William Henry Harrison.

« in September 1813, Harrison recaptured the city of Detroit, which the British had taken in 1812.

The following month he overtook the British and Tecumseh's forces onthe Thames River in Canada.

He captured the entire British force.

Tecumseh was killed, and his forces were routed. Harrison's triumph on the Thames, although won over inferior forces badly placed, was vitally important because the victory secured the Northwest from the threat of aBritish invasion from Canada.

It also added considerably to his reputation.

However, in the months that followed, bad feeling sprang up between Harrison and Secretaryof War John Armstrong.

Harrison resigned his command in May 1814, returning to his home in North Bend, Ohio, a town founded by his father-in-law. D Congressional Career D1 United States Congressman At North Bend, Harrison lived in the style of a Virginia planter.

He kept servants, dispensed generous Virginia hospitality, and soon found himself in debt.

In 1816 hewas elected to the U.S.

House of Representatives, where he supported the policies of Henry Clay and gave good service as chairman of the Committee on Militia.

In1817 he maneuvered to have the new president, James Monroe, appoint him secretary of war.

However, the post went to John C.

Calhoun of South Carolina.

Thefollowing year he was proposed for diplomatic representative to Russia, but again Monroe passed him by.

However, he served out his two-year term as a congressman. Harrison was elected to the Ohio state senate in 1819.

He was defeated in an attempt to become governor of Ohio the following year.

He failed in 1821 and again in1822 to become a U.S.

senator, and in the latter year he made an unsuccessful bid for another term in the House of Representatives. D2 U.S.

Senator In 1824 Harrison succeeded in winning election to the U.S.

Senate.

As a senator from 1825 to 1828, Harrison held the chair of the Committee on Military Affairs andserved on the Committee on Militia.

He continued to seek political preferment, and he finally succeeded when Henry Clay, who had become the secretary of state,sponsored him for diplomatic representative to Colombia.

President John Quincy Adams gave Harrison the mission but wrote in his diary that Harrison's “thirst forlucrative office” was “absolutely rabid.” E Diplomat When Harrison arrived at Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, early in 1829, that country had been involved in two recent revolutions and Peru had just declared war on it.Harrison disregarded Clay's instructions not to become involved in Colombian factional politics.

Believing that President Simón Bolívar planned to make himself emperor,Harrison cooperated with Bolívar's rival, General José María Córdoba.

This aroused the Colombian government's resentment.

Harrison was saved from expulsion by theBolívar regime only because the new U.S.

president, Andrew Jackson, recalled him to give the position to one of his party supporters.

Before leaving, Harrisoncompounded his diplomatic errors by sending a strongly worded letter to Bolívar advising him to uphold the republic. F Election of 1836 Harrison did not prosper after his return to the North Bend farm.

He had little income except from the farm, whose crop yields were low, and from a minor political jobas county recorder.

He nonetheless kept in touch with his old political friends, anti-Jacksonites, who in 1836 began to think that Harrison's past and military recordmight make him a suitable candidate to run against President Jackson.

The anti-Jacksonites, or Whig Party, as they now called themselves, put up different slates ofcandidates for different sections of the country in 1836.

They hoped in this way to keep the Jacksonians from getting a majority of the electoral votes.

The WesternWhigs ran Harrison for president, and the Southern branch chose Senator Hugh L.

White of Tennessee as their standard-bearer, while the New Englanders ran SenatorDaniel Webster of Massachusetts.

None of them could defeat Jackson's chosen candidate, Martin Van Buren, who polled 170 electoral votes to Harrison's 73.

However,Harrison piled up such a large popular vote, especially in the northwestern states, that he appeared a promising candidate for the next presidential campaign. G Election of 1840 The Whig national convention of 1839, determined to appeal to the mass vote, rejected Henry Clay in favor of the aging hero of Tippecanoe.

To attract the votes ofpoor farmers and frontier dwellers, they presented Harrison as a man of the people, a Westerner, and a fighter of Native Americans.

Former U.S.

Senator John Tyler ofVirginia was named Harrison's vice presidential running mate.

No platform was adopted.

The campaign was based on accusations that Van Buren had caused thefinancial panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression. Whig posters and campaign literature ignored their candidate's comfortable Virginia and Ohio background, misrepresenting him as a poor farmer plowing his little plot,with a log cabin for his home and a keg of hard cider, the poor man's consolation, near at hand.

Van Buren was represented with equal distortion by the Whigs aslounging on silken cushions and drinking imported wines.

Such slogans as “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” coonskin campaign hats, and rallies where hard cider flowedwere calculated to whip up voters into such an emotional state that they would not ask what the issues were.

Harrison talked in pleasant generalities at a few soldiers'rallies and some meetings in Ohio.

The electoral votes brought Harrison in by a landslide: he polled 234 to Van Buren's 60.

He carried 19 states, while Van Buren carriedonly 7. IV PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES President-elect Harrison journeyed to Washington in triumphal procession.

The 68-year-old hero of Tippecanoe, “Old Tip,” as the campaign songs called him, wasinaugurated on March 4, 1841.

He had written his own inaugural address, which included many classical allusions.

In the speech, Harrison spoke out for a singlepresidential term and moderate use of the executive power.

He deplored office seeking and greed for power.

He opposed antislavery agitation as an interference withthe domestic affairs of states. In forming his Cabinet, President Harrison chose outstanding anti-Jacksonites from different sections of the nation, with Daniel Webster of Massachusetts as secretary ofstate and other Cabinet members from Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and New York.

Clay had assumed that he would dominate Harrison's administration.He was vexed at the extent of Webster's influence and the power wielded by Thurlow Weed, New York Whig leader.

However, Clay went ahead with plans to directHarrison's legislation, until a note from the president declared that Clay was too impetuous and that others must be consulted. In mid-March, Harrison developed pneumonia.

He died on April 4, 1841, and was buried at North Bend. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation.

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