William Henry Harrison

The seventh and youngest child of a man who signed the Declaration of Independence, he grew up at Berkeley Plantation on the James River and expected to inherit accordingly. He did not. His father died in 1791, an older brother took the money, and the medical studies he had begun in Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush ended for want of funds. Within a day of meeting Virginia's governor, Henry Lee, the 18-year-old had an ensign's commission. His first act as an officer was to sweep about 80 idlers off the Philadelphia streets, talk them into signing enlistment papers, and march them to the Ohio frontier. In 1795 he eloped with Anna Symmes because her father would not have him. They had 10 children.

He took the oath on March 4, 1841 and read 8,445 words, the longest inaugural address anyone has delivered. Then came three weeks of office seekers, an illness that started on March 26, and death at half past midnight on April 4 — the first president to die in office. He signed nothing that outlasted him, and the one consequential act of the term was involuntary. BriefHistory carries those 31 days and the succession fight they touched off. This page is about the 68 years in front of them.

Harrison's real career was taking land. As governor of the Indiana Territory from 1801 to 1812 his assignment was to clear Native title ahead of settlement, and he was very good at it. In 1805 alone he secured some 51,000,000 acres after plying five chiefs with alcohol, at a price of roughly a dollar for every 20,000 acres. The Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809 took another 2,500,000 acres from the Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami and Eel River nations, and Tecumseh's confederacy formed in answer to it. Harrison also wanted slavery in Indiana. He asked Congress in 1803 to suspend the Northwest Ordinance's ban for 10 years, failed, and backed territorial indenture laws in 1807 that let masters set the length of service. An antislavery legislature repealed them in 1810.

Anna Harrison was still in Ohio packing when the news reached her, and she never saw the house. Congress voted her a pension that June, which she spent paying his debts. Her grandson Benjamin took the same office in 1889 — the only grandfather and grandson to hold it. For a century and a half the story stayed fixed: the hatless speech in the cold, the pneumonia, the price of vanity. In 2014 Jane McHugh and Philip Mackowiak went back through the attending physician's notes in Clinical Infectious Diseases and found something else. The White House drew its water downstream of the field where Washington dumped its sewage, and Harrison most likely died of septic shock from enteric fever.

William Henry Harrison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Treaty of Grouseland other
  One of a series moving Native title to the United States 1805
• Grouseland building
  His 26-room brick house at Vincennes, among the first in the territory 1805
• Vincennes University company
  Founded in 1801 and incorporated five years later 1806
• Treaty of Fort Wayne other
  Took 2,500,000 acres and brought Tecumseh's confederacy into being 1809
• Inaugural address speech
  8,445 words, the longest on record, delivered without a coat 1841

• August 16, 1791 aged 18 Commissioned an ensign at 18 after his father's death ends his medical studies
• August 20, 1794 aged 21 Serves as aide-de-camp to Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers
• November 25, 1795 aged 22 Elopes with Anna Symmes after her father refuses consent Asked how he would support her, he answered, by my sword and my own right arm.
• January 10, 1801 aged 27 Begins 12 years as governor of the Indiana Territory at Vincennes
• November 7, 1811 aged 38 Fights the Battle of Tippecanoe The name carried him through two presidential campaigns.
• October 5, 1813 aged 40 Commands at the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh is killed
• 1836 aged ~63 Takes work as clerk of courts in Hamilton County, Ohio, to pay his bills Four decades of public service had left him with no fortune.
• March 4, 1841 aged 68 Delivers the longest inaugural address on record
• April 4, 1841 aged 68 Dies at 12:30 in the morning, one month into the term

• Tecumseh 1768–1813
  Shawnee leader who sought a broad Indigenous confederacy to resist U.S. territorial expansion. opposed
• Benjamin Harrison 1833–1901
  Twenty-third president who signed the Sherman Antitrust Act and expanded the modern navy. grandfather of
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. appointed