The crowds that flocked to
Indianapolis in 1888 came to visit a man who, from an early age, seemed destined
for political greatness. Benjamin Harrison was the son of John Scott Harrison, a two-term congressman from Ohio;
grandson of William Henry Harrison, the first governor of the Indiana Territory
and ninth president of the United States; and the great-grandson of Benjamin
Harrison V, governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Benjamin Harrison captured the presidency that year, defeating incumbent Grover
Cleveland.
The future twenty-third
president was born on his grandfather’s farm at North Bend, Ohio, on August 20,
1833. After receiving his early education at Farmers’ College in Cincinnati,
Harrison graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1852. After
graduation, the young man studied law for two years with a Cincinnati firm and
married Caroline Lavinia Scott , an
Oxford Female Institute graduate and an accomplished artist and musician. In
1854 the twenty-one-year-old Harrison and his wife moved to the growing city of
Indianapolis, and Harrison established his own law practice.
Given Hoosiers’ love of
politics, and the famous Harrison name, the young lawyer became drawn—somewhat
reluctantly—into the political scene. In 1856 while busy working at his law
office, Harrison was interrupted by some Republican friends who dragged him
from his office to speak before a political gathering. Introduced to the crowd
as the grandson of “Old Tippecanoe,” Harrison firmly replied: “I want it
understood that I am the grandson of nobody. I believe that every man should stand
on his own merits.”
The Harrison family’s strong
political background, however, did aid young Harrison as he undertook a
political career, becoming Indianapolis city attorney in 1857 and being elected
to the post of Indiana Supreme Court reporter three years later. The Civil War
halted Harrison’s political career. Asked by Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton
to recruit men for the Seventieth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, Harrison served
as a colonel with that outfit and offered sterling service to the Union cause
in the battles of Peach Tree Creek and Resaca, Georgia. During the war Harrison
received the nickname “Little Ben” from his troops (he stood five feet, six
inches tall).
In a one-month period during
the Union’s fight to take Atlanta, Harrison, now in charge of a brigade of
regiments that included the Seventieth, had participated in more battles than
his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had fought during his lifetime. At New
Hope Church, Georgia, Harrison had his troops fix bayonets to attack the enemy
position “Men, the enemy’s works are just ahead of us, but we will go right
over them. Forward! Double-quick! March!” he ordered.
After a bloody action at
Golgotha Church near Kennesaw Mountain on June 15—fighting where two or three
of his men had their heads torn off down to their shoulders—Harrison pitched in
to help with the wounded, as the brigade’s surgeons had scattered in the
fighting. “Poor fellows!” Harrison said of the casualties who had taken shelter
in a frame house. “I was but an awkward surgeon of course, but I hope I gave
them some relief,” he wrote Caroline. The colonel treated some “ghastly wounds,”
including pulling from a soldier’s arm a “splinter five or six inches long and
as thick as my three fingers.” He also ordered tents to be torn up so the
strips of cloth could be used to bandage the wounded.
Mustered out of the Grand
Army of the Republic with a brevet brigadier general’s commission, Harrison
returned to Indianapolis to fill out his term as Indiana Supreme Court reporter
before returning to his private law practice. Paradoxically for Harrison, his
biographer Harry J. Sievers noted, the financial panic that gripped the country
in the early 1870s aided his firm as “defaults, mortgage foreclosures, and
bankruptcy cases flooded the office.”
Financially secure, Harrison
turned his attention to building a new home for his family, which included at
that time two teenage children, Russell and Mary. In 1867 Harrison had
purchased at auction a double lot on North Delaware Street, and it was here
that the family’s new red brick home was built during the fall and winter of
1874 and 1875 at a cost of approximately $20,000. Along with a library for
Harrison’s substantial book collection, the home possessed a ballroom and
became a popular location for society events, including Thursday afternoon teas
hosted by Caroline Scott Harrison,
first president-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 1876 Harrison returned to
the political arena, running as the GOP candidate for Indiana governor. He lost
to Democrat James “Blue Jeans” Williams; his electoral failure, however, did
not hurt his strong standing with Hoosier Republicans. In 1881 the Indiana
legislature, controlled by the GOP, elected Harrison to serve a six-year term
in the U.S. Senate. Harrison arrived on the national scene at an
opportune time where Indiana played a prominent role on the national political
scene following the Civil War. To attract Hoosier voters, political parties
often selected “favorite sons” from Indiana to bolster the parties’ chances in
November.
In 1888 the Republican Party
nominated Harrison as its presidential candidate. Like most presidential
contenders of that time, Harrison refused to barnstorm around the country for
votes, preferring instead to remain at home. “I have a great risk of meeting a
fool at home,” he told journalist Whitelaw Reid, “but the candidate who travels
cannot escape him.”
While
Cleveland remained in the White House, content with his duties as president and
believing in the dictum “the office sought the man,” Harrison embarked on a
busy speaking schedule that saw him give more than eighty extemporaneous talks
to more than 300,000 visitors to Indianapolis from July 7 to October 25.
Usually, there were anywhere from one to three delegations per day, but at one
point Harrison met seven on one day. To meet the demand posed by those who
clamored to see the candidate at his Indianapolis home, a “committee of
arrangements” was formed to manage the deluge of letters sent to Harrison and
to schedule and control visitors.
The
crowds soon overwhelmed the space at the Delaware Street house, and instead
were moved about a mile away to University Park, the former drilling ground for
Union soldiers. Marching bands were on hand at Union Station to welcome
delegations as they arrived and accompanied them as they walked to the park.
All the remarks made by outside groups were closely scrutinized to ensure that
no controversial statements were uttered, and Harrison listened to them and
often adjusted his speech to reflect what had been covered. Delegations included
such groups as commercial travelers, Union war veterans, railroad workers,
African American supporters, young girls who had formed a Harrison Club, and
old followers of William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign.
Although
at the beginning of the campaign Harrison had called for the two parties to
“encamp upon the high plains of principle and not in the low swamps of personal
defamation or detraction,” his hopes were dashed by the 1888 election’s two
great controversies—one that damaged Cleveland’s chances, and one that hurt
Harrison.
The first broadside came in October with what became known as the MurchisonLetter. A California Republican had sent a letter, signed as Charles F. Murchison,
to Sir Lionel Sackville-West, the British minister (ambassador) to the United
States, asking his advice on how to vote. Not suspecting a trap, Sackville-West
answered the letter with friendly words and support for the Cleveland
administration as the best choice for British interests despite recent tensions
over a dispute regarding fishing rights in Canada. Republican officials
released Sackville-West’s letter to the press. The seemingly friendly relations
between the hated British and the Cleveland administration infuriated
Irish-American voters in New York, and Cleveland had to call for Sackville-West
to be dismissed.
Shortly
after the Murchison Letter had caused such a furor, the Democrats struck
political gold with another letter, this one involving William W. Dudley, the
Republican National Committee treasurer, and featured the class of voter known
as a “floater,” a person with no fixed party allegiance who sold his ballot to
the highest bidder, be it Republican or Democrat. Party workers could buy these
votes for as little as two dollars or as high as twenty dollars in close
elections, and since political parties, not the state, printed and furnished
ballots to voters, could ensure that once a “floater” was bought, he stayed
bought. “This infamous practice,” complained the Shelbyville Republican, “kept up year after year by both parties,
has brought about a state of affairs that cannot be contemplated without a shudder.”
The newspaper went on to lament that a third of the state’s voting population
“can be directly influenced by the use of money on the day of election.”
In a letter sent to an Indiana Republican
county chairman, Dudley warned that “only boodle and fraudulent votes and false
counting of returns can beat us in the State [Indiana].” To counter this
threat, he advised Republican workers to find out what Democrats at the polls
were responsible for bribing voters and steer committed Democratic supporters
to them, thereby exhausting the opposition’s cash stockpile. The most damaging
part of the letter, however, appeared in a sentence where Dudley advised:
“Divide the voters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man, with necessary
funds, in charge of these five, and make them responsible that none get away.”
The
political dynamite in Dudley’s letter found its way to the opposition thanks to
a Democratic mail clerk on the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad who was suspicious
about the large amount of mail being passed from Republican headquarters to
Indiana Republicans. He opened one of the letters, recognized its value to his
party, and passed the damaging contents to the Indiana Democratic State Central
Committee. The Sentinel printed the
letter on October 31, 1888, under a banner headline reading: “The Plot to Buy
Indiana.”
Although an indignant Dudley and other top Republican officials declared
that the letter was a forgery, and denounced the person responsible for
interfering with the mail, its contents received nationwide attention, with
newspapers supporting the Democratic cause, including the Sentinel, happy to lambast Harrison for his ties to such chicanery,
while Republican papers defended their candidate’s character. A political
veteran such as Michener said that the instructions Dudley outlined were
standard practice by both parties in Indiana, and found nothing in the letter
“unusual, illegal or immoral.”
What effect both scandals had on the
campaign’s outcome is still debated by historians, with Charles Calhoun, in his
book on the 1888 election, arguing that underhanded practices by both parties
in New York and Indiana “may well have canceled each other out," while racist voting restrictions in the South blocked most African Americans from casting ballots for Republican candidates.
Whatever the
impact nationally, in Indiana the Dudley letter had failed to dampen the enthusiasm
of Hoosier Republicans for their favorite son. The day before the election,
Harrison, on his way to his downtown law office, was greeted with applause and
cheering. On Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, Harrison walked from his home,
accompanied by his son, Russell, to Coburn’s Livery Stable at Seventh Street
between Delaware and Alabama Streets, the polling place for the third precinct
of the second war. To a cry from a supporter of “There comes the next
President,” Harrison cast the ballot he had carried with him from his home.
After
voting, Harrison returned home to learn his fate as a candidate, with regular
reports coming to him in his library through a special telegraph wire
connecting him with Republican headquarters in New York. After the polls
closed, downtown streets in Indianapolis were clogged with people eager to hear
the results, with many gathering near newspaper offices to receive reports. “As
the morning drew nearer,” noted an article in the Indianapolis Journal, “the wild crowd, growing hilarious with
excitement, would receive a return with cheers, and the next moment follow it
up with a refrain of ‘Bye, Grover, bye; O, good-bye, old Grover, good-bye.’
Another return, and ‘What’s the matter with Harrison? He’s all right.”
Several
people gathered around a large, oval writing table in Harrison’s library to read
over the returns. When vote totals arrived over the wire from New York, they
were read aloud, sometimes by Harrison and sometimes by his law partners, while
Russell sorted bulletins by state. The Journal
described the scene as “a quiet gathering of a few neighbors,” adding that
Harrison seemed “cool and self-possessed,” sometimes retreating to the parlor
to talk with his wife, Caroline, and her guests. According to one account, when
returns from the state of New York seemed discouraging, Harrison took the news
well, telling his friends to cheer up. “This is no life and death affair. I am
very happy here in Indianapolis and will continue to be if I’m not elected.
Home is a pretty good place.”
Harrison
seemed much more concerned about whether he won Indiana, closely perusing
returns from each of the state’s ninety-two counties. When his son-in-law, at
about 11:00 p.m., announced that it looked as if Indiana had been won, Harrison
responded: “That’s enough for me tonight then. My own State is for me. I’m going
to bed.”
At the White House, Cleveland also monitored the election results. At
midnight in Washington, D.C., Secretary of the Navy William Collins Whitney,
walked out of the telegraph room and down a corridor to announce: “Well, it’s
all up.” Asked the next morning how he could go to sleep still not knowing
whether he had won the presidency, Harrison noted that his staying up would not
have changed the results if he had lost, and if he won he knew he “had a hard
day ahead of me. So I thought a night’s rest was best in any event.”
The
Hoosier candidate won the presidency, securing the Electoral College with 233
votes to 168 for Cleveland. Harrison had been able to grab the crucial states
of New York and Indiana, winning both by the barest of margins (by 2,376 votes
in the Hoosier State and 14,373 votes in New York; in both states turnout
exceeded 90 percent); both of these were states that Cleveland had captured in
the 1884 election. In the popular vote, Cleveland bested Harrison, with
5,534,488 votes to 5,443,892 for his opponent, becoming the third of five
presidential candidates to win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral
College (the other losing candidates were Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden
in 1876, Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016).
