Background
McCrary was born near Evansville, Indiana in 1835.
McCrary was born near Evansville, Indiana in 1835.
He attended the public schools (then, at age eighteen, taught in a country school). He studied law in Keokuk, Iowa at the law firm of future United States. Supreme Court Justice Samuel F. Miller, then was admitted to the bar in 1856, and, at the age of twenty, commenced practice in Keokuk.
He was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 1857, serving until 1860. In 1868 he was elected as a Republican to the first of four consecutive terms representing Iowa"s 1st congressional district in the United States. House. In his first month in Congress he received national attention for refusing to support an appropriation for a federal courthouse in Keokuk because the nation was in debt and he could not support such a courthouse in every district.
In the House, he chaired the Committee on Elections (in the Forty-second Congress), and the Committee on Railways and Canals (in the Forty-third Congress).
He published A Treatise on the American Law of Elections, in 1875. He helped create the Electoral Commission to resolve the outcome of the 1876 Presidential Election, and served on the committee that investigated the Cr Mobilier scandal.
He served as the under President Hayes from March 12, 1877 to December 1879, when he resigned to accept his next appointment. As Secretary, he withdrew federal troops from the remaining reconstruction governments in South Carolina and Louisiana, and used federal troops in the 1877 railway strike and in Mexican border disturbances.
But the greatest military conflicts during his watch occurred in the American West, in battles with certain Native American tribes in Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere.
(Hayes would later serve as MOLLUS commander-in-chief)
On December 1, 1879, President Hayes nominated McCrary to become a judge of the United States Circuit Court for the Eighth Circuit (which preceded the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit). Referencing his family"s financial need after his many years of public service, he left the court in 1884 to become general counsel for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. He died in Saint Joseph, Missouri in 1890, at age 54, after suffering from a stomach tumor.
He was interred in Oakland Cemetery in Keokuk.
Then he was a member of Iowa Senate between 1861 and 1865. In the Forty-fourth Congress, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, he was the author of a farsighted (but unsuccessful) bill to reorganize the federal courts to enable reasonable and prompt judicial review. He was elected as a 3rd Class (honorary) member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS).
This was probably due to President Hayes" influence as a prominent member of MOLLUS.