(1833–1901)
Benjamin Harrison was the great-grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the grandson of “Old Tip”—President William Henry Harrison. But he probably owed much more of his presidential success to the scheming of Pennsylvania politician Matthew Stanley Quay, who guided his campaign (and somehow helped Harrison steal New York State) than he did his distinguished and historical pedigree. In fact, Harrison bristled if people around him made too big a fuss about his famous ancestors; he wanted to be considered his own man, ascending to the Executive Mansion on his own merit, with a little assistance from God, perhaps.
Like many politicians of his era, emerging from the Civil War as an officer of high rank helped Harrison’s credibility with voters in his home state of Indiana.
The growing power of the temperance movement, however, was always a force (and potential source of votes) to be considered. Therefore, like most savvy politicos of his era, Republican presidential candidate Harrison—en route to becoming the twenty-third president (1889–1893)—did not go out of his way to showcase the moderate amounts of alcohol he consumed. Considering that Harrison was both preceded and followed by known beer-lover Grover Cleveland, perhaps alcohol consumption was not such a determent to political fortune as one might have imagined.
KING ALCOHOL VS. THE TITANS OF TEMPERANCE
A decade before the Civil War, Harrison—a lawyer by trade—was already branching out into the political arena. He was once asked to share his views on temperance to a Hoosier crowd. The speaker before him apparently had already “handed down the tablets” on the subject and also confessed that he had suffered the evils of drink before he saw the light.
Fearing it might be a tough act to follow, Harrison more or less petitioned the crowd for a bit of understanding in advance because he was “inexperienced not only in making temperance speeches, but in drinking whiskey.”
. . . for unlike the reformed drunkard who addressed you so powerfully, I can recount no life spent in the service of King Alcohol; nor can I speak of a home made desolate by its ravages.
All that said, Harrison (knowing his crowd) emphatically added that “drunken demagogues” should be ousted from legislative and judicial positions and their spots filled by “honest temperance men.” Obviously he considered himself one of the latter. Harrison was not exactly a teetotaler, however.
A pious man by practice, Harrison was nonetheless pulled into the mass horror of the Civil War. He served as a general with the 70th Indiana Regiment and held prayer meetings at his tent.
Harrison’s letters from the field seem to hint that he drank a bit more than he might have as a civilian back home in Indiana, but those records also stress that his consumption was moderate. And they do not hide his disdain for his fellow officers (or even his superiors) who fell under the firm spell of Demon Alcohol.
When some of his fellow officers got their hands on some quality bourbon and knocked back a few measures, Harrison humorously penned to his wife Carrie:
Some of the officers got quite mellow and I laughed more than I did for a year before at the antics of some of them, particularly Col. Dustin.
But did the future president of the United States imbibe in a sip or two of the char-barreled nectar too? He allowed to his wife that he might have “touched it very lightly myself.”
Harrison may have confessed to his own “light touch,” but he was no fan of heavy-handed whiskey sluggers, either. When it was learned that General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker was coming in to a branch of the Union Army that included Harrison’s Indiana unit, the future president was much chagrined. Writing to his wife in April 1864, Harrison feared that “whiskey . . . would be the ascendant now, if the stories about Hooker are well founded.”
Some of those stories came from men very high up in President Lincoln’s administration. As Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles noted in his diary in 1863 (a year before Harrison “inherited” Hooker):
[Francis] Blair, who was present, said [Hooker] was too great a friend of John Barleycorn.
And furthermore, Welles wrote:
From what I have since heard, I fear [Hooker’s] habits are not such to commend him, that at least he indulges in the free use of whiskey, gets excited, and is fond of play. This is the result of my inquiries. . . .
Hooker’s arrival also meant the reassignment of General Howard, a man who, like Harrison, was quite religious (and not a drinker). It was no wonder that Harrison viewed the switch as a lose-lose situation. To make matters worse, Hooker had a sidekick—General Ward—who also liked his liquor. Harrison refers to Ward in his writings as getting “beastly drunk” and also as a “lazy sot.”
Like General George Washington, Harrison did not turn a blind eye when men below him mucked up the army’s efficiency by lifting the whiskey jug with drunken intent. He once fired a regiment postmaster for chronic intoxication.
Nevertheless, Harrison knew that alcohol had both its charms and uses. Slogging through inclement weather on a march against the Confederates, Harrison was sympathetic to the plight of the rank-and-file soldier, as he mentioned to his wife:
Some of the wagons did not get in until noon the next day and the rear guard was forced to stand all night in a swamp and without a fire to do any good. I went out four miles the next day and took a ration of whiskey to them.
Last night when we and all our bed clothes were wet it turned cold and froze quite hard this morning. We got up stiff all over.
In contrast to the enlisted man’s whiskey ration, Harrison—who enjoyed the occasional benefits of dining under more refined conditions—spoke to the attributes of moderation concerning “a pleasant, cheerful dinner of the kind where only enough wine is taken to give vivacity to the mind.”
In his Recollections of Thirteen Presidents, John S. Wise had this take on Benjamin Harrison:
He did indeed have two prominent traits of the Harrisons, for he was fond of shooting and a religious enthusiast. . . .
He utterly lacked another family trait, for many of the Virginia branch have dearly loved whisky. My father, who knew them all and loved them, but had a way of saying what he pleased, generalized Harrison traits that he never knew a Harrison who was not a gentleman, but some were inclined to run to extremes—some in the love of God, and others in the love of whisky.
President Benjamin Harrison was quite “inclined” toward God (though he was not entirely unfamiliar with whiskey) and, in fact, gave the Lord great credit for his winning of the Executive Mansion.
“Providence has given us the victory!” Harrison exclaimed to Republican chairman Senator Matthew Quay shortly after securing the 1888 election victory. In a cynical aside to a journalist, Quay blurted out: “Think of the man! He ought to know that Providence hadn’t a damned thing to do with it. . . .” Quay also said that Harrison would never know how many underlings had been “compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary” in order to get him elected.
CARNEGIE’S “CONGRESSIONAL” CARGO
Industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie loved to send casks of fine scotch whisky to people he deemed worthy. Mark Twain, for example, had long been a recipient of Carnegie’s liquid kindness, once observing that it was “the smoothest whisky now on the planet.”
As president of the United States, Harrison made the Carnegie gift list. Carnegie sent Harrison a keg of scotch from John Dewar & Sons, and (like Twain) the sender spoke most highly of its contents.
The Scottish-born Carnegie must have also sent some sort of amusing message with the keg, because Harrison’s thank-you note for the precious cargo mentioned: “It was very nice of you to think of me as to needing a ‘brace’ this winter in dealing with congress.”
If Carnegie was pleased with sending the gift of Scottish spirits, and Harrison seemingly quite content to receive it, perhaps only Thomas R. Dewar (son of the distillery’s deceased founder, John Dewar) outstripped them in his enthusiasm concerning the shipment.
“It was the very best kind of advertising I ever had and certainly the cheapest. . . . Inquiries and orders flowed to us from all parts of the States,” said Dewar once word spread concerning the delivery of whisky to the Executive Mansion.
A few months after shipping Carnegie’s keg, a traveling Dewar swung by the Executive Mansion, as he documented in his book A Ramble Round the Globe. Dewar did not get to meet President Harrison, but a tour guide showed him around:
He was expatiating proudly on the fact that everything was American-made, when I mentioned that he must not forget that there is something from Scotland in the cellar. At first he looked hurt; but when I gave him my card, and he saw who I was, his countenance relaxed, and the meaning smile which beamed over it proved that he was well aware as I of what had travelled from Perth to Washington, some months previously
Most presidential history buffs are well aware that William Henry Harrison, Benjamin’s grandfather, won the Executive Mansion on the infamous “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign.
But Benjamin Harrison—“Little Ben’s” great-grandfather—most definitely fit John S. Wise’s description of the family branch fond (in the extreme) of whiskey. The portly delegate from Virginia was one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence, and was sometimes dubbed “The Falstaff of Congress.” His gluttony resulted in decades of suffering with gout.
Special events at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Home in Indianapolis have included a croquet tournament and a Civil War dinner—the latter accompanied by wine and a “guest” dressed up as General Benjamin Harrison. Confirmation is still pending on whether there might be a keg of Carnegie-sent scotch hidden somewhere on the site.