Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (review)

As we approach the bicentennial of the War of 1812, studies of the conflict, its causes and consequences, and its personalities are bound to accumulate. Robert M. Owens adds to this growing corpus with a fine study of William Henry Harrison’s role in the political, diplomatic, economic, and social aspects of the Old Northwest.

He acknowledges that his is a cultural biography, attempting to place Harrison within the milieu of early America. As such, he updates the Harrison biographies by Dorothy Burn Goebel (1926) and Freeman Cleaves (1939) by re-examining their often fawning premises and incorporating virtually all of the recent research on the era.

In his final line Professor Owens reiterates a constant them of this volume: “William Henry Harrison was a son of Virginia” (p. 250). Raised at Berkeley Plantation on the James River, he was the third son of Virginia planter, patriot, congressman, signer and wartime governor Benjamin Harrison. From his youth he appears to have accepted Virginia gentry attitudes concerning large estates, slavery, Anglophobia, militia wariness, and lower class deference. With his father’s death when he was 19, young Harrison gave up plans for a medical career and used his family’s influence to receive an army commission.

Harrison soon became Anthony Wayne’s aide-de-camp and at the Treaty of Greenville learned negotiating tactics he successfully implemented in his negotiations with the Native Americans such as the famous, or infamous, land cessions in the Fort Wayne Treaty of 1809, which represents “the zenith of Harrison’s negotiating style.” Of this inter-tribal conference Owens writes: “The annuities promised by Wayne in 1795 allowed Harrison, by threatening to withhold them, to coerce chiefs into attending his councils. He then built upon his mentor’s examples of bribery and exploitation of divisions among the Indians and took both to new heights. Both at the inter-tribal and intra-tribal levels, he masterfully and ruthlessly divided and conquered his opponents” (p. 204). This argument represents the core of Owens’ discussion of Jeffersonian Indian policy.

But this book is more than its title suggests. It is really a study of Harrison’s governorship of Indiana Territory, 1800–12. He describes Harrison as the young man who wanted to divide the Old Northwest when Arthur St. Clair was its governor but opposed it when he was in charge of Indiana, who ran as an opposition leader to St. Clair’s picked candidate for territorial delegate to Congress but who wanted his crony to hold a similar post in Indiana, who encouraged smaller tracts of land for sale under favorable terms as territorial delegate but who pushed for slavery in Indiana and large landholdings it supported, and the list goes on and on. In other words, this is a “warts and all” biography that often imposes modern morality upon historical figures.

For readers of this journal, it is unfortunate that Owens neglects Harrison’s important and varied military career from Fallen Timbers to the Thames. For “Old Tippecanoe,” force and threats of force were important ingredients in securing dominance over the Indians and in maintaining American control over the Old Northwest that both the Native Americans and British thought should be theirs.