William Darrah Kelley (April 12, 1814 – January 9, 1890) was an American politician from Philadelphia who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania's 4th congressional district from 1861 to 1890.

Since the law at the time said that all a man's possessions must be sold to discharge his debts, with no exemptions allowed for widows or orphans, all of the family's treasures were spread out on tables to be auctioned off.

[4] Later, a reporter described Kelley in the United States House as "slightly noticeable for the disfigurement of the lid of one of his eyes, received in a machine shop in which his youth was educated -- a man who literally hammered his way up in life, and who is capable of hammering his representative way through life, on whatsoever paths social tyranny or political injustice seek to bar man's progress to a pure democracy.

"[5] He became involved in politics as an antislavery member of the Democratic Party, and in 1846 Governor Francis R. Shunk appointed Kelley a Judge of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, where he served until 1856.

Kelley came to national attention after his first great Republican address in 1854, in Spring Garden Hall Philadelphia, where he spoke against the slave trade, "Slavery in the Territories", was published and widely read.

Nevertheless, during the American Civil War he volunteered during a September, 1862 emergency call up for service in the Independent Artillery Company, a home guard unit.

[17] In 1872, Kelley was among the congressmen accused by the "New York Sun" of having taken bribes from Credit Mobilier, the company formed to construct the Union Pacific Railroad.

Kelley, who protested his innocence, had been given Credit Mobilier stock and paid for it out of its dividends, but no evidence showed that he had been asked for any favors in return, and it did not affect his career.

The Congressional committee that reviewed the issue suggested that in the late 1860s Kelley had accepted dividends from shares of Credit Mobilier stock despite not yet having paid for them.

He also noted to House members that he had been involved in other activities, such as the letting of ship construction contracts during the Civil War, where opportunities for bribery and corruption existed, but had never been accused of dishonesty in those matters.

[19] Thin, "a tall lath of a man with a bloodshotten eye and a voice like an eloquent graveyard," as one reporter put it, Kelley ranked as one of the hardest workers in Congress.

"Sir, the bloody and untilled fields of the ten unreconstructed States, the unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, cry, if the dead ever evoke vengeance, for the punishment of Andrew Johnson" (February 22, 1868)[24]