A Child of the Revolution

William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773-1798

Hendrik Booraem V

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612776422
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Indian wars in early Ohio as seen through the eyes of a future president

The American Revolution gave birth to a nation, forever changed the course of political thought, and shattered and transformed the lives of the citizens of the new republic. An iconic figure of the Old Northwest, governor, Indian fighter, general in the War of 1812, and ultimately president, William Henry Harrison was one such citizen. The son of a rich Virginia planter, Harrison saw his family mansion burned and his relatives scattered. In the war's aftermath, he rejected his inherited beliefs about slavery, religion, and authority, and made an idealistic commitment to serve the United States.

This led him to the United States Army, which at the time was a sorry collection of drunks and derelicts who were about to be reorganized in the face of a serious conflict with the Indian nations of the Ohio valley. Author Hendrik Booraem follows Harrison as Gen. Anthony Wayne attempted to rebuild the army into a fighting force, first in Pittsburgh, then in Cincinnati and the forests of the Northwest. A voracious reader of history and the classics, Harrison became fascinated with the archaeology and ethnology of the region, even as his military service led to a dramatic showdown with the British army, which had secretly been aiding the Indians.

By age 21, Harrison had achieved almost everything he had set his heart on—adventure, recognition, intellectual stimulation, and even a small measure of power. He was the youngest man to put his name to the Treaty of Greenville, which ended Indian control over Ohio lands and opened the way for development and statehood. He even won a bride: Anna Symmes, the Eastern-educated daughter of pioneer landowner John Cleves Symmes. When Congress voted to downsize the army, 25-year-old Harrison, now a family man, fumbled for a second career.

Drawing on a variety of primary documents, Booraem re-creates military life as Lieutenant Harrison experienced it—a life of duels, discipline, rivalries, hardships, baffling encounters with the natives and social relations between officers and men, military and civilians, and men and women.

CHAPTER ONE

An Ardent Ambition to Become a Soldier

Various reasons exist for being concerned with the early life of a president of the United States, and each affects differently the amount and nature of source material preserved for each individual. Even before achieving the presidency, for example, a candidate for the office needs to offer the public a narrative of childhood and early adulthood that establishes a character, generates sympathy, and connects plausibly with his or her adult achievements. Although the style of presidential campaign biographies has changed over the years—a process traced in detail by Scott Casper for the nineteenth century in Constructing American Lives—the publication of such biographies has been a constant feature of American elections almost from the beginning. Such campaign biographies form the basis for most later studies. Despite selective omission—since nothing conceivably damaging to the candidate will be included—they are generally accurate in outline: they must be in order to establish their subject’s credibility.¹

Former presidents, with their reputation already made and less need to tell the public about the early years of their lives, have fairly often published memoirs in which those years play only a supporting part. Nevertheless, in several such cases, the material collected in the process of writing the memoir was preserved for the use of family, friends, and future biographers, and often the information not used in the memoir is more revealing than the material that actually made it into the pages. Several presidents—for example, both Adamses, James A. Garfield, and Woodrow Wilson—saved documents from their early life, including letters and diaries, for personal reference. Such documents, steeped in the mores and the context of the times that produced them, often reveal behavior patterns and interests useful for understanding the president’s career as a whole.

Some presidents have been fascinated with their own personal and political development as a theme, regardless of the possible utility of such material. Calvin Coolidge and Jimmy Carter, for example, who published autobiographies in retirement, wrote in great detail not only about their own early lives but about the society shaping those lives. Barack Obama, as a young man, turned his early life into the frame for a powerful book about racial identity in America.

Other former presidents showed less interest in their early years, and the information on them is correspondingly limited. Grover Cleveland resisted numerous invitations to write his autobiography and gave would-be biographers only perfunctory help; he was even indifferent to whether the campaign biographies accurately reported the facts of his own life. Although Chester Arthur collaborated a bit more with biographers than Cleveland, he wrote no account of his own and took care to destroy all his personal papers, while as for Zachary Taylor, modest and matter-of-fact, he neither wrote his own story nor supplied information to anyone else; his early life, consequently, is almost a complete blank. The lives of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy drew special attention and treatment. Both presidents died young, in office, by assassination, and each became a cult figure; writers and enthusiasts consequently took great pains in collecting facts and recollections about their youth and blended them into narratives quite independent of the presidents’ own preferences.

On this spectrum, William Henry Harrison—the ninth president of the United States and the one serving the briefest term (only a month)—falls, not surprisingly, toward the undocumented end. Lacking the charisma of a Lincoln or Kennedy and the achievements of a Roosevelt, he was an obscure president, although a fairly famous general, and scholars are seldom interested in collecting facts about such lesser public figures. Moreover, since Harrison’s national political prominence came late in his life, in his sixties, biographers found few contemporaries to interview. Finally, Harrison had moved around a good deal in the course of a military and bureaucratic life, preserving few documents. He wrote no memoir or autobiography, although he did leave two brief accounts of his early life, one in his own words and one based on information he supplied. These are where a modern biographer has to begin, and they supply a reason for writing about him, for they tell—or rather, they suggest—a more interesting story than his brief presidency offers.

The first account of Harrison’s early life appeared in Philadelphia’s Port Folio magazine in 1815, just after the close of the War of 1812, in which Harrison had won national respect through his competent generalship, actually winning a couple of battles.² This account was written in the third person but was clearly based on information supplied by Harrison himself. Naturally enough in the circumstances, it focused on how he happened to become a soldier in the first place. The narrative began by describing his family, one of the most prominent, wealthy, and respected in Virginia at the time of the Revolution. William’s father, Benjamin Harrison, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. “Thus honored and deserving of honor,” concluded this description, “lived the father of general Harrison to the year 1791, when at the age of sixty-five he was gathered to his forefathers, leaving behind him three sons, the youngest of whom, is the gentleman of whose exploits we are now to speak, and who was born at the family seat in Virginia the ninth of February 1773.”

The article went on to narrate, in smooth prose, a rather complicated sequence of events:

William Henry, who entered upon his education after his elder brothers had finished theirs and been settled in business, was at an early age placed in a grammar-school, from which in due time he was sent to Hamden-college, where he remained till he completed his fourteenth year, when he was moved to an academy in Southampton county. There he remained until he entered his seventeenth year, at which time, being pronounced by the principal well qualified to begin the study of physic, for which he was destined by his father, he was placed for a short period under the tuition of doctor Leiper, a practicing physician of respectable standing in Richmond, and in the spring of 1791, was sent to Philadelphia to finish his medical studies.

It was while he was on his journey to Philadelphia that his father died, and this event determined him to abandon altogether a profession which he had consented to enter upon, merely to gratify that gentleman. The reception he met from all the eminent professors of that day—Rush, Shippen, Wistar, &c., especially the first of them, on account of the services rendered by his father during the progress of the revolution, was insufficient to shake his purpose.

Having decided to quit medical study, the account continued, Harrison turned to several Virginia friends who suggested alternatives. Edmund Randolph, then attorney general, offered him a place in his office, presumably to read law. Governor Lee of Virginia made a suggestion, “more congenial with [Harrison’s] taste and active disposition,” to obtain a commission in the Army, and this was the course Harrison adopted.

A couple of slightly odd features are visible in this story. The restless wandering from one school to another is a little peculiar for a young Virginia gentleman of good family, but since the period of his education coincides with the years just after the War of Independence, one is tempted to attribute it merely to the unsettled conditions of the time. Again, it seems strange that, having disliked medicine as a career for some time, young Harrison had formed no alternative plan, instead spending weeks or months in a state of indecision, from which he was rescued by Governor Henry Lee.

Whatever the reasons for these shifts, the forty-two-year-old Harrison, looking back on his life, seems to have viewed it as an exciting story, as many literary-minded Americans in the early 1800s were beginning to view theirs. In this account, Harrison wanted readers to marvel, as he did, at how the repeated, inconclusive efforts of his childhood and adolescence ended at the pivotal moment when he committed himself to the Army and to the path he followed to success—hence the early, uncertain tacking from school to school, from career to career.³

When he retold his story in the first person, twenty-four years later, Harrison eliminated both these features. In 1839, on his way to becoming the Whig nominee for the presidency in 1840, he recounted his early life for a New York newspaper editor.⁴ While this later account related essentially the same facts, Harrison laid greater stress on his early credentials and less on his frustrated youth:

I was born at the seat of my father called Berkley on James River in the County of Charles City 25 miles below Richmond Va on the 9th of Feby 1773. For an account of my father see the lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Having received a Classical education I commenced the study of Medicine in Richmond in the year 1790. In the Month of April 1791 I was sent to Philadelphia further to prosecute my studies & was placed under the direction of my father’s intimate friend Robt Morris the Financier of the Revolution. My father died whilst I was on the passage to Philadelphia & in the following summer not liking the Medical profession & expressing that dislike to Govr Lee of Va who was on a visit to Philadelphia he recommended me to go into the Army. I immediately acquiesced. The application was made through him & in 24 hours of the first conception of the idea of changing my profession I was an Ensign in the 1st U.S. Regt. of Infantry—commission dated Augt 16th 1791.

Both versions focus on the central event of Harrison’s youth: his father’s death and his subsequent decision, in Philadelphia in summer 1791, to abandon medicine for a military career. That is where this chapter, too, will begin: with the seemingly distraught, purposeless young man who made the decision, the environment around him, and the factors that influenced, or may have influenced, his thought.

The young Virginian who disembarked at the Philadelphia waterfront in late April 1791, encumbered with trunkfuls of clothing, was “tall, thin, [and] puerile in his person.” The description is Harrison’s own, from the 1839 account; its wording is designed to point up the incongruity of his becoming a soldier a few months later. Harrison had, as he put it, been “tenderly brought up”; he looked “wretchedly qualified for the hardships to which a soldiery is liable in the wilderness.”⁵ No likenesses exist for this exact period of Harrison’s life, but two portraits from his late twenties, a painting and a physionotrace (a sort of engraving in profile), depict an appearance—unblemished skin, silky brown hair, a long nose, a long, thin face—that jibes with this picture.⁶ In other words, Harrison embodied a familiar kind of young Southerner: slender, graceful, and a bit delicate in build. An entry in a cousin’s diary suggests that his family knew him as “Billy,” and one can assume that his friends did too.⁷

Both the painting and the engraving also suggest a characteristic not apparent from Harrison’s account—a mobile, expressive mouth with a humorous curl to the lips. Billy Harrison looks like a young man who might have been amusing company. Scattered sources from his early years seem to support this. He had “much resource in conversation,” according to a man who met him three years later. (The men of the Harrison family, as a later chapter will show, tended to be vigorous, articulate speakers.) The testimony of another acquaintance, who knew him ten years later on the Indiana frontier, is similar but more striking: “[I]n conversation he is sprightly and gay—can repeat a theatrical performance and mimmick a blackguard as well as I ever saw a man.” A long letter Harrison wrote at age twenty-one to his older brother Carter likewise suggests good humor and wit: Billy wrote in the smooth, easy style of Henry Fielding or Laurence Sterne, with graceful transitions and clever turns of phrase.⁸

That he traveled to Philadelphia by ship is evident from Harrison’s reference to his father’s death while he was “on the passage to Philadelphia.”⁹ Several contemporary accounts mention ships that plied regularly between Philadelphia and the James River around this time, carrying grain and tobacco from the plantations and luxury goods from Philadelphia, as well as occasional passengers.¹⁰ Benjamin Harrison died on 21 April 1791; consequently his son arrived around the end of the month, and since he intended to complete a multiyear medical course, he doubtless brought a large wardrobe with him.¹¹

Billy Harrison had never visited Philadelphia before, or indeed any large city (although his readings of English authors had given him impressions of London life), but even older, more experienced travelers accounted Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, a remarkable place. Despite a population of nearly 45,000,¹² it was no longer the largest city in English-speaking North America (New York had just overtaken it), but it remained the most impressive because of what one traveler called its “Size and Regularity”; its rectangular grid of wide streets firmly asserted the primacy of human design over the natural setting, a tongue of land between two rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Remarkably level except for a few steep spots at the Delaware waterfront, the broad streets, paved in the center with cobblestones and bordered with well-maintained brick sidewalks, combined to present a soothing vision of rationality—“this splendid city,” a young medical student called it in 1791. “Philadelphia seemed to me a beautiful city with wide streets,” wrote a French traveler the same year; “some, lined with trees, crossed one another at right angles in regular order.”¹³

Another traveler found the view of the city from the Delaware “genuinely lovely,” and this was most likely the first glimpse of the city young Harrison had. As ships came closer to shore, however, arriving passengers faced an ugly, confused scene, where a part of the city had escaped from its master plan: “heaps of wooden storehouses, crowded upon each other, the chief of which are built upon platforms of artificial ground, and wharfs which project a considerable way into the river. The wharfs . . . jut out in every direction, and are well adapted for the accommodation of shipping, the largest merchant vessels being able to lie close alongside them.” Narrow, crowded Water Street, which connected these wharves and warehouses, was, everyone agreed, “low and disagreeable.”¹⁴

Once past the waterfront district, Philadelphia projected an air of moderation, regularity, and prosperity. The open brick market house on High Street, nearly half a mile long and divided systematically into sections, was notable for its decorum; a traveler in 1787 recorded that a “buzzing murmur of voices resounded through the crowds, but no clamorous noise nor crying of wares of any kind.” Here farmers from the city’s outskirts brought their meat, “sawed in round and appetizing shapes,” their fish, milk, and produce to feed the people of the capital. The broad range of buyers and sellers at the market house reflected the multiplicity of the city itself: “The crowds of people seemed like the collection at the last day,” observed one visitor, “for there was of every rank and condition in life, from the highest to the lowest, male and female, of every age and of every color.” Another traveler noted the absence of profanity or billingsgate among the customers and vendors.

A few blocks distant, the State House, modern Independence Hall, had a park behind it, with small trees “judiciously arranged” and graveled walks in serpentine patterns. It was the closest thing to a ceremonial showplace in this commercial city. Elsewhere, the houses, brick or wood, were all of similar size and design; Philadelphia boasted no palaces or sumptuous churches, an absence of emphasis that led one European to label the city “cold and monotonous.” Cedar posts at regular intervals kept the many carriages and coaches from running up on the sidewalks. Public pumps and street lamps likewise recurred at regular intervals. While Philadelphia did host the usual number of stray dogs for an eighteenth-century city, its streets were, on the whole, remarkably clean. Residents were soberly dressed and seemed well off. One traveler noted the absence of beggars.¹⁵

Philadelphia’s appearance was distinctive; but like any city, it was really a set of nested boxes, each containing a different experienc...