Years earlier having given up distilling whiskey himself on the grounds that his son had become an alcoholic, William Henry Harrison during the Presidential election of 1840 campaigned by distributing bottles containing an alcoholic beverage with his nickname and home town on them. Harrison won but died just 31 days after his inauguration as 9th President of the United States.
By the accident of birth, Harrison came in the world in a place where some historians believe whiskey was first made in America, later known as Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. It was there that George Thorpe, an English gentleman and clergyman set about to turn corn into alcohol. In December 1620 Thorpe wrote a friend: “Wee have found a waie to make soe good drink of Indian corn I have divers times refused to drink good stronge English beare and chose to drinke that.” Those spirits would have been clear in color and more akin to “moonshine” or “white lightening” than contemporary whiskey. (See post Oct. 23, 2021.)
For his efforts, Thorpe and his fellow colonials were slaughtered by Indians in a raid in 1622, a century and a half before Harrison was born in the spacious 1726 plantation house, shown above, situated on 1,000 acres of land along the James River in Charles County, Virginia. Perhaps Harrison had this massacre in mind when in 1811 he defeated a coalition of Native American tribes and Chief Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe Creek, Indiana. It earned him the nickname “Old Tippecanoe” and a reputation as a hero in battle.
After his military service Harrison decided to relocate to the Middle West. By this time he was married to Anna Tuthill Symmes (1775-1864), a well-read, boarding-school educated, daughter of a wealthy western-land speculator named Col. John Cleves Symmes. An excellent horsewoman, Anna was said to be well suited to frontier and military life. In 1796 she would bear Harrison the first of their ten children.
The Harrisons’ first home was a farm in southern Indiana. Living in a log cabin while commanding the quiet post of Fort Washington, Harrison invested in a gristmill, whiskey distillery, and sawmill. None of the ventures proved profitable. That prompted a move to a log-cabin house on a 160 acre farm outside the village of North Bend, Ohio (near Cincinnati), purchased from Anna’s father, likely for a bargain price. Over the next few years, Harrison would expand the structure, illustrated below, into a much larger dwelling for his growing brood.
Harrison also would take another venture into distilling. Neighbor Samuel Burr Jones noted: “His farm on the Ohio River contains very superior corn ground, and some years since, when corn was low, he established a distillery in order to convert his surplus into an article more portable and profitable.” While no details exist about the size of the facility, the mashing capacity or daily production, a letter in the Gilder Lehmann Historical Collection records Harrison writing to a B. Tappin asking him to send more lime be used to create an aqueduct for the distillery. The water would have been used to turn a mill wheel to grind grain for the whiskey mash.
Exactly how many years Harrison operated his distillery is difficult to calculate but it likely was for a decade or perhaps two. He is said to have ended that activity when one of his sons became an alcoholic. He seemingly then became a reformer. Possibly with his eye on a Presidential run he declared his opposition to alcohol in a speech to the Hamilton County Agricultural Society in June 1831,declaring: “I speak more freely of the practice of converting the material of the “staff of life” (and for which so many human beings yearly perish) into an article which is so destructive of health and happiness, because in that way I have sinned myself; but in that way I shall sin no more.”
Harrison’s antipathy toward strong drink appears to have been modified significantly nine years later when he became the Whig Party candidate for the Presidency. He and his party broke new ground in campaigning. Up to that time it generally was thought vulgar for presidential candidates to make speeches or otherwise campaign on their own behalf. When Harrison’s Democratic Party opposition characterized him as an elderly country duffer, he broke tradition and began to speak for his candidacy. Making sure he always had some old veteran of the Tippecanoe battle on the stage next to him, Harrison would break off his oration suddenly to take several ostentatious swigs from a barrel marked “hard cider.”
His campaign emphasized Harrrison’s having lived for a time in a log cabin, casting it as an icon of the genuine in America. Log cabins engendered great nostalgia for the simple virtues of the Nation’s rustic pioneer past, including neighborliness and fair dealing. Below are two depictions of many used during the campaign. The one at left purports to show Harrison shaking hands with a wounded veteran (note the wooden leg). At the side of the log cabin are two barrels marked “hard cider.” The picture at right shows a barrel on the roof and claims to be a replica.
Harrison offered free bottles in the shape of a log cabin to the electorate. Shown below, the bottles were made in two styles by the Mount Vernon Glass Works of New York. The bottle at left is blown in the shape of a cabin with a four-sided “hip roof.” The front has the legend “Tippecanoe,” an allusion to Gen. Harrison’s battle success The other side of the bottle reads “North Bend,” his southern Ohio home.
With the originals now worth six figures, the almost universal assumption is that the contents were whiskey. During the campaign Harrison was quoted saying he would “rather sit on his front porch sipping whiskey than run for President.” Later Edmund Booz, a Philadelphia distiller, would issue a series of log cabin shaped bottles, shown below. Often are mistaken for the originals, Booz’s bottles did hold whiskey.
Although Harrison’s bottles clearly held some kind of alcohol, my speculation is that the contents might well have been hard cider, not whiskey. Two reasons: First, the alcohol content of hard cider is only from 4% to 7.5%, just about the same as beer, and clearly not as intoxicating as whiskey at 40% and higher. Second, cost: Distilling whiskey from corn or other grains is a lengthy and laborious process, involving time and expense. Apple squeezings turn into hard cider quite naturally simply by sitting. Since Harrison’s campaign was giving these bottles away, it might well have chosen cider over whiskey. In truth, however, we will never know.
The rest of the story is short. Harrison stood for two hours to give the longest inaugural speech in American history, some 8,000 plus words, despite having been physically worn down by many persistent office seekers and a demanding social schedule. On March 24, 1841, Harrison took his daily morning walk to local markets, without a coat or hat. Despite being caught in a sudden rainstorm, he did not change his wet clothes upon return to the White House. He became ill, the doctors of his time made matters worse, and nine days William Henry Harrison died. His resting place is near his North Bend farm and marked by a memorial tower, shown below.
As one result of his untimely passing, we still do not know what Harrrison’s true feelings were about strong drink.
Notes: With research from many sources, two stand out. The chapter on Harrison in “Dead Distillers” by Colin Spoelman and David Haskell, undated, and the chapter on “Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images (1789-1896),” edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1994. The photo of the original log cabin bottles is through the courtesy of Ferd Myers.
No comments:
Post a Comment