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WILLIAM MCKINLEY-A STUDY OF HIS CHARACTER

From a new photo. for San Francisco Wasp.

W

AND CAREER.

BY EUGENE V. SMALLEY.

ILLIAM MCKINLEY, SENIOR, the father of Governor McKinley, was cne of the pioneer ironmasters of eastern Ohio. Beds of rather lean iron ore here and there, lying in close proximity to seams of bituminous coal, led to early attempts at iron making in the eastern counties of the State, where the pig metal could be hauled in wagons to the Ohio River or shipped on the canals constructed in the thirties and early forties. The elder McKinley seems to have inherited his bent for metal working from his maternal grandfather, Andrew Rose, who was sent home to Bucks county, Pennsylvania, from the Revolutionary army, to make bullets and can

non. The Roses traced back to a Puritan ancestor who went from England to Holland with his coreligionists and followed the Pilgrims to America. The McKinleys are of the vigorous and prolific Scotch-Irish stock that has left as broad and permanent an impress upon the middle belt of the United States as the Puritan stock has left upon the northern belt, from New England to Oregon. The Scotch-Irish element never has had its full due at the hands of historians. Too much stress has been placed upon the influence of the New England element in the formation of our national character. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, central and southern Ohio and Kentucky it is from the Scotch Irish strain of blood that has come a very large proportion of the statesmen, jurists and successful men of affairs. The dominant traits of this virile stock are industry, thrift, strong religious convictions and serious views of life. It is a large boned, muscular, long-lived race and it has kept up its fecundity to our own day, whereas the New England stock has become so barren that in its original home it hardly keeps its numbers good.

The grandfather of William McKinley, Senior, was a revolutionary soldier named David McKinley, who campaigned in eastern Pennsylvania and whose record is in the Pension Office at Washington. He was for a long time on the Revolutionary pension roll and died at an advanced age at the home of his grandson in New Lisbon, Ohio. The biographers of Governor McKinley all dwell upon the paternal line of ancestry in seeking for the currents of hereditary tendency which have gone to the making of the famous statesman and pay small attention to the maternal line; yet a very slight acquaintance with the Governor's mother, who is now in her eighty-seventh year is enough to convince one that it is from her and not from his father that he gets his leading traits of character. He resembles her strongly in face, in manner and in many mental peculiarities. She was an Allison, of Scotch Covenanter stock. There were Allisons among the vic. tims of Claverhouse's dragoons, and there were other Allisons who after long imprisonment for conscience sake left their homes in the Lowlands and sought religious freedom in the American colonies. Nancy Allison McKinley is an exceedingly competent, strong brained woman. She is the mother of nine children, all of whom lived to maturity and seven of whom are still living. The rearing and education of this large family, and the struggle with the straitened circumstances incident to life in the early days in Ohio, absorbed her energies and developed

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Ohio. Mrs. McKinley set her mind on Poland as a good place to rear her large family and when the boy William was two years old she persuaded the father to make the important move. In Poland the McKinleys established themselves in a large whitepainted wooden house, with green blinds, of a style of architecture very common on the Western Reserve and brought from New England by the first settlers. There was an L for the kitchen, and in the gable, which faced the street, was the customary rising sun device of painted slats. Maple trees stood in the yard and a white picket fence separated the little domain from the sidewalk. This house is still standing, but the birth-place house in Niles was recently demolished. In the Poland house young McKinley grew to manhood.

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Drawn for the World.

THE LATE WILLIAM M'KINLEY, SR.

her natural gifts of management, thrift and earnestness. She is profoundly religious and at the same time intensely practical. She imparted the stamp of her vigorous character to all her offspring. There was no black sheep in her flock. The children grew up to be serious, competent, independent men and women. William was the seventh child.

BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY HOME LIFE.

The senior William McKinley, born in 1807, lived to be eighty-five. He was only twenty years old when he married Nancy Allison, aged eighteen. He was interested in furnaces and foundries in Columbiana county for many years and most of the children were born at New Lisbon, but in 1843, when his seventh child was born, he was managing a furnace at Niles, in Trumbull county. The family lived in a long, low two-story frame building, in one end of which a country store was kept. The sojourn in Niles was of but short duration. The mother, always the guiding spirit in the household, was anxious about the education of the children, and Niles was only a petty village of ironworkers and its sole educational equipment was the country district school. About twenty miles to the south, down the Mahoning Valley, was the village of Poland, which possessed a seminary for boys and girls of the type of the New England academy-a type reproduced in many of the towns on the Western Reserve of

Drawn for the World.

MRS. NANCY ALLISON M'KINLEY (MAJOR M'KINLEY'S MOTHER).

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people were keenly interested in the intellectual, religious and reform movements of the time. They were much given to religious controversy, but neighbor to the most devout Congregationalist or Methodist would be found the so-called infidel, or the come-outer," who had left his church because it sanctioned slavery and who had dropped the Bible for the study of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason." The early anti-slavery agitators, Garrison, Pillsbury, Henry C. Wright, Stephen and Abby Kelly Foster, made annual tours through this region, preaching liberty for the negroes of the South. Salem, about twenty miles from Poland, was a centre for the abolition movement and sustained a newspaper called the Anti-Slavery Bugle, which was a Western

BIRTHPLACE OF MAJOR M'KINLEY AT NILES, OHIO.

echo of Garrison's Liberator. The anti-slavery orators frequently visited Poland while McKinley was a boy and in Poland was supposed to exist a station on the "Underground Railroad," where fugitive slaves from Virginia were concealed and helped along on their way to Canada under cover of the darkness of night. McKinley was eight years old when the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 was passed by Congress, and he remembers well the excitement that prevailed and the meeting held in Poland to which Ben Wade came from his home in Ashtabula county, and which adopted resolutions declaring that come weal, come woe, come stripes, imprisonment or death," the people of that village would not obey the law and would continue to give food and shelter to the poor slaves fleeing from oppression. Thus young McKinley came in his boyhood under the same influences of agitation against slavery which Garfield felt in his early manhood and of which Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade were the leaders on the Reserve.

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In the forties and the fifties the Reserve was the scene of much sectarian controversy. Alexander Campbell made frequent missionary tours in this region from his home in the neighboring Panhandle of Virginia, building up his new sect of the Disci

ples, based on the rejection of all creeds and the acceptance of the Bible as the only rule of faith and conduct. The Mormons built their first temple at Kirtland and then moved off in a body to Nauvoo, Illinois, under the lead of their prophet, Joseph Smith. Each of the old Protestant sects had grave doubts as to the salvation of the other sects. One branch of the Presbyterians thought it wicked to sing anything but psalms in church. The Methodists called their churches meeting-houses and put no steeples on them. They objected to jewelry and to all finery in dress and denounced dancing and card-playing as devices of the devil. The Baptists would fellowship with no one who had not been dipped in the water. The Dunkards washed each

other's feet as a religious rite. Near Poland was a strong community of Germans called Omish, who wore no buttons and fastened their coats and trousers with hooks and eyes and strings for conscience sake. Over all the strife of the warring sects the Quakers exercised a benign influence. At sixteen, William McKinley, Junior, joined the Methodist Church, the church of his parents, and he has remained in its communion ever since. He is as tenacious of his religious opinions as of his views on a protective tariff, and here is shown the influence of his strain of Scotch Covenanter blood. To change his belief because of the changes in the currents of modern thought would not be a possibility for him.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION.

I like to dwell upon the environment of Western Reserve life which helped to form the character of the future statesman. I was myself born upon the Reserve, some forty miles from McKinley's Poland home, and I remember vividly the religious controversies, the anti-slavery agitation, the first movement for woman's rights advocated by Lucretia Mott, the numerous temperance revivals, the signing of the pledge as a boy, the debating club at the "Centre," where the farmers wrestled with the questions of the day, the influence of Horace Greeley's Weekly Tribune, great bundles of which came to every country post-office, the ardent desire of the boys and girls for higher education than the district schools afforded, and the wholesome, patient, self-denying life of the farms and villages. This region has produced a long list of men who have made their mark in our national history.

To Poland Seminary came ambitious young men and young women from the neighboring farms, eager for the book-learning of the schools and believing that its possession would open broad highways to success in life. Some engaged rooms and board at the rate of two dollars a week and others reduced this very modest cost of living by taking rooms alone and eating the victuals sent in to them weekly by their parents. None of these bright young peo

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