Benjamin Harrison

President of the United States (1889-1893)

• Born: August 20, 1833
• Birthplace: North Bend, Ohio
• Died: March 13, 1901
• Place of death: Indianapolis, Indiana

Harrison took a narrow view of the powers of the U.S. presidency and neither innovated nor experimented with the office during his single term as the twenty-third president; however, he gave the country an honest and straightforward administration devoted to Republican principles.

Early Life

Benjamin Harrison came from a line of notable Americans. One of his great-grandfathers was a signer of the Declaration of Independence; his paternal grandfather, William Henry Harrison, was ninth president of the United States; and his own father, John Scott Harrison, served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The farm on which Harrison grew up, known as The Point, was near Cincinnati, and his family was a large one. Harrison himself was the second of eight children, and two other children had the Harrisons as their guardians. Financial difficulties were not unusual, and the children learned the value of hard work and thrift. Benjamin spent much time with his grandmother at her home at North Bend, where he read widely in the excellent library gathered by his grandfather.

In 1847, Harrison went to Farmer’s College in Cincinnati; two years later, he transferred to Miami University, where he met Carrie Scott, daughter of the Reverend Dr. John Scott, a professor. In 1853, a year after Harrison was graduated, he married Carrie; her father performed the ceremony.

The Harrisons settled at The Point while Benjamin studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1854, and the couple moved to Indianapolis, where Harrison set up his law office. Difficult times faced the young couple initially, but Harrison’s meticulous research, his command of the facts, and his ability to present those facts clearly and plainly soon won for him cases and respect. By 1855, Harrison was doing well, and he was drawn into politics.

An opponent of slavery, he was naturally attracted to the new Republican Party and was an avid supporter of John Charles Frémont in the 1856 election; this support was expressed so fiercely that it drew a rebuke from his father, who urged him to temper his language.

An extremely loyal party man throughout his life, Harrison became secretary to the Republican state central committee; this was to be his real entry into politics. His successes would be owed primarily to his steadfast devotion to the party’s cause and the alliances he formed in its struggles.

Elected as reporter to the state supreme court in 1860, Harrison was torn between serving in that position and volunteering for the Union army. In 1862, he enlisted, and was given command of a regiment. He was a strict disciplinarian but was popular with his troops because he took care to see that they were always well supplied.

Harrison was an able officer, cool and judicious in combat. During the Atlanta campaign, he fought well at the Battle of Resaca and at Peachtree Creek; against a surprise Confederate attack, he helped save the Union army by holding a weak point in the line. By the war’s end, he was a brigadier general; in politics, the veteran’s vote was almost always his.

At the end of the war, Harrison looked much as he would for the remainder of his life. He was about five feet, six inches tall and stout. He wore a long, full beard, which, like his hair, was light brown and which turned silver as he aged. His deeply blue eyes could be steely or warm, depending upon his mood. He had a fine voice, clear and penetrating; it was admirably suited to his manner of speaking, which was to stress the orderly arrangement of facts.

Life’s Work

After the war, Harrison allied himself strongly with the section of the Republican Party that favored a radical reconstruction of the South, including voting rights for the free blacks and harsh treatment of the defeated rebels. For a time, however, Harrison stuck to his law practice. It was not until 1872 that he took an active part in the political wars, campaigning successfully for Republican candidates.

In 1876, the Republican candidate for governor of Indiana abruptly quit the race when his associations with the corrupt Grant administration were revealed. The party central committee hastily nominated Harrison, who was away on a fishing trip and had to be persuaded to run when he returned. He then mounted a vigorous campaign, promising government reform, supporting sound money, and waving the “bloody shirt” by accusing the Democrats of wartime treason. He covered the state and received much support from veterans but lost by five thousand votes. Nevertheless, he had greatly impressed party regulars. He increased this respect and won many supporters when he went on a speaking tour for presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes . Harrison spoke across the country, from New Jersey to Chicago, and established himself as a nationally recognized Republican leader.

In 1878, there occurred a tragic and bizarre incident. John Scott Harrison died in May. Leaving the cemetery, John Harrison, Benjamin’s brother, noticed that the grave of a recently buried cousin had been disturbed. At that time, grave-robbing was commonly practiced by “resurrection men” who sold the bodies to medical schools. Fearing that this had happened, John Harrison and a sheriff visited the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati. There they discovered the body, not of the cousin, but of John Scott Harrison, suspended in a pit in the school’s basement.

Great public anger was aroused by what was called the Harrison Horror. After the father’s reinterment, the cousin’s body was located in Ann Arbor, a finding that revealed a widespread and regular traffic between medical schools and grave-robbers. Following this incident, reforms were enacted regulating the procurement of cadavers for medical studies.

Harrison was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1880. He sponsored extremely generous pensions for veterans and was a strong protectionist, favoring high tariffs. At the same time that he was voting to have the federal government protect private industry, Harrison opposed flood control projects on the Mississippi, maintaining that the government had no constitutional right to assist individuals. In making such an argument, Harrison was following the essential Republican Party line, which strongly and unabashedly favored business, particularly big business. He never deviated from this line, disregarding the rise of labor and the growing emphasis on workers’ rights.

In 1884, Harrison worked diligently for the Republican nominee, James G. Blaine, despite the charges of corruption that clung to the candidate. (Blaine sometimes closed his correspondence with the injunction, “Burn this letter.”) In a close race, Blaine was defeated by Grover Cleveland after a Republican clergyman derided the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.”

After the defeat, Harrison was in the vanguard of efforts to rebuild the Republican Party. In 1887, he was ousted from the Senate when the Democrats took control of the Indiana legislature (this was before the popular election of senators). During that same year, President Cleveland launched a vigorous attack on the tariff, denouncing a protective system that allied the federal government and big business at the expense of the worker. This was a direct assault on the key Republican position and set the battle lines for the next campaign.

The Republicans had an issue but lacked a candidate, since Blaine declined to run and there was no other figure of national prominence in the party. Harrison, the dedicated and hardworking party man, won the nomination in 1888.

In the election, Harrison faced Grover Cleveland. The Republicans were well financed by business and trade associations, which naturally favored a high tariff to protect their interests. A dispute among Democrats in New York State proved decisive: Although Cleveland polled a ninety thousand popular-vote majority, he lost the electoral count by 233 to 168.

Personally honest and highly moral (he had considered the ministry as an alternative to law), Harrison was generally independent in selecting his cabinet. The one exception was his appointment of Blaine as secretary of state. Actually, this appointment proved productive, because both were strong believers in closer ties with Central and South America. Their efforts led to a pan-American conference in 1889, during which representatives from most nations in the hemisphere toured the United States.

In line with his earlier efforts as a senator, Harrison pushed for increased veterans’ pensions. He was also firmly in favor of protecting black voting rights in the South, moderate civil service reform, and limited use of silver in the currency—the last adopted to satisfy Republicans in the West, an area rich in the metal. The main struggle in Congress was over the tariff, which the Republicans wished to increase; they succeeded, raising customs duties an average of almost 50 percent. The tariff would once again prove to be a key issue in the presidential election.

The so-called Mafia incident in New Orleans arose in 1890. A police officer scheduled to testify on the activities of the alleged society was murdered; before he died, he named several Italians. After a long, tense trial, the accused men were acquitted. A mob stormed the jail and killed eleven Italian inmates who had not yet been released. Harrison denounced the event and offered his regrets to the Italian government but pointed out that the Constitution left considerable powers to the states; in this case, the federal government was unable to act. The incident was short-lived, but one major result was increased support for Harrison’s call for a larger navy: During the brief war scare, observers noted that Italy had a much larger fleet of armored ships than did the United States.

In the election of 1892, Harrison faced, once again, the redoubtable Grover Cleveland. The election turned into a referendum on Republican policies, especially those regarding labor. The high tariff had protected the captains of industry but not the workers. Wages had been repeatedly cut, and many workers had been fired. Worse yet, a wave of antilabor violence swept the country. During a strike at the Homestead Plant of the Carnegie Steel Company, twenty men were killed in combat between locked-out workers and Pinkerton detectives. In July, a fight between striking miners and strikebreakers left thirty miners dead in Idaho; Harrison ordered in federal troops to restore order and keep the mines open. Another mine-related battle erupted in eastern Tennessee, where miners fought convicts who had been brought in to dig coal. The result of all this was a defection of thousands of voters from the Republicans to the Populist Party or to the Democrats.

Harrison did not campaign. His wife was gravely ill, and she died on October 25. Harrison was despondent and seemed relieved when he lost the election. Following his presidential term, Harrison returned to the law but accepted only a few cases. He refused a chair at the University of Chicago, although he did give a series of lectures at Stanford, which later became the book Views of an Ex-President (1901). He continued his extensive charitable contributions, especially for support of educating southern black people and for orphans.

In April, 1896, at the age of sixty-two, Harrison remarried; his bride was the widow Mary Lord Dimmick, daughter of his dead wife’s sister. In February, 1897, they had a daughter; by his first wife Harrison had a son and a daughter.

With few exceptions, family life now occupied Harrison. In 1896, he firmly discouraged any talk of renomination, although he did campaign for the candidate William McKinley. In 1899, Harrison was retained by Venezuela in an arbitration case with Great Britain over disputed boundaries. In the course of a fifteen-month period, Harrison amassed three volumes of evidence, which he masterfully presented to the arbitration panel in Paris from June through October. Despite this, the panel decided in favor of Great Britain; it was later revealed that improper pressure from London had influenced the decision.

In March, 1901, Harrison caught a cold, which rapidly worsened and developed into pneumonia. On March 13, at his home in Indianapolis, he died.

Significance

Soon after Harrison entered the White House, his private secretary had a talk with him. The secretary later recalled:

I asked the President if he had ever seriously thought about being President. He said the thought had been with him many times when suggested by others, but he had never been possessed by it or had his life shaped by it.

This frank, disarming reply is characteristic of Harrison, and it reveals much about him and his administration. He was not driven by desire for office or inspired by a specific sense of mission. He seems to have regarded the the presidency as a duty to discharge faithfully and honestly but not a position through which to effect profound changes in American life. With few exceptions, he was probably quite satisfied with American life: The Union had been preserved by the Civil War, slavery had ended, business was good, and public officials were becoming increasingly, if perhaps slowly, more honest.

Harrison was neither an innovator nor an experimenter. He clung closely to a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, one that limited the powers of the federal government and left private enterprise strictly alone. Exceptions were those activities that protected business: the tariff, a firm hand in labor disputes, and a strong currency. In this, he was in accord with the prevailing policy of his party and, indeed, of many in the country.

As a man, Harrison was honest, principled, and forthright. Personally, he was kind and generous, a charming and affectionate family man, and a devoted friend. Even his political foes admired and respected him. As president, he conducted himself within the constitutional limits he revered, and his term in office was like the man himself, solid and dependable.

Bibliography

Armbruster, Maxim. The Presidents of the United States and Their Administrations. 7th ed. New York: Horizon, 1982. Print.

Calhoun, Charles W. Benjamin Harrison. New York: Times, 2005. Print.

Crockett, David A. "The Perils of Restoration Politics: Nineteenth-Century Antecedents." Presidential Studies Quarterly 42.4 (2012): 881­902. Print.

Frantz, Edward. "A March of Triumph?" Indiana Mag. of Hist. 100.4 (2004): 293­320. Print.

Graff, Henry, ed. The Presidents: A Reference History. New York: Scribner, 1984. Print.

Harrison, Benjamin. Public Papers and Addresses. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893. Reprint. New York: Kraus Reprints, 1969. Print.

Harrison, Benjamin. Speeches. Comp. by Charles Hedges. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1971. Print.

Lambeth, Harry J. "Lawyers Who Became President." Amer. Bar Assn. Jour. 63.10 (1977): 1430­1434. Print.

Nevins, Allan. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. New York: Dodd, 1958. Print.

Perry, James M. Touched with Fire: Five Presidents and the Civil War Battles That Made Them. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Print.

Sievers, Harry J. Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Warrior, 1833-1865. 2d ed. New York: University, 1960.

Sievers, Harry J. Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Statesman: From the Civil War to the White House, 1865-1888. New York: University Publishers, 1959.

Sievers, Harry J.. Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President: The White House and After, 1889-1901. Indianapolis: Bobbs, 1968. Print.

Socolofsky, Homer Edward, and Allan B. Spetter. The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1987. Print.