Many of you have visited Antietam National Battlefield at Antietam Creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland. The September 17, 1862 battle became the largest violent loss of life in the United States in our history. The marginal victory on the battlefield led to a major change in the war aims of the United States, with Lincoln releasing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, less than a week later.
If you went to the battlefield, you very likely viewed the Burnside Bridge where thousands of Union soldiers crossed the creek to try to disperse five hundred Georgians tenaciously defending the crossing from heights above it. Just a few minutes walk from Burnside Bridge is the William McKinley Monument. You can reach it by parking above Burnside Bridge at the parking area east of the bridge along Burnside Bridge Road, or you can park on the west side of the creek. You will park in the lot overlooking the bridge, where the Confederates took a heavy toll of Union troops.
If you come over the bridge, turn left along the short trail in within three minutes you’ll be upon the statue. If you park in the lot overlooking the bridge, just go a little south of the lot and you will see it. It is the largest monument in the area.
A recent president has said that his favorite president is William McKinley. You likely have not thought much about McKinley since you finished your high school history classes. But see, McKinley is newsworthy again.
Seeing such a large monument on the field, you might ask yourself if McKinley was a commander of either of the armies, or if he was a subordinate commander who had led a gallant charge or held off an overwhelming attack. No. Not at all. He was a soldier at the battle and he did become president. Even more important, McKinley was killed in Buffalo on September 14, 1901. The monument was put up by a grievous nation just two years later. Whatever McKinley did in September 1862 was more than outweighed by his assassination in September of 1901.
The monument is built into a hillside which makes it look unbalanced. The trails leading up to it are slightly hilly, but I am sixty-seven and I had no trouble reaching it.
McKinley was born in 1843 in Niles, Ohio. His father owned iron foundries throughout the Western Reserve and the family was prosperous. Like many in the area, the McKinleys were opposed to slavery and abolitionists. In his teens, William became a schoolteacher. After the Civil War broke out, McKinley enlisted in the Union Army in June of 1861. He was only eighteen years old.
McKinley’s local company was incorporated into the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. William Rosecrans was given command. McKinley was a teenaged future president but he was outranked by Rutherford B. Hayes who was a major at the time McKinley joined. So this regiment had two future presidents. It also had one future Senator, a future Supreme Court Justice, and a future Congressman.
The unit was sent to help occupy what is now West Virginia where it conducted guerrilla warfare against Confederate irregular forces. In the Summer of 1862, the 23rd was transferred to the defenses of Washington as Robert E Lee defeated John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The unit was sent from the capital to join the Army of the Potomac after Lee invaded Maryland and were assigned to the XI Corps under General Ambrose Burnside in the Kanawha Division.
On the front of the monument are the dates of McKinley’s birth and death.
On September 14, 1862 the 23rd was ordered into it first large-scale battle during the Battle of South Mountain. The regiment lost nearly a third of its men in this first major engagement. After the Confederate retreat, the regiment continued to pursue the enemy.
Three days later, the Army of the Potomac caught up with Lee’s army at Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg, Virginia. While you might think that the statue is to commemorate William McKinley’s presidency of his death, the heroic monument with a mythical woman reaching down to touch a bas-relief of McKinley’s two portraits. It is to honor McKinley’s actions at Antietam.
Shortly before Antietam, McKinley had been promoted to the post of a Commissary Sergeant, responsible for feeding the regiment.
The woman is reaching down a laurel branch to award McKinley a victory.
As you can see, the artist depicts the assassinated president (on the left) as a 19 year-old soldier and (on the right) as the president. Below the portraits is another bas-relief showing the regiment under fire at Antietam with food supplies being handed out.
The handsome statue is surrounded on three sides with a wrought iron fence.
Unfortunately, the park service has turned the field next to the monument into an unpaved parking lot.
Below, you can see the bas-relief with the commissary wagon on the right and McKinley standing up on the left delivering food.
In the close-up below you can see the future president giving coffee to a soldier.
The inscription says:
WILLIAM McKINLEY
January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901
Fourteen Years Member of Congress
Twice Governor of Ohio 1892-3 and 1894-5
Twice President of United States 1897 – 1900 – 1901
Sergeant McKinley Co. E. 23rd Ohio Vol. Infantry, while in charge of the Commissary Department, on the afternoon of the day of the battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, personally and without orders served “hot coffee” and “warm food” to every man in the Regiment, on this spot and in doing so had to pass under fire.
Historian Kathleen Thompson wrote that “Perhaps the most prominent of the monuments around Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam is not to a regiment who fought there, or indeed any fighting at all. It is a monument to coffee.”
Below is a close-up of the portraits. Many visitors miss these bas-reliefs, and they have worn over the century they have been on display, but they are very good.
William McKinley may have fought to reunited the Union and to end slavery, but as president he also presided over the Spanish-American War. He was goaded into declaring the war when the battleship Maine was supposedly sunk by Spanish agents in Havana Harbor in Cuba. Most modern analysts say that sabotage had nothing to do with the disaster. McKinley used the war to gain colonial possessions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, which were administered badly from the view of the natives and led to thousands of deaths in the Philippines over the next decade.
McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. Because of his foreign-sounding name, the United States put in new restrictions on immigration. In fact, Czolgosz was born in Michigan.
After I finished photographing the monument, I went across the Potomac River to Shepherdstown with historian Damian Shiels for dinner.
