The shooting in New York, on September 6, 1901, of President William McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz marked the end of an era in the most tragic way possible. McKinley died on September 14, 1901, almost twenty years exactly since another president, James A. Garfield, had succumbed, on September 16, 1881, also as a result of an assassin's bullet. Beginning with the murder of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, McKinley became the third American president to be assassinated, and the last of a generation of American leaders whose lives had been shaped – and in Lincoln's case, abruptly terminated – by the Civil War. Garfield and McKinley were both Union veterans of the Civil War, as indeed every elected president had been since 1868. Garfield's Civil War record had been a distinguished one. He was promoted to major general before taking up political office at the end of 1863. McKinley, by contrast, was the only Republican president since Lincoln not to have been a general in the Civil War, but his public life had begun with that conflict. He had joined the Ohio Volunteer Infantry at just eighteen years of age, and ended the war as a brevet major.