William Henry Harrison on American Time

I'm writing this post in a house built in 1791, or, as I keep thinking of it, during Washington's first term. It's a stone farm house in Kentucky, which, at the time, was perhaps the wildest bit of wilderness in America--some serious Daniel Boone-Cumberland Gap-type stuff going on here.

It's easy in America to be overwhelmed by time. We are still so young, relatively, even if we have a steady presence in the world that other, long-lived countries (such as Poland, founded around 1000 but which did not exist as a political entity at two different periods last century) do not. We are young, we lack--as they say--institutional memory. We create ideas about ourselves as a country that do not reflect the facts: the founders were all Christian, the slaves were better off under slavery, the whites destroyed the Indians without prejudice or hesitation.

William Henry Harrison: he does his work in the wilderness of Indiana Territory, defeating Tecumsah at Tippicanoe and cementing his legend, but only as a vaguely remembered campaign slogan, confused with "54-40 Or Fight!" in a junior high school class. But that historical fact--William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumsah at Tippicanoe--becomes the basis for the first true presidential campaign. The well-to-do Harrison, son of a Virginian who signed the Declaration of Independence and who was born in a plantation, is presented as a cider-drinking, log-cabin-residing plain-spoken Everyman for the Whig voters. And it works. He's elected as the ninth president, defeating the incumbent Van Buren.

He dies a month into his presidency, which is fitting, because it means he is only an idea, which is maybe all he ever was, all any president can ever be to his constituents, his country.