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WILLIAM
HENRY HARRISON ACCEPTS A NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN 1836,
PROMISING
"TO ‘CARRY OUT’ THE GREAT PRINCIPLES WHICH WERE
ESTABLISHED...
BY THE FATHERS OF THE CONSTITUTION"
AND DECLARING THAT AS "A
CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION,
MY ATTACHMENT TO LIBERTY WAS IMBIBED IN MY EARLIEST YOUTH...
AND TO THE END OF [MY] LIFE I WILL FAITHFULLY ADHERE TO IT"
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON. Letter Signed to John
W. Taylor and others, Cincinnati, OH, 20 February 1836. 3 pages, 10"
x 7¾", plus integral address leaf.
An extraordinary letter in which William Henry Harrison accepts his
nomination for the Presidency by New York State’s Whig Party in
1836. In the process, he extols Presidents George Washington,
John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, and promises to restore the government
to its founding Constitutional principles. In what would prove to be
a highly ironic lamentation, he also decries at length the evils of
party spirit.
The son of a Virginia Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison
had fought in the Northwest Territory against the Indians in the 1790's
and then settled in the region, serving as Governor of the Indiana Territory
from 1800 to 1812. As commander of the Army of the Northwest during
the War of 1812, he recaptured Detroit from the British and won the
Battle of the Thames in which Tecumseh was killed, events which made
him a national hero. In subsequent years, Harrison was a Congressman
and a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, but
after 1830, he held no major office.
The
Whig Party, organized in 1834 by opponents of Andrew Jackson, first
turned to Harrison in 1836. In the Presidential race that year, the
Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren, but the Whigs fielded several
candidates with the aim of preventing anyone from winning a majority
in the Electoral College and so throwing the election into the House
of Representatives. Harrison was first nominated for President by a
Whig state convention in Pennsylvania in December 1835, and then secured
similar nominations in Ohio, Maryland, Vermont, and several other states
as well as in New York. He responds here to the committee that informed
him of his nomination by New York's Whigs.
"I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your communication
announcing that a Convention composed of Delegates from a large majority
of the Counties of the State of New York had by a unanimous vote nominated
me a candidate for the Presidency of the US, at the ensuing election,"
Harrison opens. His nomination by "my fellow citizens of several
of the States of the Union is one [of] which I had never the least expectation....
The high office in which they wish to place me was never for a moment
the object of my ambition. I never even in imagination supposed that
I should be deemed worthy, by any considerable portion of the people
of the United States, to fill the seat once adorned by the father of
his country; - by the high intellectual power and moral worth of his
immediate successor; - by the immortal author of the Declaration of
Independence, and his distinguished associate in developing the principles
of Government and producing the happy combination in our Constitutions
of all that can be required for liberty, with all that is necessary
for security and order.... A large and respectable portion of my countrymen
have however determined that I should be placed in the list of candidates;
I have therefore no choice remaining; I must acquiese in that decision."
Turning to the problem of faction and party, Harrison declares, "You
have been pleased to say Gentlemen, that...my elevation to the Chief
Magistracy will redound to the permanent welfare of our beloved Country,
by contributing to the permanancy of its free institutions. With a consciousness
of my imperfections, I must attribute this high encomium to the belief
that from the disposition I have ever manifested together with my long
abstraction from the contests of the political arena, that I may carry
into the chair of the Chief Magistracy a mind uninfluenced by the passions,
and the prejudices, which the heat and violence of the late contests
have unfortunately produced.
"If such was your intended reference Gentlemen, let me assure
you that you shall not be disappointed," Harrison insists.
"In the retirement in which I have been for some time placed, I
could not fail to remark that the spirit of party was daily increasing;
that it had reached a degree much beyond that which had been considered
wholesome and sanative for free Governments, and that from its rapid
progress and increasing violence, it was approximating to that point
where nothing would be considered right which had a tendency to arrest
its march; nothing wrong which could be appropriated to the use of those
for whose agrandisement it was created and sustained.
"In this lamentable State of affairs," Harrison continues,
"it would seem to require a combination of all those high qualities,
which are to be found in the possession of several of the distinguished
individuals from whom a choice might have been made, to restore the
Government in its practical operations to an accordance with the simplicity
& beauty of its theory, and to a large portion of our fellow citizens,
a participation in those rights to which all have an equal claim. But
as I have no right to dictate Gentlemen, I must submit myself to the
will of your constituents, and to those of the other States who may
unite with them, under the promise that should their efforts be successful,
they may depend upon my utmost exertions to fulfill their expectations,
and to ‘carry out’ the great principles which were established
and practised upon by the fathers of the Constitution, and which are
as much opposed to Jacobinism, and Agrarianism, as to Monarchy and Aristocracy.
"A child of the Revolution, my attachment to liberty was imbibed
in my earliest youth," Harrison concludes. "I have
never ceased to cherish it in my progress through life, and to the end
of that life I will faithfully adhere to it."
Harrison has himself penned the closing and signed the letter: "With
the most profound respect for your constituency & regard for yourselves
Gentlemen - I am yr fellow Citizen W H Harrison." Interestingly,
Harrison has also added to the inside address the names of several vice
presidents of the New York Whig Convention, one of whom was Millard
Fillmore.
The Whigs’ election strategy failed in 1836, and Martin Van Buren
won the race. But Harrison made a strong showing by coming in second
in the popular vote and securing seventy-three electoral votes, a large
number for a sectional candidate. In 1840, the Whigs nominated Harrison
as their sole Presidential candidate, and he soundly defeated Van Buren.
For all Harrison’s complaints here about the iniquity of parties,
the Whigs’ "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign in 1840
greatly solidified both the party system that had begun to emerge under
Andrew Jackson and the style of popular electioneering that accompanied
it.
There is a little discoloration from prior mounting along the top edge
of the last page which touches one line of the text, and there are some
very minor fold breaks. Otherwise, the letter is in very good condition,
quite clean and very darkly penned.
Good content political letters from Harrison are scarce, and such a
significant campaign letter from any President is rare. $17,500.00
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