William McKinley: The 25th US President, The Spanish-American War, and the Birth of a Global Superpower

1. Civil War Private at Antietam to Ohio Governor & Tariff Champion

William McKinley Jr. was born on January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio. Enlisting as an eighteen-year-old private in the 23rd Ohio Infantry in 1861, McKinley served under Rutherford B. Hayes. At the bloodbath of the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), Sergeant McKinley drove a horse-drawn supply wagon under heavy Confederate artillery and musket fire to serve hot coffee and rations to pinned-down Union troops, earning a battlefield commission to lieutenant from Governor David Tod. McKinley was the last US President to have fought in the Civil War.

Serving fourteen years in Congress, McKinley authored the protective McKinley Tariff of 1890 and served two terms as Governor of Ohio (1892–1896). In 1896, managed by industrialist Mark Hanna in his famous "Front Porch Campaign" from Canton, Ohio, McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan in the most transformative realignment election of the Gilded Age.

3. The Spanish-American War (1898): "A Splendid Little War"

When the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, McKinley reluctantly asked Congress for war against Spain to liberate Cuba.

In a lightning 100-day conflict termed by Ambassador John Hay as "a splendid little war," Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, and American forces defeated Spain in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Under the Treaty of Paris (1898), Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine archipelago to the United States for $20 million, and recognized Cuban independence. In July 1898, McKinley also signed the Newlands Resolution annexing the Republic of Hawaii.

6. The September 1901 Assassination in Buffalo & Ascension of TR

On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was greeting visitors in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Deranged anarchist Leon Czolgosz approached the president with a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver concealed beneath a handkerchief, firing two bullets into McKinley's chest and abdomen.

As crowds tackled the assassin, McKinley whispered to his aides: "Be easy with him, boys," and instructed them to break the news gently to his invalid wife, Ida. Despite early signs of recovery, gangrene developed around the internal wound. McKinley died peacefully on September 14, 1901, whispering his favorite hymn, "Nearer, My God, to Thee." His death elevated 42-year-old Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, inaugurating the Progressive Era.

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