Benjamin Harrison was born in 1833 in his grandfather’s house in North Bend, Ohio, the second of ten children. His great grandfather Benjamin Harrison V was governor of Virginia and his grandfather William Henry Harrison was the ninth president of the United States. His father John Scott Harrison served in Congress, however, he was a farmer who was often in debt. His mother was a strict Presbyterian.

Benjamin worked on the farm as a child, and also enjoyed hunting, fishing, and reading. He attended a log cabin school built on his father’s property. When he was 14, his father sent him to Farmer’s College near Cincinnati where Presbyterian minister Professor Robert Hamilton Bishop became a powerful influence, keeping him up-to-date on contemporary political issues and instructing him in religion.

While in college, Benjamin wrote an essay arguing that a civilization can be judged based on how they treat women and fell in love with Caroline “Carrie” Lavinia Scott, the daughter of another Presbyterian minister who taught at the college. Her family moved away to Oxford, Ohio, and Benjamin followed them there to attend Miami University in 1850. During this year when he was 17, his mother and two younger siblings died.

He was an excellent student and was elected president of the Union Literary Society which trained him in debate and public speaking. He remained a Presbyterian his whole life and considered becoming a minister, but ultimately decided on going into law. He became engaged to Carrie, but put off marriage until he was more financially secure. He began learning the law under a Cincinnati lawyer named Bellamy Storer.

After a few months, he decided he couldn’t wait to get married after all. Carrie’s father married the two in 1853 and they lived at the farm of Benjamin’s father while Benjamin commuted to Cincinnati to continue studying law. Carrie had been teaching piano at her father’s Oxford Female Institute. In less than a month, Carrie was pregnant.

Harrison was admitted to the bar when he was 20 in 1854 and he moved to Indianapolis where he would live the rest of his life. Money was tight and he had to settle for being a court crier for $2.50 a day. Carrie moved back to her parent’s house to deliver their son Russell and would move back in with them off and on while money continued to be tight.

In his first trial, Harrison wrote a detailed speech, but the dim lighting at the evening court prevented him from reading it, so he had to improvise, but he won the case. Careful preparation combined with extemporaneous presentation became a hallmark of his public speaking.

He finally got his big break a year later when William Wallace offered him a partnership. He also became a deacon at the local Presbyterian church. When the Whig party collapsed, his father joined the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party while Benjamin became an anti-slavery Republican.

Benjamin appreciated the doors his family name opened for him, but he wanted to earn fame and fortune by working for it himself. “Charity-given bread may nourish the body, but it does not invigorate the soul like the hard-earned loaf.” In 1857, he was elected city attorney for Indianapolis. It didn’t pay well, but it gave him publicity. The next year, he became secretary of the Republican state central committee. His second child Mary was also born.

In 1860, he campaigned for Lincoln and was elected reporter of the state supreme court. He vehemently denounced slave-holding southerners, earning him a rebuke from his father for offending friends of his grandfather. He was elected an elder of his church at the age of 27, a position he would hold the rest of his life.

When the Civil War broke out, Harrison didn’t immediately volunteer to join the fight. His wife was pregnant with their third child (who would die at birth), his job was keeping him busy, and he had a brother and a nephew living with him who depended upon his income.

By 1862, when it was clear the war wouldn’t end anytime soon, Harrison enlisted and was made second lieutenant. He began recruiting the Seventieth Indiana Volunteer Regiment and was made its colonel. They performed garrison and guard duty for the first year and a half while Harrison trained his men and studied warfare. He banned liquor in camp, (although he occasionally drank wine himself) and held religious services in camp.

His unit joined the Atlanta Campaign led by General Sherman. At Resaca, Harrison led a frontal assault and captured a Confederate battery. After this success, he was made a brigade commander. During the summer of 1864, Benjamin took part in more battles in a month than his celebrated grandfather fought during his entire lifetime. Once, when his regiment became separated from their surgeons, Harrison dressed his men’s wounds himself. After a victory at Peach Tree Creek, General Hooker promised to make Harrison a brigadier general, an appointment he didn’t get until near the war’s end.

At Golgotha Church in Georgia in 1864, Harrison and his men were “fighting an unseen enemy for an hour and a half without flinching” even though “men had their heads torn off close down to the shoulders.”

After the war, Harrison went back to his law practice and job as supreme court reporter. He became quite successful. In 1871, when Lambdin Milligan, a southern sympathizer in the north, sought damages from the military commission that convicted him of treason, President Grant asked Harrison to represent the commissioners. Milligan technically won the suit, but was awarded damages of only five dollars, indicating Harrison’s arguments were persuasive.

During a case involving the Whiskey Ring, Harrison defended an internal revenue officer named Brownlee accused of taking a bribe from a distiller. Harrison won the case by pointing out a discrepancy in the distiller’s story. The distiller said Brownlee, about to serve as groomsman at a wedding, was wearing white kids gloves when he took the bribe, but a fellow groomsman said Brownlee arrived at the wedding without gloves. Harrison used this small discrepancy to discredit the distiller’s entire testimony. This also earned him a reputation for being part of the kids gloves (aristocratic) set.

In 1876, when he was 42, he ran for governor. His democratic opponent affected a rustic image, so the election was characterized as Blue Jeans vs. Kid Gloves. Harrison lost, but gained in prestige due to his speaking tour in support of presidential nominee Rutherford B. Hayes.

In 1877, he expressed some sympathy for the workers in the Great Railroad Strike, but was largely against them. He said it was absolutely necessary to make examples of the strikers, but at the same time urged the judge to free the men after they’d served one month of their three month sentences.

In 1878, while campaigning for the Republicans, he learned that grave robbers had taken his father’s body to a Cincinnati medical school.

During the 1880 Republican National Convention, he helped get James Garfield the nomination. He’d gotten one vote on an early ballot and joked that he was “the only defeated candidate for the Presidency on the floor of this Convention,” but bore Garfield “no malice.” Harrison got elected to the Senate where he favored pork-barrel bills that benefited Indiana.

He supported federal aid to education and inserted a provision that states could only receive this funding if black and white students benefited equally. The bill passed in the Senate, but failed in the House.

He failed to get reelected to the Senate due to gerrymandering in the Indiana state legislature. After Republicans lost state elections in New York (a key swing state at the time), Republicans needed someone from Indiana (the other key swing state) for their presidential candidate. Since Harrison had a good public service record, had served in the Union army, was a good speaker, and hadn’t made anyone else in the party particularly mad, he was the perfect choice.

It was tradition for presidential candidates to remain at home instead of making speaking tours. Harrison remained at home, but he gave speeches from his home town to people who came to see him. It was known as a front porch campaign, even though he didn’t actually give speeches from his front porch. He gave over 90 speeches to over 300,000 listeners and his words were reprinted in the newspaper the next day.

His wife Caroline helped with campaign social duties until another child was born. At that point, she asked her niece, the young widow Mary “Mame” Scott Dimmick to help with entertaining guests and childcare. “Uncle Ben” particularly enjoyed her company, going on long walks with her. Mame would massage his head in the evenings. When she received an invitation to travel with a younger relative in Europe, she accepted, although Harrison begged her to stay.

Many of Harrison’s speeches concerned the tariff. President Cleveland wanted to lower the tariff, but Republicans like Harrison were in favor of the high tariff, believing it benefitted American workers. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur, wrote Harrison’s campaign biography to try to counter his anti-labor aristocratic kid-gloves image. Harrison was advised to keep quiet about black rights as this could offend Southern voters, but he didn’t want to get the presidency through silence and insisted on advocating for black men’s right to vote.

There were accusations that Republicans were buying votes in the key state of Indiana. Of course, black men being prevented from voting in the South by Democrats was the bigger voter fraud that occurred in 1888. Harrison ended up barely winning the swing states of Indiana and New York, and thus the presidency, even though he lost the popular vote. The Republicans also won both houses of Congress.

Harrison rewarded supporters with cabinet posts, made his law partner the attorney general, and made his old college friend secretary of the interior. He was in favor of providing pensions to Civil War veterans and their widows, even though the pension system was overrun with fraud. He moved into the White House with not just his wife, but as many family members as he could: his children, his children’s spouses, grandkids, and his father-in-law. He doted over his favorite grandchild, Benjamin Harrison McKee. He missed his wife’s niece Mame Dimmick, however, who was still traveling in Europe. The first letter he wrote as president was addressed to her.

He was constantly hounded by office-seekers. For the first year and a half, he spent four to six hours a day on patronage matters. He was a hands-on president, working closely with his cabinet secretaries and filling in for them when they were sick. He handled many patronage requests personally and looked into applicants himself, not content if senators vouched for them.

Harrison was not a cordial man and behaved particularly icy towards office-seekers, the bane of his existence. Even when a friend came to recommend an appointment, Harrison didn’t offer him a chair and called him Mister instead of using his first name. He usually behaved warmly towards friends and family, of course. When one friend fell ill, Harrison took him and his wife into the White House for his convalescence. When navy secretary Benjamin Tracy’s house caught fire, Harrison administered artificial respiration personally, informed him of the death of his wife and daughter, and let him stay in the White House to recover from his injuries.

Harrison sought a separation of his personal life from his professional life. He acted warm off-the-clock, but was all business while performing his duty. He appointed the young reformer Theodore Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission, but like many presidents before him, while he was against the spoils system in theory, he wasn’t able to get rid of it. In fact, he got rid of legions of Cleveland Democrat civil servants and replaced them with Republicans.

He made an enemy of Secretary of State Blaine by refusing to let Blaine’s son be the assistant secretary of state. Although Harrison gave the younger Blaine another job in the State Department, the elder Blaine was disappointed. Blaine also felt he should have been the president instead of Harrison and considered Harrison his social inferior. Blaine was sophisticated and charming while Harrison was bland and no fun to be around. On one occasion, when the Harrisons visited the Blaines, the Blaines were nice to their face, but made fun of them in letters to friends afterwards. Blaine often claimed to be sick and Harrison had to pick up the slack, doing much of his work for him.

In 1889, the US had a dispute with Britain and Germany over Samoa, a key waystation en route to the large markets of the East. During the previous administration, Germany and the US were at the brink of war when a hurricane destroyed most of the naval vessels at Samoa. Harrison and Blaine sent delegates to Berlin for follow up negotiations and in the end, the US, Britain, and Germany formed a kind of joint protectorate over Samoa. Unfortunately, the plan wasn’t implemented very well. Native Samoans resisted the regime and the three nations had to keep warships present to collect taxes. By 1899, the US and Germany divided the islands between them.

When Harrison sent American delegates to Berlin, he also sent along Mame’s relative Lizzie and her husband, hoping Mame would return to America with them. She didn’t return at that time, however, only returning later when her mother grew ill. After her mother’s death, she became a frequent guest at the White House and resumed taking long walks with Harrison during the day and playing billiards with him in the evening. She helped with his correspondence and even had access to the government code used to write encoded messages. She was closer to him than anyone else.

When the economy started to get into trouble in September 1890, Harrison and The Treasury injected 50 million dollars into the economy to avert a panic from occurring. (He also did this again later.) A devastating flood hit Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Harrison offered federal assistance and raised a relief fund to help the people.

Harrison supported pensions for disabled veterans and their families whether they received their injuries on the battlefield or not, reaching $144 million a year (more than 40% of government spending) before the end of his term.

He signed a bill that modified tariffs somewhat. He signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to outlaw monopolies, (although it largely went unenforced). He was in favor of the gold standard, but had to compromise with the pro-silver faction of his party. Harrison signed the Forest Reserve Act which authorized the president to create national forests. He dedicated thirteen million acres.

He also wanted a bill to provide more federal oversight over elections so black men wouldn’t continue to be denied the vote in Southern states, but he failed to get it passed after Republicans lost their Congressional majority in the midterm elections. He couldn’t even get an anti-lynching bill passed.

After being cheated in land and not receiving rations promised by the government, some Sioux (per Wikipedia, Lakota) became adherents of the Ghost Dance, a religion that promised the return of the buffalo and death to enemies of the Sioux. White people in South Dakota became alarmed. When soldiers attempted to disarm Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, a battle occurred leaving hundreds dead, including women and children. Harrison sent in troops to suppress the Ghost Dance movement, but ordered that no further attacks occur. Wounded Knee ended up being the last battle of the Indian Wars. Harrison made no fundamental change in policy, believing the solution was to civilize the Indians.

Harrison knew he wouldn’t be able to accomplish much with a hostile Congress. In the spring of 1891, Harrison took a tour of the country with his wife and several friends, including Mame. Reporters came along and reprinted his speeches in newspapers. He traveled more than 9,000 miles through 21 states and 2 territories.

He next turned his attention to foreign policy, one of the areas where he could make progress without having to work with Congress. With his secretary of state often sick, he did much of the work himself, signing reciprocity agreements to encourage trade with Austria-Hungary, Germany, and several Latin American countries. This led to exports rising by an average of 20 percent, but Democrats ended the Harrison agreements in 1894.

In the spring of 1891, a New Orleans jury acquitted several Mafia-connected Italians accused of killing the city’s police chief. Convinced the jury had been intimidated, a mob lynched eleven Italians held in police custody. The Italian government demanded justice, but Harrison said he was powerless since it was a state matter. Italy withdrew its minister from Washington. Harrison recalled the American minister to Italy. Things were tense, but the two countries returned their ministers a year later.

In October 1891, American sailors on shore leave in Chile got involved in a fight that left two Americans dead. Chilean authorities claimed it had been a bar fight that got out of hand, but Americans thought it was revenge for the US supporting the losing side in the recent Chilean civil war. The Americans had been unarmed and some wounds were due to bayonets, indicating police involvement. When Harrison’s strongly-worded letter went unanswered, he began preparing for war. Chile finally apologized and paid a $75,000 indemnity and the matter was settled.

There was also tension with Canada hunting fur seals in the Bering Sea. The home base of the seals was Alaska and American law forbade taking seals in open water, but Great Britain didn’t think the United States could ban hunting in international waters. Harrison threatened war over the issue and Britain, not willing to fight a war over seals, backed down.

During the tensions with Chile, Italy, and Great Britain, Harrison’s relationship with his secretary of state Blaine worsened. Blaine was often ill, was considering running for president against Harrison, and was angry Harrison wouldn’t promote his son-in-law to brigadier general over more than 50 other colonels with more seniority. Blaine eventually resigned.

Harrison beat Blaine and William McKinley to get the Republican nomination for president. Even though McKinley himself voted for Harrison, the rest of the Ohio delegates voted for McKinley. Harrison saw this as betrayal and never forgave McKinley.

While in the White House, his wife Caroline suffered frequent respiratory ailments, perhaps related to spending so much time renovating the White House’s clammy basement and dusty attic. She fell ill in April 1892 and remained sick for months, eventually getting diagnosed with tuberculosis. Tending to her prevented Harrison from campaigning for reelection.

Meanwhile, European immigrants arriving in New York had cholera. To prevent an outbreak, Harrison extended quarantine of the ships and temporarily suspended immigration from infected European ports, averting an epidemic.

Immigration hadn’t been a prominent issue for Harrison, although he did reverse his position on Chinese immigrants and signed legislation extending the exclusion of Chinese laborers an additional ten years. He also signed the Immigration Act of 1891 which restricted entry to mentally defective persons, paupers, felons, polygamists, and people suffering from contagious disease.

Union and nonunion workers squared off in Idaho’s silver mines. The governor of Idaho asked for troops, but Harrison declined, thinking sending in troops would only aggravate the situation. After fighting broke out and several men died, Harrison did send in troops, but he didn’t use troops in any of the other strikes taking place around the country.

Steelworkers fought against Pinkerton agents working for Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead Pennsylvania, leaving twelve dead. Harrison had tried to get the manager to settle with the workers, but he refused. Harrison said arming the Pinkertons would only lead to bloodshed, which it did. Harrison didn’t send in federal troops, but the state militia was sent in to end the strike.

Homestead hurt Harrison because Carnegie had close ties to Republican leaders, but the strike itself showed that the tariff on steel wasn’t helping make things better for steelworkers like Harrison had claimed. Harrison’s vice-presidential running mate being a newspaper owner who was having a dispute with his printers didn’t help either.

Debt-ridden farmers believed unlimited coinage of silver would solve all their problems somehow and hated Harrison for his belief that gold should be the dominant currency. Harrison argued that the economy was actually good, using a bipartisan Senate investigation to prove that worker wages had risen, farmer’s prices had gone up, and the cost of consumer items had declined, but voters saw things differently.

His wife died two weeks before the election and he lost to Grover Cleveland. Losing the election came as something of a relief as the burden of the presidency was now lifted. In his final moments in office, Americans led a revolution in Hawaii that ousted Queen Liliuokalani. There’s no evidence Harrison engineered the revolution, but he ignored the Queen’s pleas that he wait for all information to come in first and moved forward to annex Hawaii into the United States as fast as possible. He was blocked by the Senate who decided to wait until Harrison left office to annex Hawaii.

Harrison was 59 when he left the presidency, not yet ready to retire. He resumed his legal practice and wrote articles for magazines. The first letter he wrote from Indianapolis was to Mame Dimmick who had helped him care for his ailing wife. Within weeks, and to his daughter’s shock and dismay, Harrison invited Mame to come visit them. After her visit, he continued writing her letters.

A depression hit the country and Harrison gave a series of speeches blaming it on the Democrats. He helped the Republicans win a landslide victory in 1894. In 1895, he fell ill with grippe (influenza). His daughter Mary rushed from New York to see him. To her dismay, her cousin Mame Dimmick, who she utterly despised, came as well.

When Harrison proposed to Mame, his daughter Mary and son Russell both opposed the marriage. When he publicly announced the engagement in January 1896, a newspaper ran a story claiming Harrison and Caroline had fought about Mame while he was in the White House, a story possibly leaked by his son-in-law Robert.

The Indiana Republican state committee endorsed Harrison to run for president again in 1896, but he declined.

Harrison married Mame in April 1896 and his children disowned him for it. She gave birth to his third surviving child Elizabeth in February 1897. He gave some speeches in support of William McKinley, although he wasn’t that excited about him. In 1897, he served as chief counsel for Venezuela in its dispute with Great Britain over the boundary with Guiana. He worked on a multivolume printed argument for nearly two years and did almost no other legal work. The tribunal ended up awarding Britain with most of the disputed territory to Harrison’s disappointment.

Harrison was opposed to the Spanish-American War in which the United States took the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam away from Spain and did not campaign for any Republicans in the 1898 midterm elections. He spoke out against Congress wanting to put a tariff on goods from Puerto Rico, since it should be treated the same as any other US territory. He didn’t campaign for McKinley in 1900 even though McKinley appointed him to an honorific seat on the International Court at the Hague.

Benjamin Harrison died of pneumonia in 1901 with only his wife at his bedside.

---

According to Wikipedia, after electricity was installed in the White House, Harrison and his wife were afraid of being electrocuted, so they didn’t touch the light switches and often slept with the lights on. Harrison is the first president whose voice was recorded while in office. Also, more states were admitted to the Union during Harrison’s presidency than any other: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming.

So, how many lives did Harrison save while president? He personally saved the life of Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy by administering artificial respiration after his house caught fire, so there’s at least one. He saved further lives by quarantining ships infected with cholera. Twice during his administration, he injected millions of dollars into the economy to keep an economic panic from occurring, possibly saving lives (since people often starve to death during depressions). He also offered federal assistance and raised a relief fund to help flood victims in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, perhaps saving lives there. He supported pensions for disabled veterans and their families, which may have saved lives, although many of the payouts were fraudulent.

His policy of generally not sending in troops to resolve labor disputes could have saved lives, but also might have cost lives. It’s hard to say. While he wasn’t responsible for the Wounded Knee Massacre, him not changing his assimilation policy towards Native Americans didn’t help them. While he wasn’t responsible for the revolution taking over Hawaii, he did nothing to give Hawaii back to the Hawaiians. He tried to help African Americans, but Congress blocked his efforts.

His dispute with Britain and Germany over Samoa might have led to war, so the fact he engaged in diplomacy could have saved lives. Likewise, the tensions with Italy, Chile, and Canada could have escalated to war, but didn’t, although Harrison was generally the one beating the war drum and the cooler heads were on the other side of the conflicts. It doesn’t feel right to give him credit for threatening to go to war, and then not doing it because the other side backed down. Perhaps these potential wars should even count against him.

Overall, I don’t think he was directly responsible for any deaths and he even saved several lives. Nothing particularly big happened during his presidency, making him an overall average president.