Harrison, Benjamin

Harrison, Benjamin (1833–1901), twenty‐third president of the United States.Born in North Bend, Ohio, Harrison graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1852 and studied law in Cincinnati. He married Caroline Scott in 1853, and they moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, the following year. Leaders of the new Republican party recognized Harrison's political potential. His great‐grandfather, also Benjamin Harrison, had signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandfather, General William Henry Harrison, had been elected president in 1840. After holding a succession of minor political positions between 1857 and 1862, Benjamin Harrison organized the Seventieth Indiana Regiment and commanded it as a colonel in the Civil War, winning promotion to brigadier general in 1865.

Resuming his legal practice after the war, Harrison became leader of the Republican party in Indiana. Elected to the Senate in 1881, he quickly emerged as a possible presidential candidate. Harrison failed to win a second Senate term in 1887, but James G. Blaine, the most prominent Republican of the era, endorsed him for president in 1888. Harrison won the nomination and then the election, garnering 233 electoral votes to 168 for the incumbent Democrat, Grover Cleveland.

A contemporary said that Harrison “in his contempt for flattery seldom indulged in praise.” Harrison has been rated an average president at best, based on perceived failures in domestic policy. He chose not to intervene when Congress passed two controversial laws in 1890, the McKinley Tariff, with record high rates, and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which undermined confidence in the gold standard. Exploiting the unpopular McKinley Tariff, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in a landslide in 1890.

Harrison, working closely with Blaine as secretary of state, pursued a more activist foreign policy. He agreed to participate in the nation's first protectorate, with Great Britain and Germany, over the Samoan Islands in the Pacific, and in 1889 he welcomed to Washington, D.C., the representatives of the nations of the Western hemisphere for the first Pan American Conference.

After losing to Cleveland in a rematch in 1892, having endured the death of his wife during the election campaign, Harrison returned to Indianapolis. He married the much younger Mary Lord Dimmick, the widowed niece of his first wife, in 1896. They had a daughter in 1897. He died in Indianapolis, a leader of the generation of Republican party founders who fought in the Civil War and led the nation through the often chaotic years of the Gilded Age.
See also Conservatism; Democratic Party; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin American; Free Silver Movement; Monetary Policy, Federal; Pan American Union; Protectorates and Dependencies; Tariffs.

Bibliography

Harry J. Sievers , Benjamin Harrison, 3 vols., 1952–1968.
Homer Socolofsky and and Allan Spetter , The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 1987.

Allan Burton Spetter