Benjamin Harrison

He grew up on a farm at North Bend, Ohio, under a grandfather who had been president for 31 days and a great-grandfather who signed the Declaration. The name bought him very little. He took a degree at Miami University, read law, married Caroline Scott in 1853, and moved to Indianapolis at 21 with a small inheritance and no clients, taking a job crying cases in the federal courthouse to eat. Out of that he built one of Indiana's better practices. In 1862 he raised the 70th Indiana himself, went out as its colonel, and fought it through Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Peachtree Creek and Atlanta before Lincoln made him a brevet brigadier general in 1865.

One term, 1889 to 1893, busier than its reputation. Antitrust law, a veterans' pension expansion that ate the Treasury surplus, a tariff his own voters punished him for, six new states, a rebuilt navy, and the first Pan-American Conference. He also backed a federal elections bill that would have put United States supervisors over Southern polls, and watched Senate Democrats trade it away and bury it in January 1891. BriefHistory has the term itself and the two Cleveland elections that bracket it. What is left is the private wreckage.

In May 1878 his father, John Scott Harrison, was buried at North Bend, and mourners noticed that a neighboring grave had been opened and emptied. One of Harrison's brothers went to Cincinnati with a warrant looking for the neighbor and found their own father instead, hanging from a rope in a shaft at the Ohio Medical College. Benjamin Harrison managed the family's response and the suit that followed, and Ohio passed an anatomy law three years later. Fourteen years after that, in October 1892, Caroline Harrison died of tuberculosis in the White House, two weeks before an election her husband was already losing. Neither he nor Grover Cleveland campaigned in those last two weeks.

He married again in 1896, at 62, to Mary Scott Lord Dimmick — his dead wife's niece, 25 years younger, who had lived in the White House helping Caroline with her correspondence. His two grown children refused to attend the wedding and largely stopped speaking to him. A daughter, Elizabeth, arrived in 1897 and became a lawyer. Harrison went back to court, argued Venezuela's case in the British Guiana boundary arbitration at Paris in 1899, published two books, and died of pneumonia at his Indianapolis house on March 13, 1901. Historians file him as average and keep returning to the same fact: the elections bill he lost had no successor on the statute books until 1965.

Benjamin Harrison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Sherman Antitrust Act law
  The first federal antitrust statute, and barely used for a decade 1890
• Dependent and Disability Pension Act law
  Union veterans' pensions — it consumed the Treasury surplus 1890
• Act establishing Yosemite National Park law
  Signed October 1 after John Muir's magazine campaign 1890
• Land Revision Act law
  Its forest reserve clause became the national forest system 1891
• Circuit Courts of Appeals Act law
  Built the federal appellate courts and unclogged the Supreme Court 1891
• This Country of Ours book
  His plain explanation of how the federal government actually works 1897

• August 20, 1833 aged 0 Born on the family farm at North Bend, Ohio
• October 20, 1853 aged 20 Marries Caroline Lavinia Scott
• August 12, 1862 aged 28 Musters in as colonel of the 70th Indiana Infantry He had raised the regiment himself and knew nothing about soldiering when he started.
• May 25, 1878 aged 44 His father dies — and the body is stolen before the family gets home It was found days later at the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati. Ohio passed an anatomy law in 1881.
• 1881 aged ~48 The Indiana legislature sends him to the United States Senate
• March 4, 1889 aged 55 Sworn in as the centennial president One hundred years after Washington took the first oath.
• January 1891 aged 57 The federal elections bill dies in the Senate It would have put federal supervisors over Southern polls. Nothing like it passed until 1965.
• October 25, 1892 aged 59 Caroline Harrison dies of tuberculosis in the White House Two weeks before the election. Neither candidate campaigned afterward.
• April 6, 1896 aged 62 Marries Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, his late wife's niece He was 62 and she was 37. His grown children boycotted the wedding.

• William Henry Harrison 1773–1841
  Whig general elected ninth president who died one month into his term. grandson of
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. appointed
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. appointed
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. signed the park he campaigned for
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. signed the antitrust law later used against him