A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible.
Enough of these survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.
It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage.

But it made the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters.

There was no end of objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E.
Lee and Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate, if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.
The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion for this.
It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary in foreign lands.

But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union and peace.
There had been a weary and varied interim.

Sectionalism proved a sturdy plant.