William Henry Harrison presidential campaign, 1840

William Henry Harrison for President
1840 Whig Campaign Headquarters
Campaign	US presidential election, 1840
Candidate	William Henry Harrison
Affiliation	Whig Party
Status	Won general election
Headquarters	Northern Military Hall
Key people	John Tyler (running mate)

In 1840, William Henry Harrison ran for President of the United States.

Background

Whig Party nomination

Whig candidates

• 

  Former Senator William Henry Harrison from Ohio

• 

  Senator Henry Clay from Kentucky

• 

  Major General Winfield Scott from New Jersey

For the first time in their history, the Whigs held a national convention to determine their presidential candidate. It opened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on December 4, 1839, almost a full year before the general election. The three leading candidates were William Henry Harrison, a war hero and the most successful of Van Buren's opponents in the 1836 election, who had been campaigning for the Whig nomination ever since; General Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 1812 who had been active in skirmishes with the British in 1837 and 1838; and Henry Clay, the Whigs' congressional leader and former Speaker of the House.

Clay led on the first ballot, but circumstances conspired to deny him the nomination. First of all, the convention came on the heels of a string of Whig electoral losses. Harrison managed to distance himself from the losses, but Clay, as the party's philosophical leader, could not. Had the convention been held in the spring, when the economic downturn led to a string of Whig victories, Clay would have had much greater support. Secondly, the convention rules had been drawn up so that whoever won the majority of delegates from a given state would win all the votes from that state. This worked against Clay, who had solid majority support in almost all of the Southern delegations (with little potential for opponents to capitalize on a proportional distribution of delegates), and a large minority support in Northern delegations (with the potential for substantial proportional distributions in his favor eliminated). In addition, several Southern states whose Whig chapters supported Clay abstained from sending delegates to the convention. As a result, the nomination went to Harrison.

The state-by-state roll call was printed in the newspaper the Farmer's Cabinet on December 13, 1839:

Convention vote

Presidential vote	1	2	3	4	5	Vice presidential vote	1
William H. Harrison	94	94	91	91	148	John Tyler	231
Henry Clay	103	103	95	95	90	Abstaining	23
Winfield Scott	57	57	68	68	16

Because Harrison (born in Virginia) was considered a Northerner (as a resident of Ohio), the Whigs needed to balance the ticket with a Southerner. They also sought a Clay supporter to help unite the party. After being turned down by several Southern Clay supporters, the convention finally found a Southern nominee who had faithfully supported Clay throughout the convention and who would agree to run: former Senator John Tyler of Virginia, who had previously been the running-mate of Hugh Lawson White and Willie Person Mangum during the four-way Whig campaign at the previous election.

Campaign

Caricature on the aftermath of the panic of 1837.

In the wake of the Panic of 1837, Van Buren was widely unpopular, and Harrison, following Andrew Jackson's strategy, ran as a war hero and man of the people while presenting Van Buren as a wealthy snob living in luxury at the public expense. Although Harrison was comfortably wealthy and well educated, his "log cabin" image caught fire, sweeping all sections of the country.

Harrison avoided campaigning on the issues, with his Whig Party attracting a broad coalition with few common ideals. The Whig strategy overall was to win the election by avoiding discussion of difficult national issues such as slavery or the national bank and concentrate instead on exploiting dissatisfaction over the failed policies of the Van Buren administration with colorful campaigning techniques.

Log cabin campaign of William Henry Harrison

Harrison was the first president to campaign actively for office. He did so with the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". Tippecanoe referred to Harrison's military victory over a group of Shawnee Indians at a river in Indiana called Tippecanoe in 1811. For their part, Democrats laughed at Harrison for being too old for the presidency, and referred to him as "Granny", hinting that he was senile. Said one Democratic newspaper: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and ... a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year ... and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin."

Whigs took advantage of this quip and declared that Harrison was "the log cabin and hard cider candidate", a man of the common people from the rough-and-tumble West. They depicted Harrison's opponent, President Martin Van Buren, as a wealthy snob who was out of touch with the people. In fact, it was Harrison who came from a family of wealthy planters, while Van Buren's father was a tavernkeeper. Harrison however moved to the frontier and for years lived in a log cabin, while Van Buren had been a well-paid government official.

Nonetheless, the election was held during the worst economic depression in the nation's history, and voters blamed Van Buren, seeing him as unsympathetic to struggling citizens. Harrison campaigned vigorously and won.

Results

Harrison won the support of western settlers and eastern bankers alike. The extent of Van Buren's unpopularity was evident in Harrison's victories in New York (the president's home state) and in Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson himself came out of retirement to stump for his former vice-president.

Few Americans were surprised when Van Buren lost by an electoral vote of 234 to 60. But many were amazed by the close popular vote. Of 2,400,000 votes cast, Van Buren lost by only 146,000. Given the circumstances, it is surprising that the Democrats did as well as they did.

Of the 1,179 counties/independent cities making returns, Harrison won in 699 (59.29%) while Van Buren carried 477 (40.46%). Three counties (0.25%) in the South split evenly between Harrison and Van Buren.

Harrison's victory won him precious little time as chief executive of the United States. After giving the longest inauguration speech in U.S. history (about 1 hour, 45 minutes, in freezing cold weather), Harrison served only one month as president before dying of pneumonia on April 4, 1841.

Popular and electoral vote

Presidential candidate	Party	Home state	Popular vote(a)		Electoral vote	Running mate
			Count	Pct		Vice-presidential candidate	Home state	Elect. vote
William Henry Harrison	Whig	Ohio	1,275,390	52.9%	234	John Tyler	Virginia	234
Martin Van Buren	Democratic	New York	1,128,854	46.8%	60	Richard Mentor Johnson	Kentucky	48
						Littleton W. Tazewell	Virginia	11
						James Knox Polk	Tennessee	1
James G. Birney	Liberty	New York	6,797	0.3%	0	Thomas Earle	Pennsylvania	0
Other			767	0.0%	—	Other		—
Total			2,411,808	100%	294			294
Needed to win					148			148

Source (Popular Vote): Source (Electoral Vote):

^(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

Popular vote
Harrison			52.88%
Van Buren			46.81%
Others			0.31%

Electoral vote
Harrison			79.59%
Van Buren			20.41%