"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.