William Henry Harrison

By Atlas MeyersThe 9th Presidency (1841)

Biography and Memoir

History

Length45m

About this book

Summary

William Henry Harrison’s tenure of thirty-one days began with the loudest campaign in American history and ended in the silence of the sickroom. It is a study of the physical cost of ambition and the fragility of the human biological machine when placed at the center of the state. Harrison was the first president to die in office, a contingency the Founders had discussed but left dangerously vague in the text of the Constitution. This narrative traces the collision between the "Log Cabin" myth and the reality of a sixty-eight-year-old man broken by the demands of the patronage system. It is the story of a man who spent a lifetime seeking the presidency, only to be consumed by it before he could sign a single piece of significant legislation. The volume explores how a month of administrative paralysis forced the United States to answer a question that had been hypothetical since 1789: Does the power reside in the man, or in the office?