McKinley was a homebody and felt entirely comfortable conducting his campaign from the front porch of his house in Canton

From The Boys of '98 by Dale L. Walker. About President William McKinley.

McKinley knew about war. He had enlisted at age seventeen as a private in the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteers, serving under another Ohio-born future president, Rutherford B. Hayes, and saw action on the bloody ground of Antietam.

A lawyer, former U.S. congressman and governor of Ohio, he had won the Republican Party nomination for president at the St. Louis convention in 1896 and handily defeated his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan. McKinley was a homebody and felt entirely comfortable conducting his campaign from the front porch of his house in Canton.

Age fifty-four when he took office, he was a short, stout, well-tailored man addicted to cigars (but never photographed with one) and to such eye-glazing political esoterica as tariff reform, international bimetallic agreements and the gold standard. He exuded palpable charm, had a presidential bearing and a natural dignity, but to all but his closest Ohio cronies, he seemed reserved if not cold. Those who knew of his history spoke of his stoicism. He had endured the tragedy of his two daughters dying in infancy and doted on his beloved wife Ida, afflicted with terrible migraines and epilepsy, refusing to permit these illnesses to exclude her from White House dinners and banquets. (When Ida McKinley suffered a petit mal seizure at one of these dinners, the president placed a napkin over her contorting face until the seizures subsided, doing this, to the astonishment of his guests, without breaking stride in the table talk.)

Different times, different burdens, different mores.