William Henry Harrison (9 February 1773 – 4 April 1841) was President of the United States from 4 March to 4 April 1841, succeeding Martin Van Buren and preceding John Tyler. He previously served as Governor of Indiana from 10 January 1801 to 28 December 1812 (preceding Thomas Posey), a member of the US House of Representatives (DR-OH 1) from 8 October 1816 to 3 March 1819 (succeeding John McLean and preceding Thomas R. Ross), and a US Senator from Ohio from 4 March 1825 to 20 May 1828 (succeeding Ethan Allen Brown and preceding Jacob Burnet).
Biography[]
Military career[]
Harrison as a general
William Henry Harrison was born in Charles City County, Virginia in 1773, the son of Benjamin Harrison V; he was the last American president born before the American Revolutionary War. He served in the US Army as Anthony Wayne's aide-de-camp during the Northwest Indian War, fighting at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. In 1798, Harrison resigned from the military and served as Secretary of the Northwest Territory from 1798 to 1799 and as its delegate to the US House of Representatives from 1799 to 1800. In 1801, when the Indiana Territory was created, Harrison served as its first Governor, in which position he defeated Tecumseh's Native American confederation at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe; he was nicknamed "Old Tippecanoe" for the rest of his life. He was promoted to Major-General during the War of 1812, and, in 1813, he led the Americans to victory at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada, where he put an end to Tecumseh's scheming once and for all by killing Tecumseh in battle. In 1815, he negotiated peace with the natives, acquiring a large tract of land in the west for purchase and settlement.
Political career[]
After the war, Harrison moved to Ohio, and he served in the House of Representatives from 1816 to 1819 and in the US Senate from 1824 to 1828. In 1828, he was appointed minister to Gran Colombia, and he returned a year later. In 1836, he was nominated as the Whig candidate for President, but he was defeated by incumbent Democratic Vice President Martin Van Buren. In 1840, the Whigs ran him again under the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" with John Tyler as his running mate, and he became the first Whig to win the presidency. Unfortunately, just 3 weeks after his inauguration, Harrison caught a cold and died a month later at the age of 68, either of pneumonia or more likely from cholera due to the water supply in Washington DC, leading to Tyler assuming the presidency; Harrison was the first president to die in office.