William Henry Harrison grew up in a Virginia mansion (although when he later ran for president, he claimed to have grown up in a log cabin). He was the youngest of seven children. His father was a governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His mother was a relative of Martha Washington and also came from a wealthy family.

During the Revolutionary War, the family mansion was sacked (the British took 40 of the family slaves and also stole furniture and livestock) and the overused soil was beginning to produce fewer crops. Harrison therefore didn’t attend William and Mary like his brothers, but rather the less expensive Hampton-Sidney College. He then went to the Medical School of Pennsylvania. His father died when he was 18 and the family couldn’t afford to continue schooling him, so he joined the army.

He fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers against Tecumseh and the outnumbered Shawnee. The Indians inflicted as many causalities as they took, but the more numerous Americans won. Tecumseh boycotted the negotiations which gave the Americans most of Ohio.

Harrison married Anna Tuthill Symmes, who was the daughter of a Colonel. She was well read and the first First Lady known to have been educated outside the home (she’d attended a boarding school). Her father was opposed to the marriage since he didn’t think a simple soldier could support his daughter with his low income.

Harrison built a sawmill and gristmill, and bought a share in a whiskey distillery despite his aversion to drink. (He hated drunkenness and was once jailed for beating a drunken townsman.) However, none of his business ventures turned out to be successful.

He ended up having 10 children and was almost always struggling financially. He became commander of Fort Washington, but eventually resigned and took a job as a land registrar and later justice of the peace and secretary of the Northwest Territory.

In Congress, he passed the Harrison Land Act which made it possible for people to buy land on credit and increased the number of foreclosures. President John Adams liked Harrison and invited him to spend evenings at the White House and made him governor of the Indiana Territory when Harrison was just 27. Harrison would later claim Adams was trying to remove an anti-federalist from the capital, but Harrison actually identified with many Federalist positions at the time.

Port Vincennes, the capital of Indiana territory, only had about 700 residents, mostly French who had intermarried with local natives. Harrison built a grand brick mansion named Grouseland in a region full of humble wood frame houses, solid huts, and log cabins.

He was governor for 12 years and made many improvements like a circulating library and rudimentary university, and a small local newspaper. But his main job was Indian removal.

By signing treaties, he acquired about fifty million acres of land at less than 2 cents an acre from the natives. He was sympathetic to the mistreatment of natives, noticing it was impossible for a jury to convict a white man of killing an Indian. He tried to make it illegal for fur trappers to get Indians drunk in order to get them to sell their catch at very low prices, but the lawmakers didn’t go along with it.

He signed one treaty for 8 million acres with the tiny Kaskaskia tribe which only consisted of a few dozen members. He rewarded those who cooperated with gifts and punished those who didn’t want to sell by withholding annuity payments.

He never owned a large number of slaves himself, but he fought every effort to stop slavery from expanding. In his personal life, he freed many slaves by purchasing them and making them indentured servants who would get their freedom after a certain number of years.

When Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, Harrison interpreted the law to say slaves couldn’t be bought or sold, but slave holders could keep the slaves they already owned. He passed laws to prevent black people from testifying against white people in court or serving in the militia.

While slavery was technically illegal, black people in Indiana could be indentured servants for up to 99 years, and unlike white indentured servants, they didn’t get paid. Children of indentured servants were supposed to be freed when they reached maturity, but the age of maturity could be as high as 35. Harrison was more lenient in his personal life, freeing two boys once they turned 21.

This was basically slavery by another name, but he at least fought to prevent indentured servants from being taken out of state and sold as slaves.

Back in 1768, the Iroquois signed away land the Shawnee considered theirs. Tecumseh’s father died fighting off white settlers arriving in their land. Tecumseh, also known as Shooting Star, fought his first battle when he was nine. He befriended a family of white settlers who taught him to read and write English. He visited tribes throughout the country, urging them not to sell their land and join an Indian confederacy. He hated alcohol as much as Harrison did. His brother Tenskwatawa, or Open Door, was the Shawnee Prophet. (Harrison once said if he was really a prophet, he should perform a miracle like making the sun stand still. Knowing an eclipse was expected, the Prophet ordered the sun to darken and it did.)

In 1808, the brothers moved to the mouth of the Tippecanoe River. Prophetstown was a large settlement made up of different tribes with two hundred houses. They cultivated over 100 acres of land and had livestock. By 1811, tensions between whites and Indians had increased and Harrison marched on Prophetstown with 1,000 men. A delegation of chiefs proposed a council be held the next day and that Harrison’s army spend the night at a nearby site which had high ground, water, and wood for fires.

That night, the Indians attacked. Harrison couldn’t find his white horse and took the nearest mount he could find. This probably saved his life, because white horses made for an easy target. His aide-de-camp was shot while riding a white horse, as was the commander of the Kentucky volunteers who had a big white horse blanket.

Once the sun rose, the whites had the upper hand and they destroyed the village while the Indian warriors fled. Tecumseh was out of town at the time, but his brother was killed. The whites suffered 188 causalities, far more than the Indians, but they called Tippecanoe a victory. (It would be a major part of Harrison’s election campaign.)

During the War of 1812, Tecumseh joined the British against the Americans and helped capture Detroit. Harrison was appointed to rescue Detroit by the governor who actually had no authority to make such an appointment. Harrison argued with General Winchester over who was in charge. Eventually, after a great deal of negotiating, he was made a general himself.

Time had been lost, however. He led his army north in the winter, razing friendly Indian villages of the Miamis along the way to guard his supply lines. He at least recommended friendly chiefs be protected, but told his men not to run any risks to save them.

The winter campaign was a bad idea. Food was scarce, as well as other supplies. Many deserted. In the fall of 1813, he was able to retake Detroit and overtook the greatly outnumbered Indians and British at the Thames River where Tecumseh was killed. The Americans skinned the corpse and divided up strips of flesh as souvenirs, which disgusted Harrison. The Americans then burned down Moraviantown, home of the peaceful Munsee who had converted to Christianity and had nothing to do with the war.

In May 1814, before the war’s end, Harrison resigned. At 41, his military career was over. He returned to Congress in 1816, a big champion of veterans. He became a senator in 1825 and supported President John Quincy Adams who appointed him US minister to Colombia.

He didn’t spend much time in Colombia, however, since President Jackson replaced him right after his inauguration, possibly to punish Harrison for voting to censure Jackson for executing two men during his war with the Seminoles.

Harrison left Columbia just as the Colombian government was preparing charges against him for plotting to overthrow Simón Bolíver. (It’s unknown whether he was actually plotting to overthrow the dictator, but he was friendly with Bolíver’s enemies.) He brought home a pet macaw.

Back home, his business ventures continued to fail and his farm didn’t do much better. He was deeply in debt. As his sons entered adulthood, most of them proved to be a financial drain. His oldest son died of typhoid fever, leaving his widow and six children for William Henry and Anna to take in. At 60, in 1836, Harrison was appointed clerk of county courts, which provided some much needed income.

The Whigs were a new political party opposed to Jackson, but didn’t have much in common other than that. Some were pro-slavery, some were abolitionist. Some were pro-tariff and some were anti-tariff. Some were in favor of a national back or the federal government making road improvements, others were against.

Harrison was an ideal Whig candidate. Like Jackson, he was a war hero. His political opinions were unknown since he’d been away from politics for so long. He was originally from Virginia, which appealed to Southerners.

The first time he ran for president, he lost to Van Buren, but he ran again in 1840. After the financially devastating Panic of 1837, defeating Van Buren would be easy. Daniel Webster refused to run as Harrison’s vice president, so the job went to John Tyler. The “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” ticket was said to have rhyme, but no reason to it. No one bothered to ask what Tyler’s position was on anything. Since past vice presidents never did anything important, no one thought it mattered.

While things were looking up for Harrison politically speaking, things were bad in his personal life. In 1838, William Henry Jr. died at the age of 35, the next year his son Carter died at 27, and the year after that, his son Benjamin died at 33.

A Democratic newspaper ridiculed Harrison for being a country bumpkin who lived in a log cabin drinking hard cider. The Whigs celebrated the fact that he was a regular joe and presented Van Buren as someone who lived a life of luxury, even though he actually came from more humble roots than Harrison did.

Elections used to be limited to the wealthy property-owners, but by this time, most states allowed all white men to vote. Most people back then were farmers and welcomed any change to their routine. They’d show up for parades, cider-filled parties, picnics, and songs. They’d even show up to watch an oversized ball covered with campaign slogans rolled through town. Whig parades featured floats based on log cabins and hard cider even though Harrison didn’t live in a log cabin and despised drunkenness. Van Buren was condemned for turning the White House into a richly adorned mansion, even though this wasn’t true.

Whigs wrote songs with campaign slogans as the lyrics. They created a new dance called the Tippecanoe Quick-Step, as well as Tippecanoe Shaving Soap, Tippecanoe Tobacco, and the Harrison and Tyler Necktie. The Whigs had thousands of speakers campaigning for them across the country. A distiller named E. G. Booz created an election souvenir of whisky in log cabin bottles, which popularized the word booze.

The Jacksonian Democrats responded with their own songs such as this one:

Hush-a-bye-baby
Daddy’s a Whig
Before he comes home
Hard cider he’ll swig.
Then he’ll be Tipsy
And over he’ll fall,
Down will come Daddy
Tip, Tyler and all.

Harrison campaigned for himself, the first presidential candidate to do so. Up to this time, presidential candidates were supposed to pretend they didn’t want the job, but would reluctantly accept if the people called upon them.

To answer claims that the 67-year-old Harrison was too old and feeble for the job, he had his doctor issue a public report on his fitness. Harrison brought old soldiers on stage with him during the campaign. He’d complain about immigrants to one audience and praise immigrants when speaking to them. His position on slavery changed depending on who he was talking to.

Harrison won the electoral vote by a landslide, but only narrowly won the popular vote. Over 80 percent of eligible voters voted, the highest percentage of any election in American history. Van Buren got almost 400,000 more votes in his 1840 defeat than in his 1836 victory.

Harrison arrived in Washington on his 68th birthday during a snowstorm. He was the oldest president before Reagan. The campaign would have been hard on even a young man. His arm was so worn out, he could no longer shake hands. The Whigs had never held national power before, and he was deluged with letters, as well as people showing up in person, requesting jobs in his administration. He wasn’t able to give jobs to all of them, earning him many enemies.

His spoke for a record-long two hour inauguration speech in the rain, perhaps to prove he was healthy. He promised not to run for a second term and made lots of allusions to Roman consuls. (He was a fan of florid prose.) He said he was against the presidential veto, which Jackson had used more than his predecessors, and in favor of Congress being the true power, but we’ll never know if he would have followed through with this.

His long speech is often blamed for his death from pneumonia a month later, but Harrison spent a lot of time walking in the rain and slush after the speech, doing his own food shopping and going to a bookstore to purchase a Bible.

People were constantly wearing him down with endless requests. He was once stopped from going to a meeting by a crowd of petitioners who didn’t let him pass until he received their letters.

When he fell ill, he was given the most thorough medical care available, which included bleeding, cupping, opium, wine, and brandy. Perhaps the overzealous medical care is what really killed him. In either case, he became the first president to die in office after only a month.

Anna would outlive not just her husband, but all but one of her ten children. Harrison’s grandson, Benjamin, would live on to become the President of the United States himself.

William Henry Harrison is often left off lists ranking presidents since he served for only a month and didn’t have time to do anything especially good or bad. He, of course, promoted slavery and Indian removal before he was president, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t do anything during his month in office that would have contributed to any deaths or saved any lives.