"Give
him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of
two thousand a year on him, and my word for
it," a Democratic newspaper foolishly gibed,
"he will sit ... by the side of a 'sea coal'
fire, and study moral philosophy. " The Whigs,
seizing on this political misstep, in 1840 presented
their candidate William Henry Harrison as a simple
frontier Indian fighter, living in a log cabin and
drinking cider, in sharp contrast to an aristocratic
champagne-sipping Van Buren.
Harrison
was in fact a scion of the Virginia planter
aristocracy. He was born at Berkeley in 1773. He
studied classics and history at Hampden-Sydney
College, then began the study of medicine in
Richmond.
Suddenly,
that same year, 1791, Harrison switched interests.
He obtained a commission as ensign in the First
Infantry of the Regular Army, and headed to the
Northwest, where he spent much of his life.
In the
campaign against the Indians, Harrison served as
aide-de-camp to General "Mad Anthony"
Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which opened
most of the Ohio area to settlement. After resigning
from the Army in 1798, he became Secretary of the
Northwest Territory, was its first delegate to
Congress, and helped obtain legislation dividing the
Territory into the Northwest and Indiana
Territories. In 1801 he became Governor of the
Indiana Territory, serving 12 years.
His prime
task as governor was to obtain title to Indian lands
so settlers could press forward into the wilderness.
When the Indians retaliated, Harrison was
responsible for defending the settlements.
The threat
against settlers became serious in 1809. An eloquent
and energetic chieftain, Tecumseh, with his
religious brother, the Prophet, began to strengthen
an Indian confederation to prevent further
encroachment. In 1811 Harrison received permission
to attack the confederacy.
While
Tecumseh was away seeking more allies, Harrison led
about a thousand men toward the Prophet's town.
Suddenly, before dawn on November 7, the Indians
attacked his camp on Tippecanoe River. After heavy
fighting, Harrison repulsed them, but suffered 190
dead and wounded.
The Battle
of Tippecanoe, upon which Harrison's fame was to
rest, disrupted Tecumseh's confederacy but failed to
diminish Indian raids. By the spring of 1812, they
were again terrorizing the frontier.
In the War
of 1812 Harrison won more military laurels when he
was given the command of the Army in the Northwest
with the rank of brigadier general. At the Battle of
the Thames, north of Lake Erie, on October 5, 1813,
he defeated the combined British and Indian forces,
and killed Tecumseh. The Indians scattered, never
again to offer serious resistance in what was then
called the Northwest.
Thereafter
Harrison returned to civilian life; the Whigs, in
need of a national hero, nominated him for President
in 1840. He won by a majority of less than 150,000,
but swept the Electoral College, 234 to 60.
When he
arrived in Washington in February 1841, Harrison let
Daniel Webster edit his Inaugural Address, ornate
with classical allusions. Webster obtained some
deletions, boasting in a jolly fashion that he had
killed "seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as
smelts, every one of them."
Webster had
reason to be pleased, for while Harrison was
nationalistic in his outlook, he emphasized in his
Inaugural that he would be obedient to the will of
the people as expressed through Congress.
But before
he had been in office a month, he caught a cold that
developed into pneumonia. On April 4, 1841, he
died--the first President to die in office--and with
him died the Whig program.
William
Harrison