A Child of the Revolution: William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–1798

Afterword

166 a child of the revolution Afterword t When William Henry Harrison in later life described himself as a child of the Revolution, he meant it in a political context: that the time and the circumstances of his early life, in the middle of America’s defining event, had given him a special access to authentic American heroism and values, and that voters could benefit from this by putting him in office. But, as he was probably aware, he was a child of the Revolution in many more senses than this one. In fact, one could call him a child of several interlocking revolutions. For young Harrison, as for some other children of influential American families, the primary meaning of the Revolution was destruction and dislocation—a burned home, a shattered family, experience of terror, flight, and, subsequently, exile and a curtailed education. Accompanying these experiences, however, came a set of explanations about the significance of these hardships and the grandeur of the era in which they occurred. Like other children of influential American families (John Quincy Adams is a well-known example), Harrison grew up acutely aware of an obligation to develop ideals and attitudes appropriate to the greatness of the times he lived in. In Virginia, this feeling of obligation, in the context of the ongoing economic and social disruptions of the era, led Harrison and his peers to try one career plan and set of commitments after another, in search of a life that would be both workable and virtuous. To live up to the needs of the moment and the grand destiny they envisioned, many made adjustments in their thinking on disparate 166 Booraem text.indb 166 5/22/12 1:53 PM afterword 167 subjects: religion, slavery, and alcohol, to name three. Under the pressure of extraordinary events, they moved toward becoming “self-made men” in the sense studied by Daniel Walker Howe and Joyce Appleby. The driving force of the American Revolution was the Enlightenment belief that communities had the right to govern themselves and a consequent duty to resist oppression by distant tyrants. Parallel to that revolution, Jay Fliegelman has pointed out, was another in the sphere of personal and family relations, which asserted that the parent-child bond was not a one-way chain of authority but a reciprocal relationship , in which each party had responsibilities toward the other. The new thinking of the era insisted that the parent-child relationship ought to be one of love and gratitude, rather than lordship and duty. Tested by this doctrine, Benjamin Harrison, absolute, sarcastic, and preoccupied, was a bad parent, whom his youngest son was right to resist. Like the hero of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Arthur Mervyn, in Daniel Cohen’s perceptive interpretation, young Harrison searched his world for substitute fathers and found them in men like Wilkinson and Wayne; like Mervyn’s, his was an experience “of personal transition in a profoundly transitional age.”1 For reasons that can be reconstructed only partially, William Henry came to reject Benjamin Harrison and the values he represented, and could feel in doing so that he, not his father, embodied Revolutionary virtue. One can point, too, to a lesser sort of revolution in the area of sensibility . Harrison’s generation stood at the beginning of the Romantic era, in which philosophers like Hegel and writers like Scott and Cooper and Byron would draw inspiration from the struggles of history. The battles of the past, perhaps especially those involving colorful and valiant fringe cultures, like the Celts, the barbarians, or aboriginal peoples, captured their imagination just as Rollin, and later the epic of the Indians of the Northwest, fascinated Harrison and others. Harrison was a reader, but it is impossible to know whether he read some single work that gave him this new angle of vision, or whether he picked it up largely on his own through hints and scraps in the authors he read. Whatever his path, he arrived at a view shared by many Americans of the next generation and explored by Roy Harvey Pearce.2 To Harrison, as to his father, the Indians were savages; but to him they were also representatives of a culture endlessly interesting and worthy of study precisely because it was doomed to extinction. Booraem text.indb 167 5/22/12 1:53 PM 168 a child of the revolution One thing is certain: Harrison...