11 Reasons to Remember the Long Life & Short Presidency of William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison is best remembered by the American public — if he’s remembered at all — as the president who died pretty much as soon as he entered office. To historians, he’s best remembered for the seven treaties he signed during his twelve years as governor of the Indiana Territory, which added an estimated fifty million acres of land to the map. And for being the president who died pretty much as soon as he entered office.
But despite the fact that Old Tippecanoe was only Commander in Chief for a month, it turns out there’s actually a lot to say. So if you ever find yourself coming up blank during a lively game of presidential trivia, William Henry Harrison is probably a safe bet.
He was the last president born a British subject
Harrison spent the first three years of his life as a subject of King George III. Then his dad and buncha other guys signed a piece of paper.
Obvious but weird — Like George Washington not knowing about dinosaurs — every American born before the summer of 1776 was born some other nationality. That’s why the Constitution allowed anyone who was a citizen at the time of its adoption to become president.
If only Arnold had been born a few centuries earlier, his presidential aspirations coulda been fulfilled.
He ran the first modern presidential campaign, songs and all
In the early days of the Republic, it was considered low, crass, and maybe even a bit morally questionable for a man to campaign on his own behalf for the presidency. Men didn’t seek high office; it sought them, and they humbly answered the call. These men, these righteous and honorable men, nobly set aside their personal lives for the good of the nation. (Or at least they’d have the American masses believe.)
You’d think this especially true for the son of a signer of that most righteous and honorable of documents, the Declaration of Independence.
You’d be wrong.
Harrison was a shameless self-promoter. The man had no qualms about asking/begging/groveling for government appointments from every friend, neighbor, and tenuous connection he had. Even after landing a position, the jockeying didn’t stop. (Perhaps a wife, ten children, and various wards had something to do with this.) Considering that, it’s no real surprise that after losing to Martin Van Buren in 1836, Harrison would try something a little different in 1840.
This something different included a slogan (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” — pointing to his (debatable) military glory during the War of 1812 and an eh-so-what attitude towards his running mate), multiple campaign jingles, a less-than-true underdog backstory (the folksy “Log Cabin Candidate” was actually part of the Virginian aristocracy), campaign-approved hard apple cider for rallies, and a giant ball of string, because what the hell, right?
He was also the first candidate to show medical records to prove his questionable health wasn’t all that questionable (or was it?)
Remember when Hilary Clinton’s fitness for office was questioned after her bout of pneumonia back in 2016? It was not a particularly unusual news story, but that sort of thing didn’t happen before Harrison’s bout of…being old. Democrats cited his advanced age as a sign that he just wasn’t the right man for the top job.
To be fair, he was pretty old. At 68, Harrison became the oldest president when he entered office in 1841, a record he held for more than a century and a half, until Ronald Reagan took office at age 69 in 1981.
Plus, considering life expectancy in the United States in the early nineteenth century was around 40, Harrison seems ancient.
But he still became the first Whig president
All the campaign gimmicks paid off, and while his election made Old Tippecanoe the ninth American president overall, it also made him the first from the rising Whig Party, a strange, short-lived coalition cobbled together from disparate anti-Andrew Jackson factions, including disgruntled Democrats, former National Republican and Anti-Masonic Party members, and vestiges of the old Federalist Party.
The new party was chiefly concerned with creating economic and industrial growth through measures like a national bank and high tariffs.
While they were a major player during the Second Party System of the mid nineteenth century, the Whigs more or less fizzled out by the start of the Civil War. The prominent Gilded Age historian Henry Adams was less than impressed with the party, saying, “Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.”
Despite the harsh judgment of Adams and many other historians, the Whigs managed to hold the White House two(ish) more times during their short history — Harrison’s vice, John Tyler (before his expulsion from the party shortly after ascending to the presidency), Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore.
He gave the longest inauguration speech in presidential history
To prove his age wasn’t an issue, and to show his was hearty and hale, Harrison refused to wear an overcoat, a hat, or a pair of gloves during his inauguration on March 4, 1841, despite it being a cold, wet, windy, miserable day in the capital.
On top of that, he wanted to prove he was more intelligent than the backwoods cartoon character he’d played during the election, and so, underdressed and presumably shivering, Harrison proceeded to give an 8,445 word speech, promising to upend Andrew Jackson’s spoils system (and just about everything else Jackson did as president), to re-introduce the Bank of the United States, and to use his veto power sparingly. (Can’t say he didn’t come through on that last one.)
After talking for nearly two hours on the Capitol steps, Harrison had his photo taken (more on that later), rode his horse through Washington, and went to a buncha parties and a really expensive dinner.
He was the first president to die in office
After nine days of illness, Harrison died on April 4, 1841. It has long been assumed that Inauguration Day’s bad weather did him in, though, many modern medical studies, including one published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, claim this is “at odds with the detailed description of Harrison’s final illness left by his personal physician, Dr Thomas Miller of Washington, DC,” and propose enteric fever as the actual culprit.
Whatever the cause, Harrison died, and no other president had yet to do that while in office.
Which caused a constitutional crisis before setting a presidential precedent
Nobody was really sure what to do in the wake of Harrison’s death. Sure, Article II of the Constitution made it clear that the vice president takes over “the powers and duties” of the president in the event of his death/removal/resignation/etc., but did the vice president actually become president?
John Tyler thought so, and despite the Harrison-appointed cabinet’s initial insistence that he was merely “Vice President acting as President,” Tyler took the oath of office on August 6, and Congress passed a resolution confirming his presidency a few months later, setting a precedent for presidential succession that would eventually be written into the Constitution in 1967.
Despite this Congressional stamp of approval, many were not happy about what they saw as Tyler’s usurpation, including prominent Whigs like Senator Henry Clay (who had planned on wielding a lot of behind the scenes power in the Harrison Administration) and Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams.
He had the shortest tenure of any president
Harrison spent just 31 days in office (nine of them in a sickbed). The only other president who comes anywhere close to Harrison’s record is James A. Garfield, who served 199 days before dying of a gunshot wound in 1881.
Even Lincoln’s brief second term — 42 days — was longer.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose final term lasted 82 days) spent 4,391 more days in the Oval Office than Harrison did, making the Roosevelt presidency 142 times longer.
He was the first sitting president to be photographed
The three presidents preceding Harrison — John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren — may all have been photographed after leaving office, but Harrison was the OG of sitting presidents, somehow finding time after that record-setting inauguration speech to have his photo snapped using cutting edge daguerreotype technology.
However, the photo is lost. We can only assume Tippecanoe looked chilly.
He started the Curse of Tippecanoe
The legend goes that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawa, put a curse on Harrison after the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe and Harrison’s subsequent torching of the village of Prophetstown.
Any president elected in a year ending in zero, according to this curse, is doomed to die in office, as Harrison did. The next six — Abraham Lincoln (assassination), James A. Garfield (assassination), William McKinley (assassination), Warren G. Harding (heart attack), Franklin D. Roosevelt (cerebral hemorrhage), and John F. Kennedy (assassination) — all did too.
John Hinckley’s failed 1981 attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan (and impress Jodie Foster) seems to have put an end this curse business, however.
His wife, Anna Symmes, is a bundle of fun facts too
Anna Symmes was sick at the time of her husband’s inauguration, so her widowed daughter-in-law, Jane Irwin Harrison, performed the First Lady’s duties. Symmes never even set foot in the White House. Still, she was technically First Lady.
Of course, there are the fun facts that go hand-in-hand with her husband’s — shortest tenure of any First Lady (31 days), last First Lady born a Brit (b. 1775), and oldest woman, at 65, to become First Lady, though unlike her husband, Symmes still holds that record today, 179 years on.
As a widowed First Lady — the first — she was awarded a pension equal to her late husband’s salary by President Tyler. This became the standard for presidential widows.
Symmes was also the first First Lady educated outside of the family home, having attended the same boarding school as Martha Washington’s granddaughter.
Sources
Brown, Thomas, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party, page 1, 1985, Columbia University Press, https://www.questia.com/read/35908001/politics-and-statesmanship-essays-on-the-american
Caroli, Betty Boyd, “Anna Harrison,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Harrison
Collins, Gail, William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The Ninth President, 1841, 2012, Times Books, ISBN-10: 0805091181
Garber, Megan, “The Oldest Known Photographs of a U.S. President,” The Atlantic, 5 Feb 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-oldest-known-photographs-of-a-us-president/272872/
McHugh, Jane & Philip A. Mackowiak, “Death in the White House: President William Henry Harrison’s Atypical Pneumonia” Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 59, Issue 7, 1 October 2014, Pages 990–995, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciu470
