McKinley acquire for the United States?
McKinley oversaw the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 via the Newlands Resolution and, through the Treaty of Paris signed on the 18th of December 1898, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain following the Spanish-American War. His administration also partitioned the Samoan Islands with Britain and Germany, acquiring what is now American Samoa.
What was the McKinley Tariff of 1890?
The McKinley Tariff of 1890 was a protective tariff that McKinley guided through Congress as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It imposed tariffs on foreign goods to shield American manufacturers from competition. The tariff became a major campaign issue and contributed to McKinley's defeat in the 1890 congressional election, where he lost by 300 votes after the Democrats gerrymandered his district.
What was McKinley's Front Porch Campaign in the 1896 election?
During the 1896 presidential election, McKinley declined to campaign by train as his opponent William Jennings Bryan did, instead staying at his home in Canton, Ohio, and receiving delegations of voters on his front porch. Railroads subsidized the excursion rates so heavily that visiting Canton was described as cheaper than staying home. McKinley won the election on the 3rd of November 1896 with 51% of the vote.
What was William McKinley's role in the Civil War?
McKinley enlisted as a private in the Poland Guards in June 1861 and served in the 23rd Ohio Infantry, fighting at Carnifex Ferry, South Mountain, Antietam, Cloyd's Mountain, Cedar Creek, and other engagements. He rose from private to brevet major, making him the only president who began his Civil War service as an enlisted man and ended it at that rank. He served until the Veterans Corps was mustered out in July 1865.
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14 references cited across the entry
- 1bookHistory of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity, Volume 2William Levere — Lakeside Press — 1911
- 3webWilliam McKinley Event TimelineNovember 10, 2021
- 5newsLetter from an African American citizen of Wilmington to the PresidentNovember 13, 1898
- 6newsMount McKinley Will Be Renamed DenaliJulie Hirschfeld Davis — August 30, 2015
- 7webRestoring names that honor American greatnessJanuary 20, 2025
- 8bookEncyclopedia of U.S. Campaigns, Elections, and Electoral BehaviorKenneth F. Warren — SAGE — 2008
- 10webA Thing Well Begun Is Half DoneCornell University