President Benjamin Harrison's Last State of the Union Address
(Benjamin Harrison (August 20, 1833 - March 13, 1901) was ...)
Benjamin Harrison (August 20, 1833 - March 13, 1901) was the 23rd President of the United States (1889-1893) and the grandson of the ninth President, William Henry Harrison. Harrison had become a prominent local attorney, Presbyterian church leader, and politician in Indianapolis, Indiana. During the American Civil War, he served the Union for most of the war as a colonel and on February 14, 1865, was confirmed by the United States Senate as a brevet brigadier general of volunteers to rank from January 23, 1865. Afterwards, he unsuccessfully ran for the governorship of Indiana but was later elected to the U.S. Senate by the Indiana legislature.
Benjamin Harrison was an American politician and statesman. He served as the 23rd president of the United States from 1889 to 1893.
Background
Benjamin Harrison was born in North Bend, Ohio, on August 20, 1833. The Harrison had been among the most illustrious families of colonial Virginia, and Benjamin was the namesake of a Revolutionary soldier and signer of the Declaration of Independence. His grandfather, William Henry Harrison, who had transported the family to Ohio, was elected president as "Old Tippecanoe" in 1840.
Education
From 1847 to 1849 Harrison studied at Farmer's College. He graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1852.
Harrison read law for 2 years in Cincinnati, then moved to Indianapolis, Ind., where he established a prosperous practice.
Harrison became a Republican immediately. He was known as a good political orator, although today his speeches seem to combine only triteness and pedantry with 19th-century bombast. His political career advanced slowly but steadily until the Civil War: he was the city attorney of Indianapolis in 1857, secretary of the Republican State Central Committee in 1858, and reporter of the Indiana Supreme Court in 1860. The last position proved profitable, as Harrison drew large royalties for many years from his compilation of Indiana laws.
Unlike many political contemporaries, Harrison sat out the first campaign of the Civil War. In 1862, however, he organized the Union's 70th Indiana Infantry and was commissioned as its colonel. A typical volunteer officer, he knew nothing of war-making and was fortunate in being assigned to guard the newly captured Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
Harrison was not popular with his troops; apparently he was something of a martinet, and the personal coldness of which many contemporaries would later complain was already manifest. The dullness of guard duty also may have affected the unhappy command, but that was relieved in 1864 when Harrison and his men joined Gen. William T. Sherman. Harrison stayed at the front only briefly, as he was quickly requested to return to Indiana in order to head off a Democratic political threat in the fall elections. He rejoined Sherman, but only after Sherman's famous, devastating march through Georgia was complete; Harrison was brevetted as brigadier general, more for political than military services.
After the war, Harrison built his legal practice into one of the most successful in Indiana. Still, he never neglected Republican politics. He supported the victorious radical faction of the party and during the 1870s became a spokesman for the equally dominant fiscal conservatives. He was unsuccessful as a candidate for governor of Indiana in 1876 but continued to serve the party. In 1877 he again donned military uniform briefly to command troops during the national railroad strike. He was a solidly conservative Republican.
Harrison's career improved sharply in 1880. He was elected to the U.S. Senate and played an important role in winning the Republican presidential nomination for James A. Garfield. Harrison was himself a "dark horse" candidate for the nomination in 1884, but, realizing that it was the charismatic James G. Blaine's year, he refused to allow his name before the convention. It was this combination of stern party regularity and fortuitous personal decisions - rather than any particular brilliance - that accounted for Harrison's rise.
Harrison's years in the Senate were undistinguished. He played on Civil War emotionalism and appealed to anti-British sentiment but made no significant contributions to the great issues of the day. Rather, he turned his considerable legal talents to constructing interminable constitutional briefs for petty and partisan purposes. But his services paid off when he was nominated to run for president in 1888.
In the presidential campaign, Harrison lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. More than any previous Republican president, he committed his party to certain high financial and "big business" interests when, through his postmaster general, he systematized the solicitation of party funds. His administration sat during the "Billion Dollar Congress" elected in 1890, the first Congress ever to expend more than $1 billion. That famous Congress also passed a high tariff law containing reciprocity provisions (which Harrison largely wrote) that facilitated American economic expansion abroad, the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act, and the ill-fated Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Harrison's term also saw the Republican party finally abandon its commitment to defend the civil rights of Southern African Americans when Congress failed to pass a law designed to protect them.
Harrison kept in touch with his Congress on the various questions although, in the fashion of the time, he took a minimal part in the public debates. The accomplishments of the "Billion Dollar Congress," however, bear his mark: the carelessly drawn acts, intended as much to obfuscate as clarify, showed the lack of interest or inability to comprehend long-term effects which characterized Harrison's career.
Harrison was ultimately no more popular with his own party than with the Democrats. Short and portly with a stony, uncomely countenance, he seemed incapable of a warm personal relationship, let alone of the glad-handing conviviality which late-19th-century American politics frequently required. Still, he was the incumbent in 1892 and secured his party's renomination - only to lose the election to Grover Cleveland.
Actually, Harrison was to be just as happy about his defeat. Cleveland's second term was a disaster, marked by agricultural and industrial unrest with which Harrison could hardly have better coped. And Harrison was personally more suited for private life. He returned to his legal practice in Indiana, represented Venezuela in a celebrated boundary dispute with Great Britain, and wrote several books, including Views of an Ex-President (1901) and This Country of Ours (1897), a popular textbook for several years. He died of pneumonia on March 13, 1901.
At least from his college days onward, Harrison appears to have been quite devout. In addition to frequently attending church, Harrison became a church elder, and taught at Sunday school.
Politics
During Harrison’s term in the White House, the lingering effects of an economic depression led to calls for more expansive federal legislation. A longtime protectionist, Harrison supported the passage of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 (backed by the Ohio congressman and future president William McKinley). For the first time in peacetime, Congress appropriated a billion dollars during Harrison’s administration, angering many Americans who saw the president and his fellow Republicans as too supportive of wealthy interests. On the other hand, Harrison lent his support to the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the government to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month, and bowed to the pressure of agrarians and reformers by signing into law the Sherman Antitrust Act, designed to prohibit industrial combinations or trusts. (Ohio Senator John Sherman sponsored both acts.) Harrison also continued his support of veterans’ benefits as well as his advocacy of forest conservation and the expansion of the United States Navy.
In the foreign policy arena, Harrison’s administration (including the president and secretary of state, James G. Blaine) displayed a growing American influence in world affairs. The First International Conference of American States (later the Pan-American Union) took place in Washington, D.C. in late 1889. In addition, Harrison’s State Department successfully negotiated with Germany and Great Britain to set terms for an American protectorate in the Samoan Islands and opposed Britain and Canada in order to prevent the overharvesting of seals in the Bering Sea. Harrison was unsuccessful, however, in his attempts to convince Congress to back the construction of a canal in Nicaragua, as well as in his efforts to annex Hawaii in 1893.
Views
Harrison advanced science and technology. He was the first to install electricity in the White House.
Quotations:
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
"The bud of victory is always in the truth."
"No other people have a government more worthy of their respect and love or a land so magnificent in extent, so pleasant to look upon, and so full of generous suggestion to enterprise and labor."
"I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event."
"There never has been a time in our history when work was so abundant or when wages were as high, whether measured by the currency in which they are paid or by their power to supply the necessaries and comforts of life."
Personality
Known as the "human iceberg," Harrison was stiff and formal in dealing with people. He disliked small talk. He could not tolerate inefficiency or incompetence in subordinates. He tackled problems through mastery of detail. Although he lacked both charisma and the common touch, he was widely respected for his intelligence, honesty, attention to duty, and diligence. "Integrity formed the backbone of Harrison’s character," according to biographer Harry J. Sievers. "His active intellect firmly backed by moral courage, he was regarded as a bulwark of political decency." He was among the best extemporaneous speakers of his day.
Physical Characteristics:
A stocky figure with a large paunchy torso set atop short stubby legs, Harrison stood about 5 feet 6 inches tall and had a fair complexion, blue eyes, and light brown hair that had been corn-silk blond in his youth. He was among the last of the nineteenth-century statesmen to wear a full beard; Harrison’s had a reddish tinge. He spoke in a high, soft voice. He dressed fashionably. His health generally was sound, except for a brief physical breakdown in 1867 brought on from overwork.
Connections
Benjamin Harrison married Caroline Scott on October 20, 1853. Caroline's father, a Presbyterian minister, performed the ceremony. The Harrisons had two children, Russell Benjamin Harrison, and Mary "Mamie" Scott Harrison.
Harrison at age 62 remarried, to Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, the widowed 37-year-old niece and former secretary of his deceased wife. Harrison's two adult children disapproved of the marriage and did not attend the wedding. Benjamin and Mary had one child together, Elizabeth.