Book Review: Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time, by Freeman Cleaves
Trekking through Presidential biographies, I read a whole book about #9, who only lasted a month in office.
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939, 422 pages
William Henry Harrison, ninth President of the United States, has been sadly neglected. Freeman Cleaves, after years of scholarly study, has cleared away the misconceptions which obscured Harrison's fame, and gives us a warm account of a truly great hero.
Harrison's victory over the Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe, and his battle for the Presidency in 1840, with its campaign slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," are well known, but they are only two episodes in a colorful life.
He was an outstanding military hero, and a man of the people. The frontier folk depended on him for protection against marauding Indians. He had a hand in most of the Indian treaties and land cessions, and although he defeated the tribes in battle he was the first to befriend them in time of peace. Tecumseh alone, of all the Indian chiefs, held out against him to the bitter end.
Few tales of hardship can match the story of Harrison and his men during the War of 1812. The Great Lakes region was sparsely settled, there were few roads, the soldiers ran out of food, their clothing was in rags, and winter was raging. The men grew surly and wanted to go home. Harrison made a short speech and offered to let any man go home who was willing to face his relatives before victory was achieved. Not a man accepted his offer. Instead they cheered him.
Harrison was a blue-blooded Virginian, the son of a Signer, and a descendant of a long line of illustrious patriots, but he chose to cast his lot with the people of the newly opened West. Enlisting as a soldier he soon rose to high command. To maintain his sumptuous table and to provide for a large family he was obliged to engage in many business ventures, most of which failed. An improvident son threw an added burden of debt upon him, but he never lost courage. He accepted an appointment as Minister to Columbia in the hope of easing his debts, but he was ill-suited for a diplomatic joust with Simon Bolivar, and returned sadly to Cincinnati with a bright-plumed macaw and some exotic plants for his wife Anna. When things seemed darkest he was elected President of the United States.
Freeman Cleaves has done a careful, impartial, and worthy biography of a great American soldier and gentleman, of a hero lovingly referred to by his devoted followers as "Old Tippecanoe." Every one interested in the epic story of America will do well to read it.
On my project to read a biography of every U.S. President in order, I hit the wall a lot of people do with William Henry Harrison: there are very few full-length biographies written about him, and the ones that are available are old and dense.
I could have cheated. I could have read one of those "Our Amazing Presidents" series books for junior high schoolers and filled it in with Wikipedia and the official White House biography. But no, I ordered this book, and read it all the way through.
It was a slog, but a rewarding one. William Henry Harrison was actually an interesting man with an interesting career, and deserved to be more than a footnote in history as the shortest-term President.
The author, Freeman Cleaves, was a journalist who apparently took a shining to the forgotten president and literally followed Harrison's entire life's journey through the U.S. and Canada, digging up ancient newspaper archives, as well as visiting his descendants who showed him old family letters and other documents. The result is a meticulous narrative of Harrison's life, following him almost daily from his youth to his death. At times it's a rather dull travelogue of Harrison's marches through the woods during the Indian wars and the War of 1812, punctuated by much more exciting blow-by-blow accounts of his battles. Later, there is a lot of very detailed electoral counting and discussion of Harrison's cabinet selections and the political calculus behind them, in his final days. Old Tippecanoe is nothing if not informative, and like better and more readable books, it did give me a sense of Harrison's personality and what he was like as a man, and perhaps what he would have been like as president.
Still, this is a book only for very serious bibliography readers. It was published in 1939 and uses the prose of the time, including unapologetic references to Indians as "savages" and "redskins." Cleaves writes in a dry, factual manner though it's clear he adored Harrison and so rarely writes critically about him; Harrison's mistakes are described mostly as well-intentioned errors of judgment, and the biographer unequivocally comes down on Harrison's side in his disputes with other military officers and politicians.
Born in a log cabin (kind of)
Berkeley Plantation in Virginia: the "log cabin."
During his presidential campaigns, much would be made of Harrison's humble origins as a man born in a log cabin. Well, this was perhaps true in a literal sense, in that the building he was born in on his family's Virginia plantation was made of wood. Born in 1773, Harrison's ancestry was Virginia blue blood all the way through. His father was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.
However, he left his university when his father died, and instead headed west to become a soldier. This began his long career as an Indian fighter, and while Harrison was never precisely poor (he always lived in a huge house and his lifestyle was very much upper class), he was always in debt and struggling to avoid bankruptcy. For the rest of his life he would be more associated with Ohio and Indiana than his birthplace of Virginia, though he didn't hesitate to claim Virginia as his homeland when it was politically advantageous.
Anna Tuthill Symmes. Her father didn't think Harrison was good enough for his daughter.
He married Anna Tuthill Symmes while he was still a lieutenant, in 1794, and the two of them had ten children, most of whom survived. Evidently, they managed to get busy frequently on his trips home from his military campaigns. Like several other presidents, he suffered from bad business decisions while trying to support a large family, and later, an alcoholic failson who added to his debts.
Tippecanoe and the War of 1812
Although Harrison made his reputation by fighting Indians, it's not really fair to say he was primarily an Indian fighter. His attitude towards the Indians was much like that of the author of this 1939 book, regarding them with paternalistic affection when they were peaceful, and as naughty children who needed to be spanked when they weren't.
Harrison as a general.
The story of peaceful Indians ruthlessly oppressed by white settlers is only half the story; the Indian tribes were rarely peaceful, and were quite happy to make alliances with the Americans and the British as they fought their own wars. They had entirely different notions of what alliances and territorial claims meant, leading to many bloody misunderstandings. From the perspective of whites, Indians would change sides at the drop of a hat, and kept reneging on peace treaties and suffering seller's remorse after giving up land to the settlers. But the Indians saw white settlers frequently violating treaties as well and settling on land they'd agreed not to settle on, and sometimes murdering Indians and not being punished by white authorities. As well, whites often didn't understand that making a deal with one chief of a tribe did not mean that every branch of that tribe would consider it binding on them.
Thus, the campaigns in the Northwest Territory against Indians who resisted white encroachment. There were Indians who were friendly to the Americans, and Indians who were friendly to the British, and Indians who just wanted white people to GTFO.
Harrison resigned from the Army in 1798 and became the Northwest Territorial Secretary. He eventually ran for Congress, and then was appointed as the Governor of Indiana (then a territory, not a state) by President Adams. For the next twelve years, he would earn a good reputation with the Indians for his mostly even-handed dealings with them.
Tecumseh
However, a Shawnee chief named Tecumseh was building a confederation to resist white settlers. Along with his brother, a mystic known as "The Prophet" who told the Shawnee that the Great Spirit would make them invincible if they fought the white men, Tecumseh started threatening to abrogate treaties signed by other chiefs, pointing out (with some justification) that they had made agreements about lands that other tribes lived on. He met with Governor Harrison at one point in a tense stand-off that almost ended in bloodshed and could have ended with Harrison being scalped.
Harrison convinced President Madison to let him take command of Northwest Territory forces, and led an army to defeat the confederation. Reports of the Battle of Tippecanoe were initially confusing; it wasn't clear until later that Harrison had won a decisive victory.
During the War of 1812, Tecumseh sided with the British. The British officer in charge, General Procter, had a tiger by the tail. Tecumseh made it clear he wasn't happy about Procter's decisions to retreat, and Procter knew the Shawnee weren't buddies with the British because they liked them.
General Harrison would make his bones in earnest during the War of 1812, and Cleaves describes all of his battles in great detail. Some of them are the stuff of adventures, like sneaking across a river just to seize one little garrison (and then screwing up by hanging around gawking instead of just destroying the cannons and leaving), a mock battle that Tecumseh staged to try to convince the Americans that their relief force was being ambushed and draw them out of their fort (it didn't work), or the speech Harrison gave that shamed his Kentucky militia into staying when they were on the verge of saying "Fuck it" and going home.
Notable is that the "significant armies" that affected the outcome of the war in the Northwest often consisted of only a few hundred men. The forts and hills they fought over were relatively tiny. And though there is a lot of documentation, because Harrison and other officers wrote meticulous accounts that were reported back to Washington and repeated in newspapers, fog of war still obscured many details.
Tecumseh would eventually be killed in a relatively smaller battle, the Battle of the Thames, in 1813. Echoing many other disputes that would arise after the war, credit for killing Tecumseh would be claimed by many men who were there that day, though it wasn't clear that they ever actually identified Tecumseh's body. Harrison's supporters when he ran for President would tout his fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe and call him the man who killed Tecumseh, though Harrison almost certainly did not personally kill him. One of his subordinates, Colonel Richard Johnson, would later become Vice President under Martin Van Buren after claiming that he'd killed Tecumseh.
Fame doesn't pay the bills
Harrison had several disputes with the Secretary of the Army, who for political reasons wanted him removed. Harrison resigned from the Army and tried to capitalize on his fame and seek political office. He served as a Congressman for Ohio, but his debts continued to grow, especially with one particularly burdensome wastrel son.
As an Ohio Congressman, his big issue was increasing benefits for veterans and their widows. He also opposed a large pay increase Congress had just voted themselves, which was understandably extremely unpopular with the public.
Harrison's political philosophy begins to take shape here. As Cleaves describes him, we could say he was essentially a centrist of his time. Slavery was becoming the dominant culture war issue, and following a pattern we've seen with previous slave-owning POTUSes, Harrison expressed the sentiment that slavery was an evil that should eventually be abolished, while owning slaves and siding against abolitionists. It may be hard to understand today how you could hold two opposing thoughts like that in your head, but in the context of the times, there was an entire spectrum of attitudes towards slavery from "radical" abolitionism to wholehearted embrace of slavery as the natural order of things, and many nuanced gradations between on which the South in particular took careful notice. Harrison was an "emancipationist," meaning he thought the federal government should establish a program aimed at eventually purchasing the freedom of slaves. This was not a popular position with Southerners, but it wasn't quite as bad as being an abolitionist, or sympathetic to abolitionists. Harrison himself purchased a few slaves but promised them freedom after a certain number of years, which he regarded as a fair exchange for their labor. This was actually a relatively progressive attitude for the time.
Despite the pay raise (which he had opposed), however, Harrison was still broke. So he sought and received a post as Minister to Columbia.
It was a prestigious and fairly high-paying position, but Harrison was not much of a diplomat. Much of South America was undergoing revolutionary spasms, thanks to Simon Bolivar. Harrison never met Bolivar personally the entire time he was in Columbia, but he got entangled in a number of intrigues, mostly through no fault of his own except his naivete and unfamiliarity with the country. His own fellow Americans were scheming and secretly fingering him as a collaborator with the anti-Bolivar rebels. This wasn't helped by some speeches Harrison made that were misinterpreted. He ended up being recalled by Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who wanted Harrison replaced with his own man. Harrison returned to America, still in debt, but at least he brought a macaw with him, which would live on his estate for years afterwards.
"Old Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"
Songsheet from the Harrison/Tyler campaign.
Still struggling to get his head above water financially, Harrison reentered politics.
There was growing opposition to the Jackson administration. Harrison was a war hero. One of his friends tried to make the nickname "Old Buckeye" stick (in contrast to Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson). It didn't, but eventually "Old Tippecanoe" did.
Harrison was drawn into the newly-coalescing Whig party, which was a hodgepodge alliance of anti-Jacksonians, abolitionists, supporters of Henry Clay, and anti-Masons. The Anti-Masonic party was actually a significant force in some parts of the country, and Harrison tried to take a typically centrist position when asked about them. He obviously didn't really care about Masons, and didn't think the government should be trying to suppress them just because some people were going wild with conspiracy theories about them, but he couldn't completely blow the anti-Masons off.
At this time he had to respond to a lot of claims and counterclaims about what happened during the war. His opponents accused of him of everything from mismanagement of funds to poor military leadership. Some of his fellow officers were trying to claim shared glory, which Harrison disputed "under ancient military principal." He was particularly annoyed by Colonel Johnson trying to claim that they had been "coleaders."
In the election of 1836, Harrison narrowly lost to Martin Van Buren. The 1840 campaign began almost immediately. This was the start of modern political campaigning; previously, it had been regarded as somewhat unseemly for presidential candidates to go around openly campaigning as if, you know, they actually wanted to be President.
"The Times," a political cartoon blaming the bad economy on Jackson and Van Buren.
Harrison's supporters rolled logs, carried around miniature replicas of Fort Meigs and other sites of Harrison's military victories, composed campaign ditties, and threw parties wherever Harrison went. "Matty Van," a consummate machine party politician, was depicted as an aristocratic wine-sipping dandy with a taste for European luxuries, while Harrison was a rough-hewn military hero and man of the people who sipped hard cider in his log cabin. All of this was effective, but what was probably more effective was the fact that the Panic of 1837 had caused a major depression, and the economy was shit, which was blamed on Andrew Jackson and his successor Van Buren. (Like most economic crises, the actual cause was a variety of factors, many of which weren't really under the President's control.) His fellow Whigs included the venerable Kentucky Senator Henry Clay (the man who really wanted to be President) and a young Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln.
Political cartoon depicting William Henry Harrison as a rugged good ol' boy sharing hard cider with the troops.
Harrison won a decisive victory in 1840, swept into office with Vice President Tyler (a Southerner because he couldn't win without a Southerner), and died 32 days later.
The 32-day President
According to popular legend, Harrison gave the longest inauguration speech ever on a rainy day in March, caught a cold, and died of pneumonia a month later.
This is only partially true. He did give the longest inauguration speech in history (one hour and forty minutes, edited by Daniel Webster), and it was a cold, rainy day. He probably did catch a cold that day.
But for the next month, he was pretty busy. He walked around Washington on errands (we had not yet had our first presidential assassination, and the president could still just wander down the street to visit with people), formed his cabinet (with a lot of maneuvering and input from, among others, Henry Clay, who was quite upset to find out he was not going to be calling the shots in Harrison's administration), and had a couple of very congenial meetings with the outgoing president, Van Buren, and some of the Senators he expected to soon be opposing him. He established his intention to limit the power of the Executive Branch, support states rights, and remain hands off on the issue of recreating a national bank. He had already sworn that he would be a one-term president and not seek reelection.
Somewhere along the way, he became seriously ill, and his physicians soon realized he was on his deathbed. There is debate today about whether it was actually pneumonia that killed him; Harrison was 68 years old (the oldest president ever, until Ronald Reagan), and Washington was a disease-ridden place.
Freeman Cleaves's biography ends very abruptly, at the very paragraph where Harrison is buried. Harrison's last hours were spent in a state of delirium. Supposedly his final words were: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."
My impression of William Henry Harrison is that he was an intelligent if not brilliant man, not a deep political thinker, but capable enough. He was honest and quite meticulous about defending his integrity. He was a moderate who wouldn't have done much to end slavery, but his attitude towards Native Americans was relatively benign. It's impossible to say how effective his foreign policy or economic policies might have been. Friendly and even-tempered, he might have been a good President, or he might have been eaten alive by scandals and political disasters.
Instead, we got John Tyler. The Whig Party would soon collapse and disappear into history, and the Civil War would loom ever closer.
My complete list of book reviews.
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939, 422 pages
William Henry Harrison, ninth President of the United States, has been sadly neglected. Freeman Cleaves, after years of scholarly study, has cleared away the misconceptions which obscured Harrison's fame, and gives us a warm account of a truly great hero.
Harrison's victory over the Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe, and his battle for the Presidency in 1840, with its campaign slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," are well known, but they are only two episodes in a colorful life.
He was an outstanding military hero, and a man of the people. The frontier folk depended on him for protection against marauding Indians. He had a hand in most of the Indian treaties and land cessions, and although he defeated the tribes in battle he was the first to befriend them in time of peace. Tecumseh alone, of all the Indian chiefs, held out against him to the bitter end.
Few tales of hardship can match the story of Harrison and his men during the War of 1812. The Great Lakes region was sparsely settled, there were few roads, the soldiers ran out of food, their clothing was in rags, and winter was raging. The men grew surly and wanted to go home. Harrison made a short speech and offered to let any man go home who was willing to face his relatives before victory was achieved. Not a man accepted his offer. Instead they cheered him.
Harrison was a blue-blooded Virginian, the son of a Signer, and a descendant of a long line of illustrious patriots, but he chose to cast his lot with the people of the newly opened West. Enlisting as a soldier he soon rose to high command. To maintain his sumptuous table and to provide for a large family he was obliged to engage in many business ventures, most of which failed. An improvident son threw an added burden of debt upon him, but he never lost courage. He accepted an appointment as Minister to Columbia in the hope of easing his debts, but he was ill-suited for a diplomatic joust with Simon Bolivar, and returned sadly to Cincinnati with a bright-plumed macaw and some exotic plants for his wife Anna. When things seemed darkest he was elected President of the United States.
Freeman Cleaves has done a careful, impartial, and worthy biography of a great American soldier and gentleman, of a hero lovingly referred to by his devoted followers as "Old Tippecanoe." Every one interested in the epic story of America will do well to read it.
On my project to read a biography of every U.S. President in order, I hit the wall a lot of people do with William Henry Harrison: there are very few full-length biographies written about him, and the ones that are available are old and dense.
I could have cheated. I could have read one of those "Our Amazing Presidents" series books for junior high schoolers and filled it in with Wikipedia and the official White House biography. But no, I ordered this book, and read it all the way through.
It was a slog, but a rewarding one. William Henry Harrison was actually an interesting man with an interesting career, and deserved to be more than a footnote in history as the shortest-term President.
The author, Freeman Cleaves, was a journalist who apparently took a shining to the forgotten president and literally followed Harrison's entire life's journey through the U.S. and Canada, digging up ancient newspaper archives, as well as visiting his descendants who showed him old family letters and other documents. The result is a meticulous narrative of Harrison's life, following him almost daily from his youth to his death. At times it's a rather dull travelogue of Harrison's marches through the woods during the Indian wars and the War of 1812, punctuated by much more exciting blow-by-blow accounts of his battles. Later, there is a lot of very detailed electoral counting and discussion of Harrison's cabinet selections and the political calculus behind them, in his final days. Old Tippecanoe is nothing if not informative, and like better and more readable books, it did give me a sense of Harrison's personality and what he was like as a man, and perhaps what he would have been like as president.
Still, this is a book only for very serious bibliography readers. It was published in 1939 and uses the prose of the time, including unapologetic references to Indians as "savages" and "redskins." Cleaves writes in a dry, factual manner though it's clear he adored Harrison and so rarely writes critically about him; Harrison's mistakes are described mostly as well-intentioned errors of judgment, and the biographer unequivocally comes down on Harrison's side in his disputes with other military officers and politicians.
Born in a log cabin (kind of)
Berkeley Plantation in Virginia: the "log cabin."
During his presidential campaigns, much would be made of Harrison's humble origins as a man born in a log cabin. Well, this was perhaps true in a literal sense, in that the building he was born in on his family's Virginia plantation was made of wood. Born in 1773, Harrison's ancestry was Virginia blue blood all the way through. His father was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.
However, he left his university when his father died, and instead headed west to become a soldier. This began his long career as an Indian fighter, and while Harrison was never precisely poor (he always lived in a huge house and his lifestyle was very much upper class), he was always in debt and struggling to avoid bankruptcy. For the rest of his life he would be more associated with Ohio and Indiana than his birthplace of Virginia, though he didn't hesitate to claim Virginia as his homeland when it was politically advantageous.
Anna Tuthill Symmes. Her father didn't think Harrison was good enough for his daughter.
He married Anna Tuthill Symmes while he was still a lieutenant, in 1794, and the two of them had ten children, most of whom survived. Evidently, they managed to get busy frequently on his trips home from his military campaigns. Like several other presidents, he suffered from bad business decisions while trying to support a large family, and later, an alcoholic failson who added to his debts.
Tippecanoe and the War of 1812
Although Harrison made his reputation by fighting Indians, it's not really fair to say he was primarily an Indian fighter. His attitude towards the Indians was much like that of the author of this 1939 book, regarding them with paternalistic affection when they were peaceful, and as naughty children who needed to be spanked when they weren't.
Harrison as a general.
The story of peaceful Indians ruthlessly oppressed by white settlers is only half the story; the Indian tribes were rarely peaceful, and were quite happy to make alliances with the Americans and the British as they fought their own wars. They had entirely different notions of what alliances and territorial claims meant, leading to many bloody misunderstandings. From the perspective of whites, Indians would change sides at the drop of a hat, and kept reneging on peace treaties and suffering seller's remorse after giving up land to the settlers. But the Indians saw white settlers frequently violating treaties as well and settling on land they'd agreed not to settle on, and sometimes murdering Indians and not being punished by white authorities. As well, whites often didn't understand that making a deal with one chief of a tribe did not mean that every branch of that tribe would consider it binding on them.
Thus, the campaigns in the Northwest Territory against Indians who resisted white encroachment. There were Indians who were friendly to the Americans, and Indians who were friendly to the British, and Indians who just wanted white people to GTFO.
Harrison resigned from the Army in 1798 and became the Northwest Territorial Secretary. He eventually ran for Congress, and then was appointed as the Governor of Indiana (then a territory, not a state) by President Adams. For the next twelve years, he would earn a good reputation with the Indians for his mostly even-handed dealings with them.
Tecumseh
However, a Shawnee chief named Tecumseh was building a confederation to resist white settlers. Along with his brother, a mystic known as "The Prophet" who told the Shawnee that the Great Spirit would make them invincible if they fought the white men, Tecumseh started threatening to abrogate treaties signed by other chiefs, pointing out (with some justification) that they had made agreements about lands that other tribes lived on. He met with Governor Harrison at one point in a tense stand-off that almost ended in bloodshed and could have ended with Harrison being scalped.
Harrison convinced President Madison to let him take command of Northwest Territory forces, and led an army to defeat the confederation. Reports of the Battle of Tippecanoe were initially confusing; it wasn't clear until later that Harrison had won a decisive victory.
During the War of 1812, Tecumseh sided with the British. The British officer in charge, General Procter, had a tiger by the tail. Tecumseh made it clear he wasn't happy about Procter's decisions to retreat, and Procter knew the Shawnee weren't buddies with the British because they liked them.
General Harrison would make his bones in earnest during the War of 1812, and Cleaves describes all of his battles in great detail. Some of them are the stuff of adventures, like sneaking across a river just to seize one little garrison (and then screwing up by hanging around gawking instead of just destroying the cannons and leaving), a mock battle that Tecumseh staged to try to convince the Americans that their relief force was being ambushed and draw them out of their fort (it didn't work), or the speech Harrison gave that shamed his Kentucky militia into staying when they were on the verge of saying "Fuck it" and going home.
Notable is that the "significant armies" that affected the outcome of the war in the Northwest often consisted of only a few hundred men. The forts and hills they fought over were relatively tiny. And though there is a lot of documentation, because Harrison and other officers wrote meticulous accounts that were reported back to Washington and repeated in newspapers, fog of war still obscured many details.
Tecumseh would eventually be killed in a relatively smaller battle, the Battle of the Thames, in 1813. Echoing many other disputes that would arise after the war, credit for killing Tecumseh would be claimed by many men who were there that day, though it wasn't clear that they ever actually identified Tecumseh's body. Harrison's supporters when he ran for President would tout his fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe and call him the man who killed Tecumseh, though Harrison almost certainly did not personally kill him. One of his subordinates, Colonel Richard Johnson, would later become Vice President under Martin Van Buren after claiming that he'd killed Tecumseh.
Fame doesn't pay the bills
Harrison had several disputes with the Secretary of the Army, who for political reasons wanted him removed. Harrison resigned from the Army and tried to capitalize on his fame and seek political office. He served as a Congressman for Ohio, but his debts continued to grow, especially with one particularly burdensome wastrel son.
As an Ohio Congressman, his big issue was increasing benefits for veterans and their widows. He also opposed a large pay increase Congress had just voted themselves, which was understandably extremely unpopular with the public.
Harrison's political philosophy begins to take shape here. As Cleaves describes him, we could say he was essentially a centrist of his time. Slavery was becoming the dominant culture war issue, and following a pattern we've seen with previous slave-owning POTUSes, Harrison expressed the sentiment that slavery was an evil that should eventually be abolished, while owning slaves and siding against abolitionists. It may be hard to understand today how you could hold two opposing thoughts like that in your head, but in the context of the times, there was an entire spectrum of attitudes towards slavery from "radical" abolitionism to wholehearted embrace of slavery as the natural order of things, and many nuanced gradations between on which the South in particular took careful notice. Harrison was an "emancipationist," meaning he thought the federal government should establish a program aimed at eventually purchasing the freedom of slaves. This was not a popular position with Southerners, but it wasn't quite as bad as being an abolitionist, or sympathetic to abolitionists. Harrison himself purchased a few slaves but promised them freedom after a certain number of years, which he regarded as a fair exchange for their labor. This was actually a relatively progressive attitude for the time.
Despite the pay raise (which he had opposed), however, Harrison was still broke. So he sought and received a post as Minister to Columbia.
It was a prestigious and fairly high-paying position, but Harrison was not much of a diplomat. Much of South America was undergoing revolutionary spasms, thanks to Simon Bolivar. Harrison never met Bolivar personally the entire time he was in Columbia, but he got entangled in a number of intrigues, mostly through no fault of his own except his naivete and unfamiliarity with the country. His own fellow Americans were scheming and secretly fingering him as a collaborator with the anti-Bolivar rebels. This wasn't helped by some speeches Harrison made that were misinterpreted. He ended up being recalled by Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who wanted Harrison replaced with his own man. Harrison returned to America, still in debt, but at least he brought a macaw with him, which would live on his estate for years afterwards.
"Old Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"
Songsheet from the Harrison/Tyler campaign.
Still struggling to get his head above water financially, Harrison reentered politics.
There was growing opposition to the Jackson administration. Harrison was a war hero. One of his friends tried to make the nickname "Old Buckeye" stick (in contrast to Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson). It didn't, but eventually "Old Tippecanoe" did.
Harrison was drawn into the newly-coalescing Whig party, which was a hodgepodge alliance of anti-Jacksonians, abolitionists, supporters of Henry Clay, and anti-Masons. The Anti-Masonic party was actually a significant force in some parts of the country, and Harrison tried to take a typically centrist position when asked about them. He obviously didn't really care about Masons, and didn't think the government should be trying to suppress them just because some people were going wild with conspiracy theories about them, but he couldn't completely blow the anti-Masons off.
At this time he had to respond to a lot of claims and counterclaims about what happened during the war. His opponents accused of him of everything from mismanagement of funds to poor military leadership. Some of his fellow officers were trying to claim shared glory, which Harrison disputed "under ancient military principal." He was particularly annoyed by Colonel Johnson trying to claim that they had been "coleaders."
In the election of 1836, Harrison narrowly lost to Martin Van Buren. The 1840 campaign began almost immediately. This was the start of modern political campaigning; previously, it had been regarded as somewhat unseemly for presidential candidates to go around openly campaigning as if, you know, they actually wanted to be President.
"The Times," a political cartoon blaming the bad economy on Jackson and Van Buren.
Harrison's supporters rolled logs, carried around miniature replicas of Fort Meigs and other sites of Harrison's military victories, composed campaign ditties, and threw parties wherever Harrison went. "Matty Van," a consummate machine party politician, was depicted as an aristocratic wine-sipping dandy with a taste for European luxuries, while Harrison was a rough-hewn military hero and man of the people who sipped hard cider in his log cabin. All of this was effective, but what was probably more effective was the fact that the Panic of 1837 had caused a major depression, and the economy was shit, which was blamed on Andrew Jackson and his successor Van Buren. (Like most economic crises, the actual cause was a variety of factors, many of which weren't really under the President's control.) His fellow Whigs included the venerable Kentucky Senator Henry Clay (the man who really wanted to be President) and a young Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln.
Political cartoon depicting William Henry Harrison as a rugged good ol' boy sharing hard cider with the troops.
Harrison won a decisive victory in 1840, swept into office with Vice President Tyler (a Southerner because he couldn't win without a Southerner), and died 32 days later.
The 32-day President
According to popular legend, Harrison gave the longest inauguration speech ever on a rainy day in March, caught a cold, and died of pneumonia a month later.
This is only partially true. He did give the longest inauguration speech in history (one hour and forty minutes, edited by Daniel Webster), and it was a cold, rainy day. He probably did catch a cold that day.
But for the next month, he was pretty busy. He walked around Washington on errands (we had not yet had our first presidential assassination, and the president could still just wander down the street to visit with people), formed his cabinet (with a lot of maneuvering and input from, among others, Henry Clay, who was quite upset to find out he was not going to be calling the shots in Harrison's administration), and had a couple of very congenial meetings with the outgoing president, Van Buren, and some of the Senators he expected to soon be opposing him. He established his intention to limit the power of the Executive Branch, support states rights, and remain hands off on the issue of recreating a national bank. He had already sworn that he would be a one-term president and not seek reelection.
Somewhere along the way, he became seriously ill, and his physicians soon realized he was on his deathbed. There is debate today about whether it was actually pneumonia that killed him; Harrison was 68 years old (the oldest president ever, until Ronald Reagan), and Washington was a disease-ridden place.
Freeman Cleaves's biography ends very abruptly, at the very paragraph where Harrison is buried. Harrison's last hours were spent in a state of delirium. Supposedly his final words were: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."
My impression of William Henry Harrison is that he was an intelligent if not brilliant man, not a deep political thinker, but capable enough. He was honest and quite meticulous about defending his integrity. He was a moderate who wouldn't have done much to end slavery, but his attitude towards Native Americans was relatively benign. It's impossible to say how effective his foreign policy or economic policies might have been. Friendly and even-tempered, he might have been a good President, or he might have been eaten alive by scandals and political disasters.
Instead, we got John Tyler. The Whig Party would soon collapse and disappear into history, and the Civil War would loom ever closer.
My complete list of book reviews.