WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
9th President, 1841
Overall Rank: 38
Total Score: 383
“Tippecanoe’s” term lasted only thirty-one days, giving historians a relatively small presidential legacy to assess. Known for giving the longest inaugural address of any president—nearly two hours—it is notable that historians assigned him his highest ranking in public persuasion (28th). His second highest ranking is in moral authority (31st).
Party: Whig
b. February 9, 1773, Charles City County, Virginia
d. April 4, 1841, Washington, DC
First Lady: Anna Symmes Harrison
Age entering office: 68
Historian: Ronald G. Shafer
Ron Shafer spent thirty-eight years at the Wall Street Journal as an editor, reporter, and columnist. He joined C-SPAN’s Q & A to discuss his book, The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” Changed Presidential Elections Forever, on December 9, 2016.
I live in Williamsburg, Virginia. It’s right next door to where William Henry Harrison and John Tyler were born. [In 1840,] they ran the first modern presidential campaign with rallies and presidential speeches. Before this, when you campaigned for president, you didn’t go out and give speeches. You didn’t have rallies. You just sat at home and you wrote letters to people who wrote to you about the issues. In this election, for the first time, they had huge rallies, and Harrison became the first president to go out and give speeches.
This was very much like our election in 2016. It was politics, and it was entertainment. There was demagoguery. There were personal insults. And, it involved the oldest man ever to run for president. At that time, it was Harrison, who was sixty-seven years old.
Martin Van Buren was the [incumbent] president in 1840. He was known as the “Little Magician.” He was a professional politician from New York and the protégé of Andrew Jackson. Jackson served two terms. Van Buren was his vice president, and so he anointed Van Buren as his successor, and Van Buren won. Unfortunately, he won in 1836 and then came the Great Panic of 1837, which was a depression and the economy fell apart. Jobs were lost, wages went down—so it was a terrible time to be running for election as president.… Eighteen thirty-seven was the worst depression until the [Great] Depression of 1929. It was awful. People couldn’t get work. They couldn’t get food; there were food riots in New York. The main theme, if there was one, of the Harrison campaign, which tried to avoid issues as much as possible, was to promise better times ahead. They were going to help you with the economy,… and that you could count on them to at least worry about you, where the Democrats, they said, did not care about you.
Van Buren was a Democrat. Back then, the Democrats were out of the Thomas Jefferson philosophy. They believed in no federal government at all, or at least the smallest federal government. So, when the Panic of 1837 hit, they did nothing. They believed the government should not do anything, that you are on your own. This, of course, alienated the voters. The Whigs [Harrison’s party] believed that there should be some government help—mainly involved in building roads connecting the states, but they promised to offer some help. They, in effect, offered to make America great again, except their slogan was “Harrison and reform.” Not quite as catchy, but it worked.
William Henry Harrison was born at Berkeley Plantation, which is near Williamsburg and Richmond. His father, Benjamin Harrison V, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.… When Henry was young, they had dinner guests—people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—so you can imagine the conversations that he heard. And then when he was fourteen, he was sent away to college. Most kids could not go to college then, but he was sent off to college and then to medical school and ended up in Philadelphia.
His father died, and suddenly he had no income. He inherited some land from Berkeley Plantation, but since he was the youngest of seven children,… the oldest son got the plantation, and Harrison had to find something to do.
He really didn’t want to study medicine; he wanted to go fight Indians. So, he got a commission in the army, but instead of going in as a private, his father had an old friend who was now president of the United States, and his name was George Washington. Washington made him an officer. [Harrison] left Philadelphia and went to Fort Washington near… Cincinnati; he walked most of the three hundred miles. He was a big lover of Roman history, so the only thing he took with him were some volumes of the works of Cicero. He finally arrived in Cincinnati to fight for the general [who was] heading up the fight against the Indians in Ohio.
[In 1795, at age twenty-two]… he married Anna Symmes, daughter of a wealthy landowner there who sold him this little log cabin on the west bend of the Ohio about fourteen miles west of Cincinnati. [In 1798] he started looking for a better job, and again, with some help from an old friend of his father’s, President John Adams, he got appointed as secretary and then governor of the Indiana Territory, which was a big job.
This is how Harrison became famous: [in 1811] he had a run-in with [the famous Indian leader] Tecumseh because Tecumseh was trying to get the Indians not to sell their land to Harrison. Tecumseh came to [Grouseland,] Harrison’s home [near Vincennes], and during the discussion, he drew his tomahawk; Harrison drew his sword, and they parted ways. Tecumseh and his brothers set up a town near Lafayette, [Indiana,] called Prophetstown, and they were causing some trouble. So, Harrison decided to close down the town. He got a troop of men from the federal government and from the Indiana militia and went down and camped outside the town before entering the next day. During the night the Indians attacked. There were lots of casualties on both sides.… Nevertheless, Harrison prevailed and closed down the town the next day. Word spread across the country, and [Harrison] became known as “The Hero of Tippecanoe,” which led to his [later] nickname, “Old Tippecanoe.” [He resigned as territorial governor and returned to the military in 1812, attaining the rank of brigadier general and winning numerous battles in the War of 1812.]
Harrison’s retirement [from the military in 1814] was very controversial because he had just won the Battle of the Thames. He went to Washington, and there were parades all the way as he went. He gets to Washington, and what happened was that the secretary of war didn’t get along with him, and so now that that battle was over, he was going to assign him to some meaningless post. Harrison didn’t want that. He resigned and sent a letter to President Madison. He figured that Madison, the old family friend, would not accept it, but Secretary of War [John Armstrong] intercepted it and said, “Okay.” He replaced [Harrison] with a guy named Andrew Jackson. Harrison was assigned to do some peace talks with the Indians, which he did [resulting in two successful treaties].
William Henry Harrison was able, at that time, to use his fame to get into Congress.… He was in the US House [representing a district in Ohio, where he had moved], and he was in the Ohio Senate, but as the years went by, the fame faded, and he lost a couple of elections. He finally convinced the state legislature to appoint him to the US Senate… [and] was back in Washington. He was a senator, but he really wanted a higher-paying job than that. He wants to be the [envoy to Colombia]—a job had just opened up under John Quincy Adams. Adams said, “Oh, this Harrison, he is always begging for jobs. He is the worst guy. What am I going to do with this guy?” But his secretary of state, Henry Clay, said, “Why don’t you give him this job?”
Harrison did take the job, which paid a lot of money, but it took him a year to get to Colombia. He was there just a few days when Andrew Jackson became president. He and Andrew Jackson did not get along, and the first thing Jackson did when he got in office was to say, “You’re out of here.” Harrison had to go all the way back home. [Jobless,] he ended up being the county clerk at Hamilton County near Cincinnati, which paid pretty well, but he was a lowly clerk. [He was still serving in this position when he ran for president.]
[In 1840, when Harrison sought his party’s nomination]… this was the first Whig convention ever. It was in Harrisburg because they had just built a new train station so people could come in from Washington. Henry Clay, who had started the Whig Party, figured he would get the nomination. He was the leader on the first two votes, but he did not get enough to [win], so they had to keep voting.… Eventually, the support swung to Harrison because he was known as a man who was not supporting the abolitionists.… Finally, on the fifth vote, Harrison won.
[None of the three Whig candidates were actually] there. That was the other difference from now. Back in those days, you were supposed to pretend that you weren’t running for president, so all of these men were at home. Harrison was back in Ohio. Clay was in Washington. General Winfield Scott was in New York. So, they didn’t even know about this [contentious voting] when it happened. Harrison found out about it a week or two later. There was a little notice in the Cincinnati newspaper that he had won. Finally, he got an official letter from the Whigs that he was the nominee, and so he answered. He said he was very happy about this and [proclaimed] that he was very surprised, even though he had been lobbying for this.
The log cabin became the symbol of his campaign.… The plan was to portray him as the General Washington of the West, that he would be this leader on a white horse leading the people. The week after the convention ended, some reporter in an opposition newspaper wrote this article that Harrison, who was sixty-seven years old, was really just an old granny and that he’d be content to be given some hard cider and a pension and stay home in his log cabin instead of running for president.
Well, this just threw the plans in a fire. So, two people in Harrisburg, an elderly banker and a young newspaper man, met at the banker’s mansion. Harrison knew nothing about this. They said, “What are we going to do about this?” The banker said, “Well, why don’t we just go with it? The log cabin is the symbol of the common man. Hard cider is what the common man drinks.” The editor gets out a piece of paper and draws this log cabin with raccoons on the top and he’s got a barrel of hard cider there, and he says, “Why don’t we do something like this?”
Within a month, you had parades with log cabins on wheels—something like fifty feet wide and carrying forty people, pulled by twenty horses. This became a symbol in every parade they had, and he was portrayed as the champion of the common man living in a log cabin. In fact, he lived in a mansion in Ohio. He had a big house on the river. That little cabin they had bought from his wife’s father, well, they had ten kids, so they expanded it, and it was very modern. He had thousands of acres and estates, so he was actually a very wealthy man, but he was portrayed as the champion of the poor. Again, here was a parallel to the [2016 presidential election].
… He started out following the very same pattern [of past campaigns]—he would answer letters. One day, a fellow in New York said he had written Harrison asking him about some issues, and he got a letter back [that] wasn’t from Harrison; it was from some committee. This was an outrage. The Democrats jumped on this and said, “He has a conscience committee. He is being kept, the poor man, in an iron cage. They don’t even trust him to answer his own letters.” Harrison was humiliated by this, and he decided he had to do something. He got an invitation to speak at a ceremony at Fort Meigs, where he once commanded, near Toledo. He accepted it.
He started on his way, and it’s a long way. It’s two hundred miles. But by this time, the log cabin theme had kicked in, so he kept his silk hat at home and took his farmer’s hat and his plain clothes… to keep with the image. He stopped in Columbus, Ohio, overnight at the National Hotel right in the middle of town. He went to see the boys at the Tippecanoe Club the next morning. He was leaving, and there was a crowd gathered outside. He starts to say a few words, and pretty soon he is giving a speech. It is June 6, 1840—the first speech ever by a presidential candidate. Then he continued up to Fort Meigs and gave a speech for thousands of people, continued over to Cleveland, and then gave more than twenty speeches.… [Harrison was soon] going all around the state like an aging rock star—like the Mick Jagger of politics at the time.
[Their campaign slogan] “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” refers to “Old Tippecanoe,” William Henry Harrison and John Tyler as his running mate. Tyler was his cousin; he grew up right down the road from Berkeley Plantation at another plantation. His father was friends with Harrison’s father. Tyler’s father, his roommate at the College of William and Mary was Thomas Jefferson. They had a lot of these interconnections, although Harrison was seventeen years older.…
I can tell you how that Tippecanoe slogan came about. That first big rally in the campaign was in Columbus, Ohio. They had thirty thousand people in Columbus, a town of about three thousand people. They had a huge parade, and one of the things in the parade was this big rolling ball—it was about ten feet high—that came in from Cleveland and had slogans all over it. There was a jeweler from nearby Zanesville in the audience, and he was so taken by this that he went home to his Tippecanoe glee club and wrote a song about this ball called “The Great Commotion.” The chorus line was, “for Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” and the name just caught on—or in modern terms, it went viral.
Nobody had ever heard of anything like this and never seen anything like this, so Harrison started drawing more and more people. By the time he got to Dayton… people came from all over the area, and it was sixty thousand to one hundred thousand people just to see him. They probably could not hear him because they didn’t have microphones at that time, but he gave a two-hour speech in Dayton, Ohio, with one hundred thousand people and another one in Cincinnati that also drew an estimated one hundred thousand people. The population of the United States was about [7] percent of what it is now, so it was quite amazing the kinds of crowds he drew. It probably has never been matched. I think Barack Obama drew one hundred thousand at a rally in Manassas, Virginia, in one of his elections, but very rarely matched.
They turned on poor President Van Buren. He had no idea why people were saying these things [calling him, among other things, a “weasel”]. It was a very, very nasty campaign. Even his friends turned on him. Washington Irving, the author, grew up in the same part of New York State where Van Buren had, and he was his friend until Van Buren would not appoint his brother to a federal job. He switched over to Harrison and supported him. If you were running for president in those days, you better be ready for a lot of insults.
In those days, there was a lot of bribing of voters. You are talking about voter fraud. There was no secret ballot. People would coop up—they called it cooping—people in houses and give them wine and food and tell them, “Okay, now you go out and vote for this person,” and they would do it. They sent bullies to the polls to chase away somebody from the opposition, so a lot of voting was not exactly on the up and up, but that was really on both sides.
… This was the first campaign that women were involved with. They couldn’t vote, of course, but the Whigs decided they would be great allies because they could persuade their husbands and boyfriends to vote for Harrison. It became a great movement where women wore sashes reading, “Whig husbands or none,” and they refused to marry their boyfriends unless they said they would vote for the Whigs. Women came to the parades, and they waved handkerchiefs. Some gave speeches. Some wrote pamphlets. It was very shocking. They were criticized by the Democrats, who said that these women should be home making pudding. This was the beginning really… of the movement for the women’s vote. One of my favorite anecdotes: at a rally in Springfield, Illinois, the horses stampeded, and this woman was heard saying, “If any are to be killed, let it be the ladies, for they can’t vote.”
An amazing total, 81 percent [of eligible voters voted in 1840, which] was the highest ever at that time. One reason they went to this log cabin campaign theme was that the voter rolls had expanded to include most of the white males in the country. Before this, you had to own property, or you had to be in the militia, but they expanded it that year so that the number increased. And then this entertaining campaign increased voter interest so much that the voter number increased by 60 percent for this election,… so it was really incredible.
[William Henry Harrison got 1,275,390 votes, 234 electoral votes, and President Van Buren got 1,128,854 votes and only 60 electoral votes.] It was, again, somewhat like the 2016 campaign. Harrison won in states that got him the electoral votes while Van Buren picked up a lot of popular votes. There was some feeling that maybe this circus campaign started to backfire by the end because it really didn’t have much substance. But… the vote total was fairly close. The funny thing about Van Buren, Andrew Jackson said, “Wait until you see the final returns. Don’t give up yet.” Van Buren had a messenger go to the polling place every day because people voted over several days at those times. Finally, he got word that he lost New York, which is when he knew he lost the election.
There were a lot of cartoons about Van Buren stomping down the stairs of the White House as Harrison moved in. In fact, when Harrison arrived in Washington, he stayed at a local hotel. Van Buren invited him over to the White House. He was very gracious. He invited him to move in ahead of the election to get away from the crowds. Of course, there was no Secret Service protection then, but Harrison stayed at the hotel. Van Buren brought his cabinet over to meet Harrison and then had him over for dinner. He did not attend the inauguration because that was not the custom at the time, but he turned out to be a very gracious loser.
[Harrison held the first inaugural parade in history] mainly because this was the hallmark of his campaign, these big rallies with the log cabins on wheels. They had the first official inaugural committee, and they arranged this parade, which would pretty much look like a rally with the log cabins and the marching bands; music was very important in this campaign. The Whigs in Baltimore got a brand-new wagon for Harrison to ride in, but he did not want to ride in it. He rode his horse, Old Whitey. He did not wear a coat. He did have a hat, but he kept doffing it as he went down Pennsylvania Avenue. They paraded down to the Capitol, and once he gave his speech, they paraded back to the White House.
Harrison gave the longest inaugural speech in history, and maybe the most boring inaugural speech in history—an hour and forty-five minutes. It was not raining, [but] it was very cold. The wind was blowing. He did not wear a coat or hat. He wanted to look very young. But he did not get sick; he went to three inaugural balls that night. He was fine.
Two weeks later he went on a walk—he walked every morning from the White House. There was no [security] in those days; you could just go out. He got caught in the rain, and he rushed back to the White House, but didn’t change his clothes. A couple of days later, he came down with a cold. It got worse and worse, became pneumonia, and he was dead a month after he was inaugurated as president.
[The nation was] totally surprised because everything you read going up to that time said, “Oh, he looked so young. He looked so vigorous.” He may have been helped along by his doctors who treated him with all kinds of wild treatments like bloodletting, giving him laxatives, then giving something to make him vomit, and some Indian snake weed. Later they discovered—at least one study found—that though they claimed they were treating him for pneumonia, they were treating him for the common cold. If he had better treatment, he might have survived.
[Harrison died thirty days, plus twelve hours, into his presidency.] There was panic because the vice president was not [in Washington]. In those days the vice presidents had nothing to do, so Tyler had gone home to Williamsburg, Virginia, to his plantation. They sent two guys; they took a steamship and a train and then horses to ride to his house and got there in the middle of the night.… They rushed Tyler back. Now, he’d had some wind that Harrison wasn’t doing well, but he didn’t think it was proper to rush to Washington and hover over the body.
Tyler was sworn in, and then the problem was, what do you call him? This had never happened before. The Constitution didn’t really say what to do; it just said the vice president takes the duties of the president. It didn’t say he was president. But John Tyler said, “Call me President Tyler.”