Happy Presidents’ Day weekend! Enjoy the three-day weekend if you’ve got it. The holiday itself is monarchical and un-American, but it’s also the American Way to use any excuse to take a day off from work. I want to focus on three of the lesser-known Presidents this weekend, the first being William Henry Harrison. Harrison is only known as the answer to a trivia question: which American President died after only 31 days in office? Or, he’s the butt of a joke: he was the best President because he didn’t stick around long enough to screw things up! But who was William Henry Harrison? And is his presidency more important than we give it credit for?

9th President William Henry Harrison

Harrison was a man that could fit into many different categories. His father, Benjamin Harrison V, was a signor of the Declaration of Independence, and also the fifth Governor of Virginia. William Henry Harrison came from an elite Virginia political class, but as a statesman, he represented Ohio as both a Senator and a Representative. He was also the first Governor of the Indiana territory. In some ways, Harrison was the first national candidate. 

This is important because George Washington was from Virginia. So was the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. John and John Quincy Adams were New Englanders. Andrew Jackson was our first Appalachian Scottish border-chief, and Martin Van Buren was unapologetically Dutch New Yorker. These men were very much of their region, which often created sectional conflict. The Whig party of William Henry Harrison wasn’t necessarily a rebuke of Jackson’s home state of Tennessee, it was a rebuke against ‘King Andrew” and what Whigs viewed as his monarchal powers.  

Harrison was not the first Whig candidate for president. When Harrison won in 1840, it was also not his first time running. Harrison also ran in 1836, with three other Whigs that represented regional interests (Van Buren won that year). The Whigs were mostly aligned at the national level – they supported Whig patriarch Henry Clay’s system of federally funded internal improvements, as well as a national bank. But the wide variety of regional coalitions weakened the Whigs as a whole. Anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, Calhoun’s nullifiers, old Jeffersonian states’ rights republicans as well as the anti-monarchical Anti-Masonic party. Henry Clay could not check off all of these boxes, but Harrison could. 

Harrison was in some ways the first manufactured American statesman. He was the first omnibus candidate, a man who could represent everyone. He could be the man for everyone and everything, whether that was sincere or not. This becomes important as America expands westward, and regional cultures dilute. Harrison was portrayed as a log cabin-frontiersman, yet he was a doctor from an elite political family. He was an Army general, and also an anti-aristocratic, anti-Van Buren common man. He was from Ohio and from the South. He supported federal infrastructure, yet also paid lip service to states’ rights republicanism. 

Harrison was what the Whigs needed to defeat the highly organized Democrat party of Jackson and Van Buren. He defeated Van Buren in 1840 and assumed office on March 4th, 1841, then died on April 4th. To this day, it is still the shortest presidency in United States history. Harrison never vetoed a bill. He issued zero executive orders. How can you judge his presidency when there is literally nothing on his resume? You can look at his inaugural address.

Interestingly, Harrison does not mention Washington at all. He mentions Jefferson four times and Madison once. Was Harrison going to govern as a nationalist Whig or a states’ rights Jeffersonian? His inaugural address seems like it would lean towards the latter, which would certainly alienate many in his Whig party. Harrison tows the Whig line on national banking, yet at the same time, he makes it clear that it is not the presidents’ job to legislate:

I can not conceive that by a fair construction any or either of its provisions would be found to constitute the President a part of the legislative power.

Would Harrison have supported national banking? Or would he have stood against it on principle, like his successor John Tyler? Hard to say. He also makes an interesting statement on federalism:

Our Confederacy, fellow-citizens, can only be preserved by the same forbearance. Our citizens must be content with the exercise of the powers with which the Constitution clothes them. The attempt of those of one State to control the domestic institutions of another can only result in feelings of distrust and jealousy, the certain harbingers of disunion, violence, and civil war, and the ultimate destruction of our free institutions.

Harrison may have been a manufactured, “national” candidate, but this is a rock-solid support of federalism and states’ rights. It is also interesting that he uses the term “civil war.” The crisis of the 1860s was not a true civil war in that there were not two parties fighting for control over Washington DC. But Harrison correctly predicted disunion. And he correctly predicted the violence and chaos that would be caused by a regional faction exercising dominance over the rest of the Union. We’re all New Englanders in the United States today.

Based on Harrison’s address, he probably would have been a great President. Oddly enough, the Whigs probably have the best track record of good-to-great Presidents. Harrison scores an n/a, Fillmore is average at worst, and Taylor and Tyler were both great based on the sole metric for measuring a President’s job – did they uphold their oath to defend the Constitution? Harrison may have supported the unconstitutional American System of Henry Clay, or he may have been like John Tyler and alienated his party based on principle. Hard to say.

But was Harrison important? I think he was. Harrison represented a massive shift in American politics, for better or worse. While not the first example of vengeance politics in the United States, he’s the first example of a vengeance candidate at a national party level. Jefferson V Adams and Adams V Jackson still represented feuds between regional coalitions. The Whigs were fighting against Jackson’s entire party, even though Jackson hadn’t been President for four years (like how today’s Democrats cannot stop talking about Trump). Harrison is the first manufactured national politician, something you see all the time now with candidates that look like they were pumped out of an assembly line. Think along the lines of Bush from Connecticut who is somehow also a rough-and-tumble Texan. I give Harrison more credit than I do modern politicians, but Harrison started the trend.

William Henry Harrison is an important president. He will not be honored on President’s Day, but we should recognize his significant contributions to American politics. He should be remembered as more than just the answer to a trivia question.