Benjamin Harrison: The Death of a President

The illness that took the life of former President Benjam Harrison came as a surprise to him and his family. Harrison had seemed "perfectly well" on the morning of March 6, 1901, took his usual walk, and told his wife Mary that he planned on going to the law library the next day to research a case he expected to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On the morning of March 7, the couple had breakfast and Harrison had gone up to his library to finish reading the morning newspaper. About a half-hour later, she heard her husband call out to her "in rather a startled voice." Mary tracked her husband down in his library, where she found him sitting before a fire. "I am having a dreadful chill," he told her. At once Mary gave him some quinine and whiskey and went to telephone a doctor (Doctor Henry Jameson), who arrived in just fifteen minutes.

Jameson immediately gave Harrison some nitroglycerin, and upon hearing what he had been given, the former president said, "the greatest heart stimulant!" As Mary left the room she heard him say, "I think, this is very serious." Alarmed, Mary wanted Harrison to retire to bed, but he said, "not yet." The doctor remained for a while, then gave Mary directions and said he would return in a short time, telling her that as soon as she could she should put Harrison to bed.

Harrison went to bed. "For a few hours he was easy, and I lay by his side smoothing his head, as he so loved to have it," Mary wrote, "and he talked to me in a loving way, and those two hours of precious memories I would not part with for anything in this world."

"I was most anxious," Mary wrote her daughter Elizabeth, "but never thought then that this was the beginning of a fatal illness which would robe me of my beloved one." Dr. Jameson returned in a couple of hours and was at the home several times that day.

On the afternoon of March 7 Harrison complained of a pain in his side, and the doctor told Mary it was "intercostal neuralgia. All afternoon and night I made and kept on flaxseed poultices, but it was only temporary relief."

A Doctor Dorsey came to sleep at the Harrison home in case he might be needed, but "this was only a precaution," said Mary, "as I felt, I wished a doctor at hand." Dorsey was not needed during the night, and with Harrison no worse the next morning, Dorsey left for his office.

Shortly after Dorsey left, however, the pain in Harrison's side grew worse, and Mary sent for Doctor Jameson, who came and gave the former president a shot and stayed until the pain was relieved.

The doctors seemed to fear that Harrison suffered from pneumonia from the beginning. Jameson asked Mary if she wanted to have a nurse on hand, and she declined. Hearing this, Harrison said, "if it does not wear you out--dear, I do not want to do that!" Mary responded that it would not tire her out, "I will take care of you," and so she did. However, on Friday, March 8, she realized she needed assistance and told the doctor to get a nurse; she arrived Friday night.

Although Harrison's pain in the side had disappeared, his left lung became affected, said Mary, and from that time she became "very, very anxious. . . . It seemed as if I could not stand it. I could not believe that God would take him from you and me who loved him so."

As news broke that Harrison had been struck ill, concerned citizens rallied to provide treatments for his "grippe" (influenza) and neuralgia as he lay bedridden at his Indianapolis home.

Private William Butler of New York wrote that instead of staying in bed, Harrison should "get a quart can of tomatoes and stew them in a frying pan" and eat as much as he could, salted to suit his taste, along with a slice of bread. Butler added: "I cook a pound of the prunes each day and eat a few every time I look at them after they are cooked."

Chris Metz of New York said he had suffered from neuralgia and nothing could give him relief except "hot water, drawing it up through the nose, Taking it up with both hands as hot as I could bear it, changing the water to keep it the same temperature."

Mrs. A. L. Laimbeer of New York wrote that her treatment involved flannel, "wrung out of the hot, or very hot, water, placed over the lungs, changed every fifteen minutes. Have the flannel double-large enough to cover the lungs, place a dry one over the wet, wring out quite dry. The moisture penetrates and softens. Then the cough throws off the mucus. Tear up an old soft blanket-is better than new flannel. Give one cup of milk porridge every hour."

Philo S. Armstrong of Milford, Ohio, advised taking 6 to 10 onions, chopping them very fine and mixing them with rye meal and enough vinegar to make a paste, simmering for 10 minutes. "Apply in cotton bag, to the chest as hot as patient can stand it, and apply one after another."

A Chicago man said Harrison's doctor should "blister his lungs with crouting oil-all over the lungs-lay a linen cloth-dry until it works-then remove dry and lay over a time-cloth oiled with sweet oil-leave until well. Also, he noted, "Keep breast covered with pad of cotton and also the back-if this Blister has 12 hours to work. Please trust to me it will save his life, it will loosen up his lungs, so he can rise the phlegm that clogs the Lungs. I saved the life of my son that was dying with Pneumonia-after the Dr. gave him up, by blistering him."

On Saturday, March 9, Mary believed another nurse was needed for her stricken husband, and one arrived on Sunday, March 10. "He talked with me and seemed sometimes a little better, but his lung did not clear up and the doctors were anxious," Mary wrote Elizabeth. Elizabeth came into Harrison's sickroom several times a day to visit her father. Mary recalled that Harrison would take Elizabeth's hand but he could not talk much. He did always smile at her and said several times, "I would give $100, if I could take a walk with you today!"

Despite these suggestions, doctors in attendance thought it best to administer oxygen to Harrison on Sunday, March 10, and from Sunday evening until a few moments before his death, Mary recalled, it was given to him almost constantly.

Harrison 's health worsened on Monday evening March 11 and through that night and Tuesday, March 12, his mind wandered, said Mary, and he talked of public affairs and about a book he had been reading. Harrison seemed troubled about some public affairs, and Mary said to him, "dear, don't worry over these things, they will all come out right. He would rouse himself and say 'I cannot get these things out of my mind, you do not know how many things are passing through my mind."

Early Tuesday morning Mary felt that her husband was much worse, as his breathing was more difficult and "his nervous condition serious. I broke down and felt there was not hope. Dr. Jameson felt the disease was progressing and we could do nothing to arrest it."

At about noon on March 12 Harrison took his wife's hand and kissed it, "and I asked him if he knew me, his wife, he answered yes, and from that time he spoke to no one and did not seem conscious." Harrison died at about 4:45 p.m. on March 13.

Jameson said that he had never "seen such courage in a dying man." His patient's constitution was remarkably strong "for a man of his age, and it joined with his tremendous will power to retain life in the body. It seemed at times that by sheer force of mentality the patient was able to shake off the delirium that was conquering him."

According to a report in the Indianapolis News, within a few minutes after Harrison's death was made known, the flags on many downtown buildings were "run down to halfmast" and by the morning after "this token of respect is general. Flags so displayed appeared first on the masts of the United States arsenal, the Federal building, the State House, the court house and were followed by like tributes of respects from many business houses."

On March 16 pallbearers took Harrison’s body from his home to lay in state in the rotunda at the Indiana Statehouse and was visited by thousands of his fellow citizens, including surviving members of his old Civil War regiment, the Seventieth Indiana.

“There were not many of these veterans—less than a hundred—but each one stood for a little group lying somewhere beneath the friendly sod,” reported the Indianapolis Journal. “Doubtless memories of other fallen comrades than the one upon whose face they looked mingled with those evoked by the sight of their leader lying pale and cold and majestic in death, for there was not a dry eye in the group and many a bent form shook with the depth of emotion only age can feel.”

With President William McKinley in attendance, funeral services were held the following day at First Presbyterian Church, with burial to be at Crown Hill Cemetery alongside the grave of his first wife, Caroline. Also gathered for the services were former members of Harrison’s cabinet, the ex-president’s family members, and numerous U.S. senators and state governors. In his proclamation announcing Harrison’s death, McKinley has praised his fellow Republican for his “extraordinary gifts as administrator and statesman. In public and in private life he set a shining example for his countrymen.”

Indianapolis newspaperman Hilton U. Brown served as one of the pallbearers, along with Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, and remembered that they all wore tall, silk hats for the occasion and Harrison’s body had been “encased in a metallic casket, “very heavy, as we pallbearers realized in going through the front door of the General’s house with our burden. But with the aid of the undertaker we succeeded in reaching the funeral car without incident.”

Brown also had the rare experience of hearing commentary from Riley, whose only votes he ever cast were said to be for Harrison, upon the prayer offered at the service by a visiting clergyman—humorous comments about the minister’s remarks that had his fellow pallbearers “shaken with dismay and suppressed laughter.”

Hoosiers everywhere mourned the loss of what then Indiana governor Winfield T. Durbin called the state’s “most distinguished citizen,” and all public businesses were closed for the day of Harrison’s funeral and all flags were placed at half-mast.

Among the many tributes published about the former president, one that stood out was offered by his biographer and best-selling author Lew Wallace. “He had every quality of greatness—a courage that was dauntless, foresight almost to prophecy, a mind clear, strong, and of breadth by nature, strengthened by exercise and constant dealing with subjects of National import, subjects of world-wide interest,” Wallace said of his longtime friend. “And of these qualities the people knew, and they drew them to him as listeners and believers, and in the faith they brought him there was no mixture of doubt or fear.”