William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison was the ninth president of the United States and served thirty-one days, the shortest presidency and the first to end in the office-holder's death. He was born in Charles City County, Virginia, the last president born a British subject, and was a son of Benjamin Harrison V, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He left medical study for the army and fought at Fallen Timbers in 1794, the victory that ended the Northwest Indian War. As governor of Indiana Territory from 1800 he negotiated a series of treaties that transferred enormous areas of native land to the United States, including the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809, which Tecumseh rejected as invalid because the land belonged to all tribes in common. That dispute led to the confrontation at Tippecanoe in November 1811, where Harrison's force repulsed an attack on its camp and burned the Shawnee settlement, and the battle gave him the nickname that carried him to the presidency thirty years later. He commanded in the north-west during the War of 1812 and defeated the British and their native allies at the Thames in 1813, where Tecumseh was killed. The Whigs ran him in 1840 in the log-cabin-and-hard-cider campaign, the first modern American presidential campaign, presenting a wealthy planter's son as a frontier everyman. He was inaugurated on a cold March day and delivered the longest inaugural address in American history, close to two hours in the open without a coat. He died on 4 April 1841, of an illness long blamed on that speech, though later study of his physicians' notes points instead to enteric fever from the capital's contaminated water supply. His death settled the constitutional question of succession, because John Tyler simply assumed the presidency outright rather than acting as a caretaker.

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