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A Child of the Revolution: William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773-1798
Indian wars in early Ohio as seen through the eyes of a future president The American Revolution gave birth to a nation, forever changed the course of political thought, and shattered and transformed the lives of the citizens of the new republic. An iconic figure of the Old Northwest, governor, Indian fighter, general in the War of 1812, and ultimately president, William Henry Harrison was one such citizen. The son of a rich Virginia planter, Harrison saw his family mansion burned and his relatives scattered. In the war’s aftermath, he rejected his inherited beliefs about slavery, religion, and authority, and made an idealistic commitment to serve the United States. This led him to the United States Army, which at the time was a sorry collection of drunks and derelicts who were about to be reorganized in the face of a serious conflict with the Indian nations of the Ohio valley. Author Hendrik Booraem follows Harrison as Gen. Anthony Wayne attempted to rebuild the army into a fighting force, first in Pittsburgh, then in Cincinnati and the forests of the Northwest. A voracious reader of history and the classics, Harrison became fascinated with the archaeology and ethnology of the region, even as his military service led to a dramatic showdown with the British army, which had secretly been aiding the Indians. By age 21, Harrison had achieved almost everything he had set his heart on―adventure, recognition, intellectual stimulation, and even a small measure of power. He was the youngest man to put his name to the Treaty of Greenville, which ended Indian control over Ohio lands and opened the way for development and statehood. He even won a Anna Symmes, the Eastern-educated daughter of pioneer landowner John Cleves Symmes. When Congress voted to downsize the army, 25-year-old Harrison, now a family man, fumbled for a second career. Drawing on a variety of primary documents, Booraem re-creates military life as Lieutenant Harrison experienced it―a life of duels, discipline, rivalries, hardships, baffling encounters with the natives and social relations between officers and men, military and civilians, and men and women.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 10, 2021
If someone had assigned, or challenged, Booraem to write a book about William Henry Harrison’s youth, this would have been an admirable effort. But presuming Booraem chose to write this book and wasn’t forced to, I couldn’t help but wonder - why?
Booraem wrote several books about different presidents’ formative years, and the experiences and environments that shaped their lives and characters. But while a president like, say, John Quincy Adams had an incredibly eventful and well-documented youth, and the environment in which a president like Abraham Lincoln was raised is important in understanding him as an adult, neither can really be said for William Henry Harrison.
So Booraem tries to make the best with what he has to work with. The end result just doesn’t give you much insight into who Harrison was, or why any of what’s described in the book matters.
Booraem acknowledges this up front, saying that there’s simply not enough known about Harrison’s early years, so his book, subtitled “William Henry Harrison and His World,” will by necessity be more about “his world” than about Harrison himself. And the story will end well before the "laughable shortness of his thirty-two-day presidential term" (laughable? Who’s laughing?)
Booraem is a good writer, he sets a good scene, and talks about a lot of things that Harrison "may" have seen and done. In most cases, he makes clear that he’s not necessarily suggesting that Harrison “did” see and do these things, but just mentions them as a way to describe the environment as it existed in Harrison’s time. This works well in describing post-Revolutionary America, the frontier and military life as Harrison may have experienced it.
But as the book goes on, this technique starts to become more distracting, especially when Booraem begins displaying a strange fascination with Harrison’s sex life. Possibly, he surmises, a young Harrison and his friends ended their evenings "adjourning to one of the log-cabin whorehouses in the village; Harrison, after all, was twenty, with a healthy sex drive," Booarem writes. Then he immediately goes on to say that it was "equally likely" that Harrison spent his evenings just hanging around talking with his friends. Okay then.
Later, Booarem cites a book, which quoted former Senator William L. Marcy, who wrote to a friend, about what he had heard others say, about what they had heard Harrison say (so what is that, fifth-hand?) Marcy, no friend of Harrison, complained that the newly-elected president (at the time) had shared “obscene stories” and displayed “the spirit of lechery.” “He has according to his own account devoted the seventy years he has lived to Venus and Mars," Marcy wrote. None of this actual quote is in Booraem’s book - he just cites Marcy in an end note and somehow interprets his letter as evidence of "WHH's sexual prowess in youth." "Casual sex was readily available for officers at frontier posts,” he writes, “and Harrison, by his own later recollection, was a champion at it” - which is quite an interpretative stretch.
So there’s a strange, forced effort at intimacy and familiarity throughout the book, as Booraem tries to help us relate to Harrison as a person, by speculating and stretching the truth. He also insists on referring to Harrison as “Billy” throughout the book, which he surmises all his friends and family called him, and he refers to his wife Anna as “Nancy,” even though only her father called her that. Reading about Billy and Nancy and the things they may have seen and done, made me forget at times that this book is supposed to be about William Henry and Anna and the things they actually did see and do.
Overall, the book does a decent enough job following Harrison from his Virginia youth, to his abandoned study of medicine, to his embrace of a military career, his first experiences in frontier combat, and ends with him beginning to dabble in public service. But the book doesn’t ultimately reveal much about Harrison’s character or how any of this shaped him. I think the most interesting thing about Harrison is that he was a descendant of Virginia aristocracy at a time when Virginia was in decline, so he sought his fortunes on the frontier instead. In doing so, he both turned away from Virginia forever, while also bringing his Virginia values to the frontier, such as his acceptance of slavery and desire to expand it, and his preoccupation with status and success. Booraem doesn’t really delve into this in any detail.
So, in the end, after reading this book, I may never look at certain frontier log cabins in quite the same way again. But to get a full understanding of Harrison and his times, one would do best to look elsewhere.
Booraem wrote several books about different presidents’ formative years, and the experiences and environments that shaped their lives and characters. But while a president like, say, John Quincy Adams had an incredibly eventful and well-documented youth, and the environment in which a president like Abraham Lincoln was raised is important in understanding him as an adult, neither can really be said for William Henry Harrison.
So Booraem tries to make the best with what he has to work with. The end result just doesn’t give you much insight into who Harrison was, or why any of what’s described in the book matters.
Booraem acknowledges this up front, saying that there’s simply not enough known about Harrison’s early years, so his book, subtitled “William Henry Harrison and His World,” will by necessity be more about “his world” than about Harrison himself. And the story will end well before the "laughable shortness of his thirty-two-day presidential term" (laughable? Who’s laughing?)
Booraem is a good writer, he sets a good scene, and talks about a lot of things that Harrison "may" have seen and done. In most cases, he makes clear that he’s not necessarily suggesting that Harrison “did” see and do these things, but just mentions them as a way to describe the environment as it existed in Harrison’s time. This works well in describing post-Revolutionary America, the frontier and military life as Harrison may have experienced it.
But as the book goes on, this technique starts to become more distracting, especially when Booraem begins displaying a strange fascination with Harrison’s sex life. Possibly, he surmises, a young Harrison and his friends ended their evenings "adjourning to one of the log-cabin whorehouses in the village; Harrison, after all, was twenty, with a healthy sex drive," Booarem writes. Then he immediately goes on to say that it was "equally likely" that Harrison spent his evenings just hanging around talking with his friends. Okay then.
Later, Booarem cites a book, which quoted former Senator William L. Marcy, who wrote to a friend, about what he had heard others say, about what they had heard Harrison say (so what is that, fifth-hand?) Marcy, no friend of Harrison, complained that the newly-elected president (at the time) had shared “obscene stories” and displayed “the spirit of lechery.” “He has according to his own account devoted the seventy years he has lived to Venus and Mars," Marcy wrote. None of this actual quote is in Booraem’s book - he just cites Marcy in an end note and somehow interprets his letter as evidence of "WHH's sexual prowess in youth." "Casual sex was readily available for officers at frontier posts,” he writes, “and Harrison, by his own later recollection, was a champion at it” - which is quite an interpretative stretch.
So there’s a strange, forced effort at intimacy and familiarity throughout the book, as Booraem tries to help us relate to Harrison as a person, by speculating and stretching the truth. He also insists on referring to Harrison as “Billy” throughout the book, which he surmises all his friends and family called him, and he refers to his wife Anna as “Nancy,” even though only her father called her that. Reading about Billy and Nancy and the things they may have seen and done, made me forget at times that this book is supposed to be about William Henry and Anna and the things they actually did see and do.
Overall, the book does a decent enough job following Harrison from his Virginia youth, to his abandoned study of medicine, to his embrace of a military career, his first experiences in frontier combat, and ends with him beginning to dabble in public service. But the book doesn’t ultimately reveal much about Harrison’s character or how any of this shaped him. I think the most interesting thing about Harrison is that he was a descendant of Virginia aristocracy at a time when Virginia was in decline, so he sought his fortunes on the frontier instead. In doing so, he both turned away from Virginia forever, while also bringing his Virginia values to the frontier, such as his acceptance of slavery and desire to expand it, and his preoccupation with status and success. Booraem doesn’t really delve into this in any detail.
So, in the end, after reading this book, I may never look at certain frontier log cabins in quite the same way again. But to get a full understanding of Harrison and his times, one would do best to look elsewhere.
April 3, 2017
The book's subtitle makes it clear that this is not a full biography of William Henry Harrison. It just covers the first 25 of his 68 years. Most books about Harrison cover his better documented life after 1798 such as his second military career and/or his later political life through his Trivial Pursuit worthy death in 1841, so this is a nice addition. The author notes that there is scant primary source material on Harrison's early days. Therefore, much of what is in the book is somewhat speculative at times yet Booraem provides ample evidence to support those assumptions.
What little records there are of Harrison's life before 1798 are obtained form a variety of sources and then compared with Harrison's own accounts written decades later as he was ramping up for a Presidential run. Much like today, folks running for political office like to fluff up the old résumé a bit and cast a better light on some of their more youthful indiscretions. Harrison was no different so we must take his words from the 1830s with some caution as most autobiographical accounts should. For those early gaps, Booraem takes Harrison's words, known events, customs and other evidence of the period and constructs educated theories of some of Harrison's early life and whereabouts. He does a fine job at it.
Any student of William Henry Harrison's life or the early American Republic should consider this required reading to better understand how the son of a well off slave owning Anglican Virginian planter who signed the Declaration of Independence can be transformed into an abolitionist, a military man, and a politician.
What little records there are of Harrison's life before 1798 are obtained form a variety of sources and then compared with Harrison's own accounts written decades later as he was ramping up for a Presidential run. Much like today, folks running for political office like to fluff up the old résumé a bit and cast a better light on some of their more youthful indiscretions. Harrison was no different so we must take his words from the 1830s with some caution as most autobiographical accounts should. For those early gaps, Booraem takes Harrison's words, known events, customs and other evidence of the period and constructs educated theories of some of Harrison's early life and whereabouts. He does a fine job at it.
Any student of William Henry Harrison's life or the early American Republic should consider this required reading to better understand how the son of a well off slave owning Anglican Virginian planter who signed the Declaration of Independence can be transformed into an abolitionist, a military man, and a politician.
November 1, 2013
This book focuses on William Henry Harrison's early life. It is well written and interesting and left me wishing the author went all the way to the end of his life.
September 10, 2019
Ashame there just isnt much source material on The life of WHH. Interesting book detailing more the men around WHH and his surroundings than directly describing the man himself.
December 5, 2016
A very different biography than what I've read in my journey to read one for each president. This book points out its lack of sufficient historical records, but it does a great job of connecting the dots to give us some insight into Harrison's early life. It is a little heavy on military records in the last half and can drag a bit, but overall, a recommended read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews