William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison (born February 9, 1773, Charles City county, Virginia [U.S.]—died April 4, 1841, Washington, D.C., U.S.) was the ninth president of the United States (1841), whose Indian campaigns, while he was a territorial governor and army officer, thrust him into the national limelight and led to his election in 1840. He was the oldest man, at age 67, ever elected president up to that time, the last president born under British rule, and the first to die in office—after only one month’s service. His grandson Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president of the United States (1889–93).

Early years

Born at Berkeley Plantation in Virginia, Harrison was descended from two wealthy and well-connected Virginia families. His father, Benjamin Harrison, was long prominent in Virginia politics and became a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1764, opposing Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act resolutions in the following year. He also was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and the governor of Virginia (1781–84). A brother, Carter Bassett Harrison, served six years in the House of Representatives.

William Henry Harrison received a classical education at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he was a student from 1787 to 1790. He then studied medicine in Richmond, Virginia, and in Philadelphia with Benjamin Rush. However, the death of his father caused Harrison to discontinue his studies. In November 1791, at age 18, he enlisted in the army as an ensign in the 10th Regiment at Fort Washington near Cincinnati (in what is now Ohio). The following year he was made a lieutenant and subsequently served as an aide-de-camp to Gen. Anthony Wayne, who was engaged in a struggle against the Northwest Indian Confederation over the westward encroachment of white settlers. Harrison took part in the campaign that ended in the Battle of Fallen Timbers (August 20, 1794), near present-day Maumee, Ohio. The following year, on November 25, he married Anna Tuthill Symmes. Because her father objected to the match, the couple married in secret. Harrison was promoted to captain in 1797 and, for a brief period, served as commander of Fort Washington, resigning from the army in June 1798.

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In subsequent years Harrison held several government positions. In 1798 Pres. John Adams named Harrison to succeed Winthrop Sargent as secretary of the Northwest Territory, a vast tract of land encompassing most of the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The following year Harrison was sent to Congress as a territorial delegate. While serving in this capacity, he devised a plan for distributing public lands to settlers and also assisted in the division of the Northwest Territory. It was Harrison’s ambition to become governor of the reconstituted, more-populous eastern portion of the territory. Instead, in May 1800, Adams appointed Harrison governor of the newly created Indiana Territory, which comprised, until 1809, a much larger area than the present state of Indiana. He would serve as governor for 12 years. In 1803 Harrison also became a special commissioner charged with negotiating with Native Americans “on the subject of boundary or lands.” Succumbing to the demands of land-hungry whites, he negotiated a number of treaties between 1802 and 1809 that stripped Indians of millions of acres of land—in the southern part of the present state of Indiana and portions of the present states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. For a few months after the division in 1804 of the Louisiana Purchase into the Orleans Territory and the Louisiana Territory, Harrison also acted as governor of the Louisiana Territory (all of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 33rd parallel), the largest jurisdiction ever exercised by a territorial official in the United States to that date.

Resisting the expansionism fostered by the treaties negotiated by Harrison, the Shawnee intertribal leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, who was known as the Prophet, organized an Indian uprising. Returning to military service, Harrison commanded a force of seasoned regulars and militia that defeated the Indians led by the Prophet at the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811), near present-day Lafayette, Indiana, a victory that largely established his military reputation in the public mind. A few months after the War of 1812 broke out with Great Britain, Harrison was made a brigadier general and placed in command of all federal forces in the Northwest Territory. He would be promoted to the rank of major general in March 1813.

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Gen. James Winchester, whom Harrison had ordered to prepare to cross Lake Erie on the ice and surprise Fort Maiden, turned back to rescue the threatened American settlement at Frenchtown (now Monroe, Michigan), on the River Raisin, and there on January 22, 1813, was forced to surrender to Col. Henry A. Procter. With his offensive operations having been thus checked, Harrison accomplished nothing that summer except to hold in check Procter, who besieged him at Fort Meigs (May 1–5), the American advance post after the disaster at the River Raisin. After Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry’s naval victory in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, Harrison no longer had to remain on the defensive. He advanced to Detroit, reoccupied the territory surrendered by Gen. William Hull, and on October 5, 1813, decisively defeated the British and their Indian allies at the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, Canada. Tecumseh was killed in the battle, and the British-Indian alliance was permanently destroyed. Thus ended resistance in the Northwest.

At a glance: the Harrison presidency