About
the Author
Alexander Kelly McClure
(1828-1909)
Alexander Kelly McClure was born in Sherman’s Valley,
Pennsylvania to the farming family of Alexander and Isabella Anderson
McClure on January 9, 1828. He received little formal schooling and
was apprenticed to a tanner in 1843. He also assisted as a printer
at the local Perry County Freeman, and so began a long and distinguished
career as a newspaperman. Within a few years he was editor and publisher
of the Juniata Sentinel in Mifflintown, and before long the strident
Whig views he had developed earlier at the Freeman came to the notice
of Pennsylvania political leaders. The youthful McClure was appointed
to the staff of William F. Johnson, the first Whig governor of the
Commonwealth, with the honorary rank of colonel. In 1850 he served
as the deputy United States marshal for Juniata County thanks to Whig
president Millard Fillmore. Two years later McClure relocated to Franklin
County, took over the Franklin Repository, and then turned it into
one of the most influential newspapers in the state.
A prominent citizen
of Chambersburg for two decades, McClure studied law and was called
to the Franklin Bar in 1856. Politics and the press,
however, remained his major interests. In 1853 he had been selected
as the Whig candidate for auditor-general, the youngest man up to that
time in Pennsylvania nominated for a state office. He lost that race,
and his Whig passion began turning toward the newly emerging Republican
Party. McClure carried on a spirited conflict with the local Democratic
Valley Spirit through his own press in Chambersburg, the powerfully
Republican Repository. He attended the Commonwealth’s Republican
organizing convention in Pittsburgh in 1855, was elected to the state
House of Representatives in 1858, and the following year became a member
of the state Senate. He played an even more prominent role in Republican
politics in 1860 when, still only thirty-two years of age, he and Andrew
Curtin succeeded in bringing over the Pennsylvania delegation at the
national convention from Simon Cameron to Abraham Lincoln. McClure
immediately launched himself in the state and national elections as
chairman of the Republican State Committee, constructing an efficient
and widely organized campaign that swept his friend Curtin to the governorship
and Lincoln to a sweeping Pennsylvania victory.
On the outbreak of war,
Senator McClure became the chair of the state's Senate Committee on
Military Affairs. He acted as spokesman for Curtin
and offered the governor strong support within the legislature. He
assisted Curtin in the calling of the influential meeting of “Loyal
War Governors of the North,” held in Altoona on September 24
and 25, 1862. He was also commissioned as an assistant adjutant general
under President Lincoln and helped provide seventeen Pennsylvania regiments
to the Union armies. His own personal brush with war came with the
Confederate occupations of Chambersburg, the second of which, in 1863,
saw him meet with General Lee personally. In 1864 a third Confederate
foray into Pennsylvania saw the town burned to the ground with McClure’s “Norland” estate
on the northern outskirts deliberately targeted for destruction. He
never rebuilt his estate in Chambersburg (Norland was later to become
much of the campus of Wilson College), and instead moved to Philadelphia,
opening a law office in that city. Around this same time, he also invested
in western mining. As a representative of the Philadelphia-based Montana
Gold and Silver Mining Company, he traveled and worked, in 1867 and
1868, as superintendent of the mill that was built with company funds
on the Oro Cache vein in the Montana Territory.
The remainder of his political
career saw McClure take on an increasingly independent bent. He supported
Ulysses S. Grant at the 1868 Republican
National Convention, but by the time of the General’s reelection
bid, McClure had become disillusioned with the party; he then led the
Pennsylvania delegation to the Liberal Republican National Convention
that nominated Horace Greeley. Back home in Philadelphia, he had similarly
broken party ranks, winning a hard fought election to the state Senate
on the Citizen’s ticket, with Democratic endorsement. In 1874
McClure ran for mayor, with similar backing, on the popular platform
of anti-corruption, losing by only a few hundred votes. Not giving
up, the following year he and Frank McLaughlin founded the Times as
an independent, anti-corruption voice for Philadelphia. McClure remained
its editor until 1901 when he sold the newspaper to Adolph Ochs.
McClure
had earlier, in 1869, published letters of his travels in Montana,
but from 1892 onwards he began to write on his reminiscences
of a long political career. He published works on Andrew Curtin, Abraham
Lincoln, and Pennsylvania politics as he had seen them, and he also
wrote a more contemporary biography of William McKinley. Alexander
Kelly McClure died in Philadelphia on June 6, 1909.
Please visit the following link for materials authored
by Alexander Kelly McClure maintained in the Their Own Words database:
McClure, Alexander
Kelly, 1828-1909.
Researched, authored, and
edited by John Osborne, Ph. D., and James Gerencser.
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