William Henry Harrison

9th President of the United States

### Children

Elizabeth Bassett Harrison (daughter), John Cleves Symmes Harrison (son), Lucy Singleton Harrison (daughter), William Henry Harrison Jr. (son), John Scott Harrison (son), Benjamin Harrison (son), Mary Symmes Harrison (daughter), Carter Bassett Harrison II (son), Anna Tuthill Harrison Taylor (daughter), James Findlay Harrison (son)

### Parents

Benjamin Harrison V (father)Elizabeth Bassett (mother)

### Siblings

Elizabeth Harrison Rickman Edmundson (sister), Fairleanah Eleanor Harrison (sister), Anne Harrison (sister), Benjamin Harrison VI (brother), Lucy Harrison Randolph Singleton (sister), Carter Bassett Harrison (brother), Sarah Harrison Minge (sister)

### Education

Hampden–Sydney CollegeUniversity of Pennsylvania

### Awards

Congressional Gold MedalThanks of Congress

### Hair color

Brown

**William Henry Harrison**, an American military officer and politician, was the ninth President of the United States (1841), the oldest President to be elected at the time. On his 32nd day, he became the first to die in office, serving the shortest tenure in U.S. Presidential history.

*The Presidency of William Harrison spanned the period in United States history that encompasses the events of the Westward Expansion era. Harrison was deemed a hero following the Battle of Tippecanoe that disrupted the confederacy of Tecumseh.*

## Biography

“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.

## Personality

The character traits of President William Harrison can be described as outgoing, genial, kind, frank, good humored, humble and down to earth. It has been speculated that the Myers-Briggs personality type for William Harrison is an ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment). An outgoing, practical, realistic and civic-minded character with a strong belief in rules and procedures, placing a high value on competence and efficiency. William Harrison Personality type: Decisive, hardworking, methodical and orderly.

## Nicknames

* "Tippecanoe"
* "Old Tip"
* "The Cincinnatus of the West"
* "Washington of the West"

*Meaning: The nickname of President William Harrison provides an insight into how the man was viewed by the American public. The nickname "Old Tippecanoe" and his other nickname "Washington of the West" refers his strong leadership as a general during the Battle of Tippecanoe, on November 7, 1811, between the confederacy of native warriors led by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. The meaning of his other famous nickname "General Mum" was due to his avoidance of speaking out on contentious or controversial issues.*

## Inauguration

The **inauguration of William Henry Harrison** as the ninth president of the United States was held on Thursday, March 4, 1841, at the East Portico of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. This was the 14th inauguration and marked the commencement of the only four-year term of both William Henry Harrison as president and John Tyler as vice president. The presidential oath of office was administered to Harrison by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Harrison died 31 days into his term, the first U.S. president to die in office and has the shortest presidential term in American history. Tyler then succeeded to the presidency, creating a precedent which would be followed seven more times before it was officially regulated through the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967.

## Accomplishments and major events

*William Henry Harrison represented the Whig political party but before he had been in office a month, William Henry Harrison caught a cold, that developed into pneumonia, and resulted in his death, making him the first president to die in office, serving the shortest tenure in U.S. Presidential history.*

**Inaugural Address**

Summary: The presidency of William Harrison only lasted for one month. He was a member of the Whig Party who had a common dislike of Andrew Jackson and his policies. He delivered his two hour long inaugural message on a freezing cold March morning without wearing a hat or coat. He presented a detailed critique of the Constitution and criticized what he saw as the excess of power seized by the executive branch. In a thinly disguised reference to President Andrew Jackson and the Bank Wars he remonstrated that the veto power invested in the president should only be exercised if the president believed a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional. He assured the nation that he would be obedient to the will of the people as expressed through Congress. William Harrison was a slave owner and made it clear that he supported the right of states to make their own decisions in the matter of slavery, criticizing antislavery supporters as endangering states' rights.

**The Death of William Harrison**

Summary: William Harrison was sixty-eight years old when he inaugurated as President. After delivering his inaugural address he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. He died after serving only one month in office. He was therefore unable to make any real impact on the United States. He spent his few short weeks as president dealing with job seekers due to the Spoils System which was operated during the administrations of the period. William Harrison was the first President to die in office. His grandson, Benjamin Harrison, would later become President of the United States in 1889.

## Funeral

A 30-day period of mourning commenced following the president's death. The White House hosted various public ceremonies, modeled after European royal funeral practices. An invitation-only funeral service was also held on April 7 in the East Room of the White House, after which Harrison's coffin was brought to Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., where it was placed in the Public Vault. Solomon Northup gave an account of the procession in *Twelve Years a Slave*:

> The next day there was a great pageant in Washington. The roar of cannon and the tolling of bells filled the air, while many houses were shrouded with crape, and the streets were black with people. As the day advanced, the procession made its appearance, coming slowly through the Avenue, carriage after carriage, in long succession, while thousands upon thousands followed on foot—all moving to the sound of melancholy music. They were bearing the dead body of Harrison to the grave…. I remember distinctly how the window glass would break and rattle to the ground, after each report of the cannon they were firing in the burial ground.
>
>

That June, Harrison's body was transported by train and river barge to North Bend, Ohio, and he was buried on July 7 at the summit of Mt. Nebo, which is now the William Henry Harrison Tomb State Memorial.

### Tyler's accession to office

On April 5, Fletcher Webster, the son of Secretary of State Daniel Webster, notified Tyler that Harrison had died in office. Tyler had been visiting family in Williamsburg. Tyler arrived in Washington on the morning of April 6. That same day, Tyler was sworn into office in front of Harrison's cabinet, officially beginning his presidency. On April 9, Tyler gave a brief inaugural address. In his address to the nation, Tyler did not give any personal consolation to Harrison's widow Anna or family members. Tyler did compliment Harrison by saying Harrison had been elected for a "great work" of purging the federal government of corruption. Tyler and his family moved into the White House one week after Harrison's funeral, before Harrison's 30 day time of mourning was over. The White House state rooms were still hung with black mourning crapes.

### Impact of Harrison's death

Harrison's death called attention to an ambiguity in Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution regarding succession to the presidency. The Constitution clearly provided for the vice president to take over the "Powers and Duties of the said Office" in the event of a president's removal, death, resignation, or inability, but it was unclear whether the vice president formally became president of the United States, or simply temporarily assumed the powers and duties of that office, in a case of succession.

Harrison's cabinet insisted that Tyler was "Vice President acting as President". Tyler was resolute in his claim to the title of President and in his determination to exercise the full powers of the presidency. The cabinet consulted with Chief Justice Roger Taney and decided that, if Tyler took the presidential oath of office, he would assume the office of president. Tyler obliged and was sworn into office on April 6, 1841. Congress convened, and on May 31, 1841, after a short period of debate in both houses, passed a joint resolution, which confirmed Tyler as president for the remainder of Harrison's term. The precedent that Congress set in 1841 was followed on seven occasions when an incumbent president died, and it was written into the Constitution in 1967 through Section One of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

## Facts and trivia

* William Henry Harrison was the last president born before the formation of the United States to become independent from Great Britain.
* Harrison holds the record of the shortest presidential tenure in U.S. History.
* Harrison was the seventh and youngest child of Benjamin Harrison V and Elizabeth Harrison, born on February 9, 1773, at Berkeley Plantation, the home of the Harrison family of Virginia on the James River in Charles City County. This was a prominent political family of English descent whose ancestors had been in Virginia since the 1630s.
* Harrison's father was a Virginia planter, who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress (1774–1777) and who signed the Declaration of Independence. His father also served in the Virginia legislature and as the fifth governor of Virginia (1781–1784) in the years during and after the American Revolutionary War.
* Harrison's older brother Carter Bassett Harrison represented Virginia in the House of Representatives (1793–1799).
* Harrison's son John Scott Harrison would later give birth to Benjamin Harrison, who would later go on to be the 23rd President
* William Henry often referred to himself as a "child of the revolution," as indeed he was, having grown up in a home just thirty miles from where Washington won the war against the British in the Battle of Yorktown.
* Harrison was tutored at home until age 14 when he attended Hampden–Sydney College, a Presbyterian college in Virginia. He studied there for three years, receiving a classical education that included Latin, Greek, French, logic, and debate. His Episcopalian father removed him from the college, possibly for religious reasons, and after brief stays at an academy in Southampton County, Virginia, and with his elder brother Benjamin in Richmond, he went to Philadelphia in 1790.
* Originally, Harrison wanted to be a doctor and actually attended the Pennsylvania Medical School, where studied medicine under Benjamin Rush. However, after his father's death, his older brother inherited their father's money, so he lacked the funds for his further medical schooling, which he had also discovered he didn't prefer. He therefore dropped out of medical school to join the military, though school archives record him as a "non-graduate alumnus of Penn's medical school class of 1793.".
* On November 25, 1795, Harrison married Anna Tuthill Symmes. She was a daughter of Anna Tuthill and Judge John Cleves Symmes, who served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War and as a representative to the Congress of the Confederation. Harrison asked the judge for permission to marry Anna but was refused, so the couple waited until Symmes left on business. They then eloped and were married at the North Bend home of Stephen Wood, treasurer of the Northwest Territory.
* The Harrison's honeymooned at Fort Washington, since Harrison was still on military duty.
* Judge Symmes confronted Harrison two weeks later at a farewell dinner for General Wayne, sternly demanding to know how he intended to support a family. Harrison responded, "by my sword, and my own right arm, sir."
* The match was advantageous for Harrison, as he eventually exploited his father-in-law's connections with land speculators, which facilitated his departure from the army. Judge Symmes' doubts about him persisted, as he wrote to a friend, "He can neither bleed, plead, nor preach, and if he could plow I should be satisfied." Matters eventually became cordial with the father-in-law, who later sold the Harrisons 160 acres (65 ha) of land in North Bend, which enabled Harrison to build a home and start a farm.
* Harrison and his wife had nine children. Their son, John Scott, would later be the father of Benjamin Harrison who would be elected as the 23rd President of the United States.
* Professor Kenneth R. Janken, in his biography of Walter Francis White, claims that Harrison had six children by an enslaved African-American woman named Dilsia. The assertion is based upon the White family's oral history but is not otherwise documented.
* During his early military career, Harrison participated in the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers, an American military victory that ended the Northwest Indian War. Later, he led a military force against Tecumseh's confederacy at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, where he earned the nickname "Old Tippecanoe."
* Harrison was promoted to major general in the Army during the War of 1812, and led American infantry and cavalry to victory at the Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada.
* Harrison's political career began in 1798, with an appointment as Secretary of the Northwest Territory; in 1799 he was elected as the territory's non-voting delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. He became governor of the newly established Indiana Territory in 1801 and negotiated multiple treaties with American Indian tribes, with the nation acquiring millions of acres.
* In 1824, Harrison was elected to the U.S. Senate, though his Senate term was cut short by his appointment as Minister Plenipotentiary to Gran Colombia in 1828.
* Harrison returned to private life in North Bend, Ohio until he was nominated as one of several Whig Party nominees for president in the 1836 presidential election; he was defeated by Democratic vice president Martin Van Buren. Four years later, the party nominated him again, with John Tyler as his running mate, under the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." Harrison defeated Van Buren in the 1840 presidential election, making him the first of only two Whigs to win the presidency; the other being Zachary Taylor.
* When Harrison came to Washington, he wanted to show that he was still the steadfast hero of Tippecanoe and that he was a better educated and more thoughtful man than the backwoods caricature portrayed in the campaign. He took the oath of office on Thursday, March 4, 1841, a cold and wet day. He braved the chilly weather and chose not to wear an overcoat or a hat, rode on horseback to the grand ceremony, and then delivered the longest inaugural address in American history at 8,445 words. It took him nearly two hours to read, although his friend and fellow Whig Daniel Webster had edited it for length.
* In the evening of Saturday, April 3, Harrison developed severe diarrhea and became delirious, and at 8:30 p.m. he uttered his last words, to his attending doctor, assumed to be for Vice President John Tyler: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."
* Harrison's wife Anna was still in Ohio packing for the trip to Washington when she learned of her loss.
* The prevailing theory at the time was that his illness had been caused by the bad weather at his inauguration three weeks earlier.  Jane McHugh and Philip A. Mackowiak did an analysis in *Clinical Infectious Diseases* (2014), examining Miller's notes and records showing that the White House water supply was downstream of public sewage, and they concluded that he likely died of septic shock due to "enteric fever" (typhoid or paratyphoid fever).
* Oddly, all seven presidents who were elected in a year that ended in a zero were either assassinated or died in office until 1980 when Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt and finished out his term.
* In June 1841, Harrison's body was transported by train and river barge to North Bend, Ohio, and he was buried on July 7 at the summit of Mt. Nebo, which is now the William Henry Harrison Tomb State Memorial.
* Harrison's long-term impact on American politics includes his campaigning methods, which laid the foundation for modern presidential campaign tactics. Harrison died nearly penniless, and Congress voted his wife Anna a presidential widow's pension of $25,000, one year of Harrison's salary (equivalent to about $657,000 in 2021). She also received the right to mail letters free of charge.
* At 68, Harrison was the oldest person to assume the U.S. presidency until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 at 69.
* Though he is often omitted in historical presidential rankings due to his brief tenure, Harrison is remembered for his Indian entreaties, and also his inventive election campaign tactics.

## References

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William\_Henry\_Harrison
* https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/william-henry-harrison/
* https://www.american-historama.org/presidents-united-states/william-harrison.htm
* https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Harrison-912