page_title: William Henry Harrison
section_title: 1840 presidential campaign
hierarchical_section_title: William Henry Harrison / Postwar life / 1840 presidential campaign
caption_attribution_description: English: William Henry Harrison: ninth President of the United States.
context_page_description: William Henry Harrison was an American military officer and politician who served as the ninth president of the United States in 1841. He died of typhoid, pneumonia, or paratyphoid fever 31 days into his term, becoming the first president to die in office and the shortest-serving president in US History. His death sparked a brief constitutional crisis regarding succession to the presidency, because the Constitution was unclear as to whether Vice President John Tyler should assume the office of president or merely execute the duties of the vacant office. Tyler claimed a constitutional mandate to become the new president and took the presidential oath of office, setting an important precedent for an orderly transfer of the presidency and its full powers when the previous president fails to complete the elected term.
  Harrison was born in Charles City County, Virginia, a son of Founding Father Benjamin Harrison V and the paternal grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States. He was the last president born as a British subject in the Thirteen Colonies before the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
context_section_description: Harrison was the Whig candidate and faced incumbent Van Buren in the 1840 election. He was chosen over more controversial members of the party, such as Clay and Webster, and based his campaign on his military record and on the weak U.S. economy caused by the Panic of 1837.
  The Whigs nicknamed Van Buren "Van Ruin" in order to blame him for the economic problems. The Democrats, in turn, ridiculed Harrison by calling him "Granny Harrison, the petticoat general" because he resigned from the army before the War of 1812 ended. They would ask voters what Harrison's name would be when spelled backwards: "No Sirrah". They also cast him as a provincial, out-of-touch old man who would rather "sit in his log cabin drinking hard cider" than attend to the administration of the country. This strategy backfired when Harrison and running mate John Tyler adopted the log cabin and hard cider as campaign symbols. Their campaign used the symbols on banners and posters and created bottles of hard cider shaped like log cabins, all to connect the candidates to the "common man".
  Harrison came from a wealthy, slaveholding Virginia family, yet his campaign promoted him as a humble frontiersman in the style popularized by Andrew Jackson, while presenting Van Buren as a wealthy elitist. A memorable example was the Gold Spoon Oration that Pennsylvania's Whig representative Charles Ogle delivered in the House, ridiculing Van Buren's elegant White House lifestyle and lavish spending. The Whigs invented a chant in which people would spit tobacco juice as they chanted "wirt-wirt," and this also exhibited the difference between candidates from the time of the election: 
  Old Tip he wore a homespun coat, he had no ruffled shirt: wirt-wirt,
  
  But Matt he has the golden plate, and he's a little squirt: wirt-wirt!
  The Whigs boasted of Harrison's military record and his reputation as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. The campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too" became one of the most famous in American politics. Harrison won a landslide victory in the Electoral College, 234 electoral votes to Van Buren's 60, although the popular vote was much closer. He received 53 percent of the popular vote to Van Buren's 47 percent, with a margin of less than 150,000 votes.
caption: Chromolithograph print of William Henry Harrison
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