Thank goodness I have library cards for two different counties! If I didn’t then I would have had to purchase a Benjamin Harrison biography and there’s no point in that, is there? No, I simply went to Library #2 and there it was, the old tried and true from the American Presidents Series— Benjamin Harrison: American Presidents Series by Charles W. Calhoun (New York: Times Books, 2005). I was delighted to see it. Since William Henry Harrison was a pretty total loss as a president (meaning that he wasn’t around long enough to do anything), I was interested to see how his grandson would work out instead.
“Few American presidents have descended from lines more distinguished for public service than the one that produced Benjamin Harrison” (p. 7). In the WHH bio, I outlined the Harrison ancestry so just tack Benjamin onto the end of that and I think you’ll agree with Calhoun’s assessment. Benjamin was born at North Bend, Indiana on August 20, 1833 on the farm that his grandfather had built. Growing up, young Ben worked on the farm himself, aiding his father and doing chores.
In 1847, he went to Farmer’s College near Cincinnati where he fell in love with Caroline Scott, the daughter of one of the professors. Caroline’s family soon moved away to Oxford, Ohio so Benjamin had himself transferred to Miami University, also at Oxford. It was while he was there studying that his mother and two sisters died. He did well at school, becoming president of the Union Literary Society and in 1852, he placed third at graduation.
After college, Harrison read law under the famous lawyer, Bellamy Storer, and even though he was not able to support a family yet, he married Caroline on October 20, 1853. The very next year he was admitted to the bar, so he and Caroline moved to Indianapolis in an effort to establish his reputation there as a good lawyer with better opportunities. However, it took several years for this to be accomplished and the newly-wed Harrisons struggled financially. Things began to look up, however in 1855 when Harrison went into partnership with William Wallace, a stable, reputable lawyer.
The Harrisons were perennially Whigs (since WHH was elected on that banner) but with the demise of that party, Harrison took an unprecedented leap in the family and immediately became a Republican. In 1857, Harrison was elected as the city’s attorney from whence he became the Secretary to the Republican State Central Committee. He was also elected as reporter of the state supreme court.
When the Civil War came, Harrison did not volunteer right away, unsure of how to provide for his family. However, by 1862, he became colonel of the 70th Indiana Volunteer Regiment where he spent most of his time on guard duty in Kentucky until his unit was assigned to Sherman. He was involved in all the Union battles in Georgia and he distinguished himself accordingly. “In the first major fighting of the campaign at Resaca, Harrison led a frontal assault and captured a well-defended Confederate battery, netting a haul of four large guns and twelve hundred small arms” (p. 23). In the middle of the Atlanta campaign, Harrison was sent home to Indiana to recruit and then to make speeches for Lincoln in the 1864 campaign. He then returned to Tennessee and was made brevet brigadier general.
After the war, the Harrisons were in some trouble financially due to Benjamin’s absence away from work. Therefore, he ended up overworking himself to the point of collapse in order to obtain financial independence. The Harrisons finally became financially secure which allowed them to build a house for themselves on North Delaware Street in Indianapolis.
In 1872, Harrison put his name forward for governor but he did not win the Republican nomination and in 1876, he ran for governor but again lost. Instead he campaigned brilliantly for Rutherford Hayes and was rewarded by Hayes by being appointed to the Mississippi River Commission “formed to study navigation improvements and the problem of flooding on the great waterway” (p. 36). In 1877, he helped end the railroad strike due to his involvement on the Committee of Arbitration.
1880 was a big year for Harrison. It was during that time that he headed the Indiana state delegation to the Republican national convention where they chose Garfield as their presidential candidate. Also that same year, Harrison ran for the Senate and actually won! As a senator, Harrison concerned himself with patronage, the surplus, army pensions, and education.
He lost his senate seat in 1886 but in a surprise move, he was nominated as the Republican candidate for president in 1888 and won that too! He was the 23rd President of the United States and would be sandwiched in between Grover Cleveland’s two terms. Bless him, he almost immediately alienated his own party over patronage and appointments but he was strictly devoted to do his duty as he saw it and did not want to be under anyone’s thumb, especially the party bosses.
For only serving a single term as president, Harrison had his hand in a remarkable amount of international and domestic situations at the time. In the international arena, he sent emissaries to participate in the Berlin Conference where the peaceful resolution to the problem of the Somoan Islands was discussed and agreed upon by the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Also he was interested in hosting a Pan-American Conference which would eventually evolve into the Organization of American States.
Domestically, there were numerous issues for Harrison to mediate. There was tariff reform, an ever-present concern for industrializing America, and pensions for Union soldiers, culminating in the Dependent Pension Act. Also being signed into law was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act both written by John Sherman, the brother of the general, William Tecumseh Sherman. Finally there was an election bill meant to aid African Americans in the South and a Forest Reserve Act, which would precede Roosevelt’s penchant for conservationism. “All told, the Fifty-first Congress passed 531 public laws, representing an unprecedented level of legislative accomplishment unequaled until Theodore Roosevelt’s second term” (p. 117).
During these years, the Indian problem continued to manifest its inherent issues. In 1887, Harrison signed the Dawes Severalty Act, “which mandated the division of tribal lands into 160-acre allotments with the goal of putting each Indian, as Harrison said, ‘upon a farm’ as ‘a self-supporting and responsible citizen’” (p. 112). As the United States government was trying to work out this program, the Battle of Wounded Knee occurred in 1890. “Premeditated on neither side, the battle had erupted as soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry were attempting to disarm Indians in their control. It left twenty-five soldiers dead along with more than a hundred Indians, including many women and children” (p. 113). Popular opinion again veered against the Indians.
Harrison also took the time to tour the country, where he gave speeches in Texas and even christened a naval vessel in San Francisco. When he returned to Washington he discovered that he had been re-nominated as the Republican national candidate for the 1892 election. As much as Harrison welcomed this news, the times were against him as various strikes and cholera epidemics sprang up around the US, damaging the impact that Harrison had made on the populace. It did not help either that Caroline, Harrison’s wife and love of his life, died of tuberculosis during the election campaign. Afterwards, in a gentlemanly gesture, Cleveland agreed not to campaign either but, in the end, Harrison failed to win the election anyways.
In retirement, Harrison, alone, returned back to Indianapolis and to the N Delaware St house where he practiced law, wrote articles and even did a series of law lectures at Stanford in California. He also came down with influenza but recovered and in 1896 announced that he was engaged to Mame Dimmick, his wife’s niece and old friend of the family. Even though he went against the wishes of his two grown children, Benjamin and Mame were married on April 6, 1896 and almost nine months later, they had their first child.
“In 1897 Harrison undertook the most noted and arduous assignment of his entire legal career—service as chief counsel for Venezuela in its dispute with Great Britain over the boundary separating Venezuela from the British colony of Guiana” (p. 162). Not only did this legal matter eat up years and years of Harrison’s time but he also needed to travel to Paris for the arbitration. While in Europe, President McKinley appointed Harrison to the International Court at The Hague. It’s no wonder that Harrison became worn out and on March 13, 1901 he died of pneumonia and influenza.
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