Major McKinley: William McKinley and the Civil War.

By William H. Armstrong. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 191. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-87338-657-4.)

In a July 1861 message to Congress, President Abraham Lincoln hailed the caliber of the volunteer regiments. There is scarcely one, he said, "from which there could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself' (p. 42). He could have been thinking of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, from whose ranks eventually emerged two state governors, a brace of lieutenant governors, four U.S. congressmen, a senator, a Supreme Court justice, several diplomats, and not one but two presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley. In his study, Hayes of the Twenty-third: The Civil War Volunteer Officer (New York, 1965), T. Harry Williams provided an exemplary sketch of the military career of the first of the regiment's presidents. With Major McKinley, William H. Armstrong aims to do much the same for Hayes's political protege.

Enlisting as a private in the early months of the war, the eighteen-year-old McKinley caught the eye of his superiors by his amiability and steady habits--qualities that would mark his later political career. This led to his promotion to commissary sergeant, a position in which he displayed honesty, ingenuity, and meticulous business habits. It was in this capacity that he performed his best-known military feat of the war when, at the battle of Antietam, at great personal risk, he brought rations to his beleaguered regiment. Though undoubtedly welcome, this deed may not strike some as sufficiently heroic to warrant the thirty-three-foot-high commemorative monument later erected on the battlefield--but they also serve who stand and pour hot coffee. Promotion to lieutenant followed, as did a term on the staff of Colonel Hayes, who took the personable young officer under his wing. He served throughout the entire war and was mustered out with the brevet rank of major, which would be his preferred title of address even after he was elected president.

McKinley's subsequent political career was furthered at each step by the military connections he had made during the war. Like so many of his generation, the Civil War was the formative experience of his life. He would draw upon that experience to good effect as president when he was called upon to manage the Spanish-American War, becoming, in T. Harry Williams's estimation, a far more effective war leader than Woodrow Wilson would later be. Chronicling this career has clearly been a labor of love for Armstrong, a native of McKinley's home town of Canton, Ohio. Though not a professional historian, he has managed to avoid many of the pitfalls into which amateurs too often stumble, producing a brief but well-crafted study that should be the last word on this small corner of the Civil War.

ALLAN PESKIN
Cleveland State University