biography
| name: |
Harrison, William Henry
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1773–1841)
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| biography:
| US statesman and ninth president (1841), born in Charles City Co, Virginia, USA. Wellborn and well-educated, he opted for the army and in the 1790s fought Indians in the Northwest Territory under Anthony Wayne. As governor of the new Indian Territory (1800–12), he extracted millions of acres from the Indians and fought Tecumseh's rebels in the Battle of Tippecanoe (Nov 1811), and although the battle was inconclusive, it made Harrison a hero. Commanding regular army forces in the NW during the War of 1812, he re-occupied Detroit in 1813 and soundly defeated the British and Indians at the Thames R in Ontario, Canada (Oct 1813). He went on to serve Ohio in the US House of Representatives (1817–19) and in the US Senate (1825–8). After an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1836, he won (as a Whig) in 1840 with Tyler as vice-president, on a campaign of ballyhoo and mudslinging, with its slogan, ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too’. An exhausted Harrison caught a cold at the inauguration and he died of pneumonia a month later. |
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