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

Preface

Preface t Of the two subjects in this book’s subtitle, William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–1798, the world is the dominant one—the exciting world of the new United States after the fighting had stopped, stirring with high ideals and noble dreams but also with disruptive social and political currents of all kinds, a world in which men and women cherished distant goals while struggling to keep their own lives afloat. The balance could hardly be otherwise: Harrison was a boy or very young man in these years, not yet influencing the world but instead being influenced by it. In 1798, the end of the period examined, Harrison was only twenty-five years old and, like most twenty-five-year-olds, in many ways a product of his time. Harrison the man would become a recognizable figure in American history, and not just for the laughable shortness of his thirty-two-day presidential term. His name was significant in Jacksonian politics, perhaps more for what he represented than for who he was, and he became one of the few generally successful military leaders in the War of 1812. Robert M. Owens has recently made the case for Harrison as a central figure in establishing U.S. policy toward Native Americans and their land. But all these roles are tangential to the subject of this book, Harrison’s journey to maturity in a changing world. This journey would have been illuminating even if it had been performed by someone with a less conspicuous future, uniting as it does so many theaters of the period: the crumbling world of the great Virginia vii Booraem text.indb 7 5/22/12 1:53 PM viii preface planters after the Revolution, Philadelphia and the nascent federal government , the Indians of the Ohio Valley and the settlers and soldiers who sought to displace them. Major actors of the time—George Washington, Anthony Wayne, Benjamin Rush, James Wilkinson, Little Turtle—met Harrison and actively influenced his life. Complex changes in letters, science, and religion in these years—roughly speaking, the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic era—had major effects on the development of Harrison’s intellectual interests and aspirations. In these pages, then, the reader can expect to find a great deal about Harrison’s world and less about the young man himself—but the focus will remain always on the building of his character and aspirations, an examination that will, I hope, go some distance toward addressing frontier historian Reginald Horsman’s admonition to his colleagues that “an attempt needs to be made to understand Harrison the man.”1 Information about Harrison’s earliest years, before he received his officer’s commission at eighteen, is meager compared to that existing for the other American presidents about whom I have written, and for that reason the early chapters of this study differ from those in my biographies of James Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, and Andrew Jackson. Instead of taking a straight chronological approach, they consider the central questions about this period in his life—the nature of presidential autobiography, family relations, educational patterns, and manners, medicine, slavery, and religion in the Virginia of the 1780s and 1790s. Then, building on this examination, they try to tease out inferences and implications from the scanty documents relating to Harrison himself. After chapter 5, the writing shifts to simple narrative; the same themes are present, but they are assimilated into the narrative structure. Just as information is scanty about Harrison’s early years, so, too, are certain details of life on the frontier at the end of the eighteenth century. Of special note is the dearth of specific detail about the various Indian tribes Harrison encountered. The range and number of tribes were rarely reflected in contemporary accounts; most officials and settlers did not differentiate among them, but instead simply called them “Indians” in their reports or recollections. Therefore, although I provide the names of the specific tribes and individuals where they are available, often I could only follow my sources and use the generic term Indian. No matter how authoritative this or any book may look, it is nothing more than the latest stage in an ongoing process—in this case, the Booraem text.indb 8 5/22/12 1:53 PM preface ix process of understanding Harrison as a young man. Inevitably, time will uncover pertinent facts that...