GENERAL, PRESIDENT, DISTILLER
1773–1841
William Henry Harrison Memorial, North Bend, Ohio
William Henry Harrison is the third of our dead “General, President, Distillers,” a surprisingly common string of titles for early chief executives. Harrison is mostly known to history by a single fact: At his inaugural address in 1841, he caught pneumonia and died thirty-two days later. He remains the shortest-serving president in American history.
Harrison’s father, Benjamin Harrison V, a patriot and founding father, was a notorious imbiber. He was a large man, and joked at the signing of the Declaration of Independence that “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body, you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” John Adams called him Falstaff, after the jovial, somewhat sad Shakespearean figure. He died at a celebration at the Berkeley plantation on the James River, where another dead distiller, George Thorpe (see this page), met his fate in an Indian raid.
Benjamin hoped his son would enter medical school, but after his father’s death, young William joined the army. He married Anna Tuthill Symmes against her father’s wishes, eloping and honeymooning at the military installation at Fort Washington in Cincinnati. After successful military service, he became a congressional representative and eventually governor of the Indiana Territory. Harrison was a shrewd manager and, like Andrew Jackson before him, worked to expand territory at the expense of American Indians. He won political support by giving away whiskey and cider at election times, and he was similarly generous to the Indians when he hoped to weaken them. He won a minor but psychologically important victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe and earned his nickname from the river where the battle was fought. Later, he commanded a successful fight against the British at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812.
After his military career ended, and after years of holding government posts, he returned to Ohio and set about building a commercial farm. Samuel Jones Burr wrote, “His farm on the Ohio River contains very superior corn ground, and some years since, when corn was low, he established a distillery in order to convert his surplus into an article more portable and profitable.” Harrison wasn’t the only person to have this idea; in fact, one of the distilleries established in Harrison’s time, first known as the Dunn and Ludlow distillery, remains today as the MGP distillery in Lawrenceburg, just five miles east from where Harrison is buried in North Bend, Ohio. Harrison also ran a successful horse-breeding business.
Harrison didn’t like to drink, even though his political campaign liked to portray him as a cabin-dwelling cider drinker. One of his sons struggled with alcoholism. Harrison shuttered his distillery. In June 1831, with his eye on national politics, he publicly declared his opposition to alcohol and gave this speech to the Hamilton County Agricultural Society in June 1831:
The exports of Ohio are generally the substantial comforts of life, which are everywhere acceptable, their arrival hailed as a blessing as well in the mansions of the rich as in the cottage of the poor; by the luxurious inhabitant of the tropics, cloyed with the luscious product of his burning climate, as by the poor negro who ministers to his wants. Alas! that there should be an exception; that a soil so prolific for that which is good, should, by a perversion of the intentions of the Creator, be made to yield that which is evil to scatter life and death with an equal hand. To the heart cheering prospects of flocks and herds feeding on unrivalled pastures of grain, exhibiting the scriptural proof that the seed had been cast on good ground—how often is the eye of the philanthropic traveller disgusted with the dark unsightly manufactories of certain poison—poison to the body and the soul!—A modern Aeneas or Ulysses might mistake them for entrances into the infernal regions, nor would they greatly err. But unlike those passages which conducted the Grecian and Trojan heroes on their pious errands, the scenes to which all these conduct the unhappy wretch who shall enter them are those, exclusively, of misery and woe. No relief to the sad picture; no Tartarus there, no Elysium here. It is all Tartarie darkness, and not unfrequently Tartarie crime.
I speak more freely of the practice of converting the material of “the staff of life” (and for which so many human beings yearly perish) into an article which is so destructive of health and happiness, because in that way I have sinned myself; but in that way I shall sin no more.
William Henry Harrison, for his thirty-two days on the presidential stage, endures in history: erstwhile whiskey distiller, reformed; temperance advocate; Indian killer. But perhaps his most lasting contribution to history is his political campaign. Recast as a rube by Democrat Martin Van Buren and eastern newspapers, Harrison and his party turned this to his advantage, creating all kinds of propaganda showing Harrison as a man of the people. The most enduring, a log cabin–shaped bottle of whiskey, was marked by the E.C. Booz company. It proved wildly popular, ensuring that company’s legacy, though not, as is often claimed, the word “booze” as a synonym for liquor. (The term actually traces its roots back to a Dutch word, busen, meaning excessive drinking.)