Harrison, William Henry

Harrison, William Henry (1773–1841), ninth president of the United States.Born into Virginia's Tidewater elite, William Henry Harrison attended Hampden‐Sidney College and in 1795 married Anna Symmes. Their ten sons and daughters included John Scott Harrison, father of President Benjamin Harrison. William Henry Harrison studied medicine briefly, then served in the Northwest Territory as a soldier, territorial secretary, congressional delegate, and territorial governor of Indiana (1800–1812). Despite his efforts to deal fairly with the Indians, friction over land cessions united area tribes under the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, who allied with the British during the War of 1812. At the Battle of the Thames (5 October 1813), Harrison's Army of the Northwest killed Tecumseh, smashed his confederacy, and prompted the British to vacate the Northwest.

After retiring to his North Bend estate near Vincennes, Ohio, Harrison served briefly in local offices and in both houses of Congress. In 1836, as part of an ill‐conceived strategy to deny Martin Van Buren an electoral majority, he sought the presidency as the favorite son of the Whig and Anti‐Masonic parties in the West, winning 73 electoral votes. Harrison shrewdly kept his organization intact and in 1840 bested Henry Clay for the Whig nomination. That year the Whigs elevated the politics of popular amusement to unrivaled levels, eschewing a platform and avoiding positions on substantive issues to promote Harrison, the Virginia aristocrat, as a humble farmer partial to log cabins and hard cider. The “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign (an allusion to Harrison's running mate, John Tyler) featured massive parades, rallies two and three days long, and an extraordinary array of ephemera, including cologne, bitters, and whiskey in log‐cabin bottles, and huge buckskin balls rolled hundreds of miles. Harrison defeated Van Buren, but succumbed to pneumonia a month after his inauguration.
See also Antebellum Era; Anti‐Masonic Party; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars; Northwest Ordinance; Political Parties; Whig Party.

Bibliography

Dorothy Burne Goebel , William Henry Harrison, A Political Biography, 1926.
Robert Gray Gunderson , The Log‐Cabin Campaign, 1957.

Roger A. Fischer