Benjamin Harrison

• 1. Introduction

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  Benjamin Harrison holds a peculiar distinction in American history: he is the only person to have served as president between two terms of the same opponent. In 1888, he defeated the incumbent Grover Cleveland. Four years later, Cleveland came back and beat him. That rematch made Harrison the first president to be succeeded in office by his own predecessor.

  Born on the 20th of August 1833, on a farm along the Ohio River in North Bend, Ohio, Harrison carried a surname that loomed large in American public life before he ever entered it. His grandfather had been the ninth president of the United States. His great-grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence. The weight of that lineage shaped Harrison's ambitions, his self-presentation, and ultimately the way historians have struggled to evaluate him.

  What did the 23rd president actually do in office? The questions are more interesting than the usual answer suggests. Harrison oversaw an era of remarkable legislative activity, a dramatic expansion of the Navy, the admission of six new states, and some of the most forceful presidential advocacy for Black voting rights in the decades between Reconstruction and the New Deal. He was also a man who walked into the White House carrying the electoral votes but not the popular majority, governed through a surplus that became a liability, and left presiding over a party in retreat.

  His last words, spoken at his home in Indianapolis on the 13th of March 1901, were reported to be: "Are the doctors here? Doctor, my lungs." He was 67 years old.

• 2. A Bloodline and a Boyhood

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  John Scott Harrison, Benjamin's father, served two terms as a U.S. congressman from Ohio, but the family's means were modest despite its prominent name. Harrison spent much of his boyhood fishing and hunting outdoors, and his early schooling took place in a log cabin near the family farm.

  At fourteen, Harrison and his older brother Irwin enrolled in Farmer's College near Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1847. It was there that he met Caroline Lavinia Scott, who would become his wife. Her father, John Witherspoon Scott, was the school's science professor and also a Presbyterian minister. Harrison transferred to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1850 and graduated in 1852. He joined Phi Delta Theta, a fraternity that functioned as a professional network for much of his life. Among his classmates was Whitelaw Reid, who would become his vice presidential running mate in 1892.

  At Miami, history and political economy professor Robert Hamilton Bishop was a formative influence. Harrison also joined a Presbyterian church at college and, like his mother, remained a lifelong member of that denomination. His faith was not incidental: it shaped his social circle, his early law partnerships, and the character of his cabinet selections decades later.

  After graduating in 1852, Harrison studied law in Cincinnati with Judge Bellamy Storer. Before he finished those studies, he returned to Oxford to marry Caroline on the 20th of October 1853. Her father, the Presbyterian minister, performed the ceremony. Within a year, Harrison had been admitted to the Ohio bar, sold inherited property for $800, and used the proceeds to move with Caroline to Indianapolis, where he would build his career.

• 3. The 70th Indiana

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  In 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for more Union Army recruits, Harrison visited Governor Oliver Morton and found him distressed over the shortage of men answering the call. Harrison told the governor, "If I can be of any service, I will go." Morton asked if he could help recruit a regiment. Harrison had no military experience and initially declined command, but he traveled throughout northern Indiana to raise the men.

  Morton commissioned Harrison as a colonel on the 7th of August 1862. The 70th Indiana Infantry was mustered into federal service on August 12 and left for Louisville, Kentucky. For the first two years the regiment performed reconnaissance and railroad-guard duties in Kentucky and Tennessee.

  In May 1864 Harrison and his men joined General William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign as part of the Army of the Cumberland. On the 2nd of January 1864, Harrison had been promoted to command the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the XX Corps. The battles that followed shaped his public reputation for the rest of his life.

  At the Battle of Resaca on the 15th of May 1864, Harrison faced Confederate Captain Max Van Den Corput's four-gun, parapet-protected artillery battery, described as occupying a position "some eighty yards in front of the main Confederate lines." Harrison massed his troops in a ravine, then led them up over the artillery parapet in a charge that eliminated the battery through hand-to-hand combat. Four 12-pound Napoleon cannons sat in no man's land until nightfall, when Union soldiers "dug through the parapet, slipped ropes around the four cannons, and dragged them back to their lines."

  At Peachtree Creek on the 20th of July 1864, with his ammunition dangerously depleted, Harrison sent officers to cut cartridge-boxes from Confederate dead within his own lines to resupply his men. He later wrote that the enemy, "having the higher ground, fired too high," which helped keep his brigade's losses comparatively light.

  General Sherman opined after Atlanta that Harrison had served with "foresight, discipline and a fighting spirit." On the 23rd of January 1865, Lincoln nominated Harrison to the grade of brevet brigadier general of volunteers, and the Senate confirmed the nomination on the 14th of February 1865. He mustered out with the 70th Indiana on the 8th of June 1865, after riding in the Grand Review in Washington, D.C.

• 4. Indianapolis Lawyer, Indiana Republican

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  Back in Indianapolis, Harrison resumed his law practice and took on cases that kept his name before the public. His prosecution of Nancy Clem for the Cold Spring murders of 1868 brought him particular attention, though her conviction was twice overturned on appeal. In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Harrison to represent the federal government in a civil suit by Lambdin P. Milligan, whose wartime conviction had already produced the landmark Supreme Court case Ex parte Milligan. Although the jury found for Milligan and he had sought hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, statutes limited what the federal government had to pay: five dollars plus court costs.

  Harrison's 1876 run for governor of Indiana ended in defeat by James D. Williams, losing by 5,084 votes out of 434,457 cast. Despite that loss, when the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 reached Indianapolis, Harrison gathered a citizen militia to show support for owners and management, helped mediate an agreement between the two sides, and prevented the strike from spreading. That action raised his profile further.

  Democratic gerrymandering of Indiana's legislative districts cost Harrison his U.S. Senate seat in 1887, after he had served from the 4th of March 1881, to the 3rd of March 1887. The state legislature chose Democrat David Turpie as his successor. A year after that defeat, Harrison declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, calling himself a "living and rejuvenated Republican" in a reference to his lack of a traditional power base. The phrase "Rejuvenated Republicanism" became the slogan of his presidential campaign.

• 5. The 1888 Election and Its Arithmetic

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  The 1888 Republican National Convention opened on June 19 at the Auditorium Building in Chicago with seventeen candidates in contention. Former nominee James G. Blaine of Maine was widely considered the front-runner but had repeatedly denied interest, ultimately leaving the country to stay with Andrew Carnegie in Scotland while the convention met. Harrison placed fifth on the first ballot, with Senator John Sherman of Ohio in the lead.

  As the balloting continued, Harrison became, in the language of observers, "everyone's second choice in a field of seven candidates." When New York's delegation switched to Harrison's column, it gave him the momentum needed for victory. He was nominated on the eighth ballot, 544 votes to 108. Levi P. Morton of New York, a banker and former U.S. Minister to France, was chosen as his running mate.

  The election on the 6th of November 1888, turned on the swing states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana. Voter turnout reached 79.3%, with nearly eleven million votes cast. Harrison received 90,000 fewer votes than Cleveland, but carried the Electoral College 233 to 168. Allegations of voter bribery surfaced when the Indiana Sentinel published a letter attributed to Harrison's supporter William Wade Dudley, describing offers to bribe voters in "blocks of five." Harrison neither defended nor repudiated Dudley but allowed him to remain on the campaign for the remaining days. After the election, Harrison never spoke to Dudley again.

  When Pennsylvania Republican boss Matthew Quay learned that Harrison had credited his narrow victory to Providence, Quay remarked that Harrison would never know "how close a number of men were compelled to approach...the penitentiary to make him president." Harrison was known as the Centennial President because his inauguration fell on the centenary of George Washington's first inauguration in 1789.

• 6. The Billion-Dollar Congress

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  Harrison was sworn in on the 4th of March 1889, by Chief Justice Melville Fuller. His inaugural address was half as long as his grandfather William Henry Harrison's speech, which remains the longest inaugural address in U.S. presidential history.

  The most consequential legislation of his term was the McKinley Tariff, which raised protective trade rates to the highest average level in American history. Representative William McKinley and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich framed the bill; Secretary of State Blaine urged Harrison to push for reciprocity provisions that would allow rate reductions when trading partners lowered their own tariffs. Even with those provisions, the tariff was steep enough that federal spending reached one billion dollars for the first time during Harrison's term, earning the 51st Congress its nickname.

  The Sherman Antitrust Act, sponsored by Senator John Sherman, passed by wide margins in both houses of Congress and became the first federal legislation of its kind. Harrison signed it and approved of its intent, though his administration's enforcement was limited. One successful case was brought against a Tennessee coal company during his term.

  On currency, Harrison faced a fractured Congress. Western Republicans and southern Democrats wanted free silver coinage while northeastern members of both parties held to the gold standard. Harrison attempted a middle course, and in July 1890 the Sherman Silver Purchase Act passed both houses. Harrison signed it, believing it would end the controversy. Instead, it accelerated the depletion of the nation's gold reserves, a problem that persisted into the next administration.

  Pension expenditures reached $135 million under Harrison, the largest such expenditure in American history to that point. The Dependent and Disability Pension Act, which Harrison had championed in Congress, provided pensions to disabled Civil War veterans regardless of the cause of their disability.

• 7. Beyond the Borders

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  Harrison and Secretary of State Blaine were not personally close but aligned on an aggressive foreign policy. Blaine's persistent health problems meant Harrison took a more direct hand than most presidents of the era.

  In 1889 the United States, the United Kingdom, and the German Empire were locked in a three-way dispute over the Samoan Islands. Historian George H. Ryden's research credits Harrison with playing a key role in the outcome, including refusing to allow an indemnity for Germany and insisting on a three-power protectorate arrangement, which was a first for the United States.

  On European markets, Harrison confronted a ban that various European countries had imposed throughout the 1880s on American pork imports, over unconfirmed concerns of trichinosis. At stake was over one billion pounds of pork products valued at $80 million annually. Harrison engaged his ministers to France and Germany to restore these exports, persuaded Congress to enact the Meat Inspection Act, and threatened Germany with a U.S. embargo on its beet sugar. By September 1891 Germany relented, and Denmark, France, and Austria-Hungary soon followed.

  In Chile in 1891, two American sailors were killed and dozens arrested after shore leave in Valparaiso. With Blaine incapacitated, Harrison drafted a demand for reparations. Chilean Foreign Minister Manuel Matta replied that Harrison's message was "erroneous or deliberately incorrect." Harrison threatened to break off diplomatic relations and placed the Navy on a high level of readiness. Chile ultimately apologized and war was averted. Theodore Roosevelt later credited Harrison for his use of the "big stick" in the matter.

  In the final days of his administration, Harrison submitted a treaty for the annexation of Hawaii to the Senate after a coup removed Queen Liliuokalani. The Senate failed to act before he left office, and his successor Cleveland withdrew the treaty.

• 8. After the White House

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  Harrison's wife Caroline died on the 25th of October 1892, two weeks before the election, after a struggle with tuberculosis. Their daughter Mary Harrison McKee assumed the role of First Lady after her mother's death. The grief of that loss, combined with the economic unpopularity of the tariff and defections of western voters to the Populist Party candidate James Weaver, contributed to Cleveland's decisive rematch victory: 277 electoral votes to Harrison's 145.

  Harrison returned to Indianapolis and private legal practice. In 1894 he gave law lectures at Stanford University for several months. He wrote a series of articles about the federal government that were republished in 1897 as a book, This Country of Ours. In 1896 he declined requests to seek the presidency again and instead campaigned for William McKinley.

  In 1896 Harrison remarried, to Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, the widowed niece and former secretary of his deceased wife. His two adult children, Russell and Mary, disapproved of the marriage and did not attend the wedding. Benjamin and Mary Dimmick had one child together, Elizabeth.

  In 1898 Harrison took on the most unusual case of his post-presidential legal career: representing Venezuela in its boundary dispute with the United Kingdom over British Guiana. He filed an 800-page brief and traveled to Paris, where he spent more than 25 hours arguing Venezuela's case in court. He lost, but the work earned him international legal renown.

  Harrison's support for Black voting rights and education, historian R. Hal Williams notes, remained largely intact in his reputation when he left the White House, and scholars have argued those efforts were the last significant attempts to protect civil rights until the 1930s. His endorsement of the Federal Elections Bill in 1890 and his speech to Congress on the 3rd of December 1889, asking "When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?", stand as the clearest expression of that commitment. The bipartisan Sherman Antitrust Act he signed remains in effect.