William Henry Harrison(1773–1841)

William Henry Harrison was born on 9 February 1773 at Berkeley plantation in Charles City County, Virginia, the youngest son of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, from a family of the Harrison name long established among the Virginia gentry. He left the study of medicine to take a commission in the army of the young United States and went west to the Ohio country, serving as an officer in the campaigns that secured the frontier and learning the wilderness war of the north-west. He rose to be governor of the vast Indiana Territory, charged with the settlement and defence of a region the size of several modern states.

His name was made on the frontier. As settlers pressed west, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother, known as the Prophet, built a powerful confederacy of native nations to resist further loss of their lands. In the autumn of 1811, while Tecumseh was away seeking allies in the south, Harrison marched on the confederacy's gathering-place at Prophetstown. Attacked before dawn on 7 November 1811 near the Tippecanoe River, his force held its ground through a hard fight, beat off the assault, and then destroyed the town, breaking the confederacy's base and dealing its prestige a blow from which it never fully recovered.

When war with Britain came the following year, Harrison was given command in the north-west. After the recapture of Detroit he pursued the retreating British and their native allies into Upper Canada, and on 5 October 1813 brought them to battle on the Thames River. His charge broke the British line and the allied force with it; Tecumseh was killed in the fighting, the confederacy he had built dissolved, and the security of the whole American north-west was settled for a generation. It was the decisive land victory of the war in that theatre.

He left the army and entered politics, serving in Congress and as a diplomat, and in 1840, the old hero of Tippecanoe, he was carried to the presidency of the United States in one of the most famous campaigns in the country's history. He was the ninth President, and his family gave the office a second holder when his grandson Benjamin Harrison was elected nearly fifty years later.

His presidency was the briefest in American history: he caught a chill that turned to pneumonia and died on 4 April 1841, just one month after taking office. The Harrison name carries his memory not for that short presidency but for the soldiering that came before it, the general who broke Tecumseh's confederacy at Tippecanoe and won the Battle of the Thames, and so made the American north-west safe for the settlement that followed.