|| Chapter 2 ||
Being a forgotten president would be an improvement for William Henry Harrison. In 1970, a group of eminent American historians rated every president, except for William Henry Harrison. They did not rank Harrison since his presidency had been too short and uneventful to justify a ranking—he died one month and a day after his inauguration. On March 4, 1841, Harrison, who had just turned sixty-eight, tried to demonstrate his physical stamina by delivering the longest inaugural address in history. Unfortunately, he wore no hat or coat as he spoke in icy winds. He caught a severe cold, which lapsed into pneumonia and pleurisy, to which he succumbed. He was thus weak and ill throughout his monthlong presidency.
Yet Harrison’s short presidency is distinctive for many reasons. His father signed the Declaration of Independence, and he was the last president to be born a British subject.1 At sixty-eight, he was the oldest man to be elected president until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. Harrison was the first Whig— the forerunner of the modern Republican Party—to be elected president and the first president to die in office. He holds the record for the shortest presidency in history. Moreover, the 1840 presidential campaign is the first to be waged between two well-organized national parties and the first in which women participated significantly.2 Harrison was, like Washington and Jackson before him, elected president based on image—specifically, as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, which had been fought against a confederacy of Native Americans, and as an elder statesman. Harrison was the first president to promise to serve only for a single term, and he was the first of eight Ohioans elected president.3 From 1828 to 1860, Harrison was the only president, besides Lincoln, who was not from the South or disposed to be reflexively sympathetic to slavery. Harrison was the third general elected president (after Washington and Jackson) and the first to pledge to reform the spoils system. He is the first of four presidents who made no Supreme Court appointments4and the only president whose grandson became president.5
While none of these distinctions is based on anything Harrison did as president, a closer look at Harrison’s actions, particularly in the five months between his election in November 1840 and his death on April 4, 1841, indicates his growing resistance to the Whig Party’s conception of the president as a weak figurehead who should defer to the will of Congress on domestic policymaking. He began to show that Whigs’ conception of the presidency was unworkable and that he was willing to sacrifice short-term political advantages to protect presidential prerogatives.
I .
To understand Harrison’s first blow against the Whig conception of presidency, we need to appreciate what Americans expected from him. His successful run for the presidency in 1840 was actually his second try. On both attempts, he ran as the newly formed Whig party’s nominee against Van Buren.
The Whig Party was primarily committed to two things: The first was opposition to Jackson’s and Van Buren’s usurpations of legislative authority. The second was commitment to legislative supremacy, particularly in domestic policymaking. The Whigs envisioned the president as a weak minister whose primary responsibilities were following Congress’s lead and implementing laws it enacted. Harrison was expressing Whig principles when he sharply distinguished himself from Jackson and Van Buren by emphasizing in his inaugural address the limits of executive power and the broad scope of congressional authority. Harrison rejected any “fair construction” of the Constitution that “would be found to constitute the President a part of the legislative power.”6He asserted, “It is preposterous to suppose that the President . . . could better understand the wants and wishes of the people than their own immediate representatives.”7 Thus, Harrison expressed the Whig Party line that the presidential veto should be used “only first, to protect the Constitution from violation; secondly, the people from the effects of hasty legislation where their will has probably been disregarded or not well understood and thirdly, to prevent the effects of combinations of the rights of minorities.” These opinions were not just rejections of Jackson’s and Van Buren’s conceptions of presidential power. They should strike any reader as completely at odds with what we know about the modern presidency. For an important development in the American constitutional system is the ultimate repudiation of this “Whig” conception of the weak president in favor of the contemporary view of the president as a pivotal player in introducing legislation and then vetoing legislation he dislikes. The interesting question is to what extent Harrison believed or began to question what he was saying.
The first major surprise of Harrison’s presidency involved his disastrous relationship with Henry Clay. As a founder of the Whig Party, Clay had run unsuccessfully as its presidential nominee against Jackson in 1832, and his desire to be president was as strong as ever in the run-up to the 1840 presidential election. Well before that election, Clay had known Harrison and been one of his most influential friends and sponsors. In the War of 1812, Clay helped Harrison to obtain a commission as a brigadier general in the regular army and later in full command of the Army of the Northwest. In 1828, Clay persuaded President John Quincy Adams to appoint Harrison, then one of Ohio’s two U.S. senators, as minister to Columbia. By 1835, Harrison’s fortunes turned, and the only job he found was clerk of the Cincinnati Court of Common Pleas. It thus came as a huge disappointment to Clay to lose the Whig presidential nomination to a man of Harrison’s low stature in 1836 and 1840. The 1840 defeat was particularly hard for Clay to take. He had hoped to erase the shame of losing to Jackson in 1832 by defeating Jackson’s self-selected successor. By 1840, it was evident that, because of the economic depression, the Whig nominee for president was going to beat Van Buren in the general election. But Harrison, not Clay, better understood how times had changed. In fact, the Whigs held the first national nominating convention in history that year, and Harrison’s lieutenants—including New York’s William Seward and his political mentor Thurlow Weed—were prepared. They arranged for the convention to count each state’s votes for president as a whole, thereby nullifying the advantage Clay would have had if every delegate’s vote counted. Counting all the delegates would have given Clay a winning margin, but counting each state as one favored Harrison.
Though hurt and angered by his second loss, Clay campaigned hard for Harrison in the 1840 general election. After Harrison won, Clay believed Harrison owed him—big time. He had helped Harrison win the popular vote in Kentucky and wanted nothing less than control over the new administration. To achieve this, he needed Harrison to put Clay’s people in charge of the administration. Aware that other Whigs wanted appointments for themselves or their friends, Clay was determined to be the power driving the Harrison administration. When Clay learned shortly after the election that Harrison was traveling to Frankfurt, Kentucky, to meet with Charles Wickliffe, an anti-Clay Whig who had not supported the National Bank that Clay had long championed, Clay went there immediately. Concerned about rumors that he was going to be the senator’s puppet, Harrison was wary of Clay. When he learned Clay was on his way to intercept him, Harrison sent a letter telling Clay that he preferred to delay any meeting with him.8Clay ignored the message and tracked Harrison down. When the two finally met in person, Clay told Harrison what he wanted. Harrison knew he owed the senator and agreed to the first favor he asked—not to appoint Wickliffe to the cabinet. Clay went further and implored the president-elect to spend a week at his plantation nearby. Harrison reluctantly acquiesced. He understood the significance of the invitation; he had even joked in a speech on the way to meet Clay that, if the Constitution allowed it, he would have given the presidency to him.
During his ensuing stay with Clay, Harrison reputedly offered him any cabinet post he wanted, but Clay said he wished to remain in the Senate. Clay repeatedly pressed the incoming president to accept his recommendations of other cabinet appointments, including his political ally and fellow Kentucky senator, John J. Crittenden, as attorney general and John Clayton of Delaware as treasury secretary. Clay made other requests, urging Harrison to call a special session of Congress to address the ongoing fallout from the national depression that had proved to be Van Buren’s undoing. Although Harrison’s legendary eagerness to please was put to the test, he managed to leave without committing himself on appointments and other matters.
The next meeting between the two men went worse than the first. Shortly after Harrison arrived in Washington to prepare for his inauguration, Clay asked to meet with him to discuss cabinet appointments. By the time they met, the senator was upset because Harrison had decided not to appoint Clayton as treasury secretary but rather Thomas Ewing, who had been recommended by Clay’s rival for leadership of the Whig Party in Congress, Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster. Clay told Harrison he was unhappy that Webster, whom Harrison had decided to appoint as secretary of state, was becoming the source of power in the new administration. Clay kept pressing Harrison to appoint Clayton to other posts. On the night before Harrison was going to announce that he was nominating George Badger of North Carolina as secretary of the navy, Clay called on Harrison to urge him to appoint Clayton instead. After Clay refused to take no for an answer, Harrison ended the meeting by declaring, “Mr. Clay, you forget that I am the President.”9 Clay angrily left the meeting, but he was not done.
While Clay did not press Harrison further on cabinet appointments because the cabinet turned out to be generally agreeable to him, including his friend Crittenden as attorney general, Clay was unhappy with Webster’s expanding influence over administration appointments. After learning that Webster and three other cabinet members had approved Harrison’s appointment of Edward Curtis to the collectorship of the port of New York City, Clay asked to meet again with Harrison. The collectorship controlled more patronage than any other governmental post except for postmaster general, and Clay resented Curtis because he had helped Harrison defeat Clay in the Whig primary in Pennsylvania. Clay urged Harrison to change his mind and appoint his preferred candidate. The president refused. The senator stormed out of the meeting after angrily chastising Harrison for not giving him his due in controlling patronage.
Clay’s last encounter with Harrison ruptured their relationship for good. Clay met the president just after the inauguration, this time to continue pressing him to call a special session of Congress to deal with financial exigencies. Harrison and his advisers knew what the senator wanted, but they were distrustful because they knew the special session would allow him to address the nation and to assert control over the administration’s agenda. Rather than decide himself, Harrison followed Webster’s advice to put the question to his cabinet. It split three to three over the need to call a special session of Congress. Harrison broke the tie with a negative vote. When Clay heard the outcome, he quickly wrote a letter to Harrison saying that he hoped to dine with him that evening, urging him to reconsider the question, and suggesting any inaction on the matter would make the president look indecisive.10Clay enclosed with his letter a draft of the proclamation Harrison should sign to call the special session. The gesture pushed Harrison over the edge. Upon reading the letter, he angrily wrote back, “You use the privilege of a friend to lecture me and I will take the same liberty with you—you are too impetuous.”11 He said he would make no final decision before the beginning of the next week and concluded that he preferred “this mode of answering your note to a conversation in the presence of others.”12
In another fit of anger, Clay responded in what turned out to be the final communication between the two men. Clay denied trying to dictate policy or appointments. He complained that his political enemies had poisoned Harrison’s opinion of him. He suggested that if he could not express his opinions “as a citizen and as a Senator, in regard to public matters,” he ought to retire from public life.13 He expressed the “hope” that by remaining in the Senate he could be of service to his country. He closed the letter by writing, “I do not wish to trouble you with answering this note” and remarking that he trusted Harrison would appreciate the purity of his motives, “whatever others may say or insinuate.”14 Clay then left Washington, though two days later financial exigencies—including the collapse of the national bank in Philadelphia, a depleted Treasury, and the impending bankruptcy of several states—forced Harrison to call a special session of Congress to convene on May 31. Though it was only two weeks into Harrison’s term, Clay never saw or spoke to Harrison again.
Clay’s alienation of Harrison was remarkable because it meant that the nation’s first Whig president was no longer speaking to the party’s most powerful congressional leader. They were not speaking because Harrison had increasingly resisted becoming Clay’s puppet. The breach was not just a clash in personalities; it derived from a fundamental disagreement over the Whigs’ constitutional philosophy. By the time he died, Harrison had shown he had been recognizing the unworkability of the Whig notion of the president as a weak minister who should be subservient to the will of Congress. Given Clay’s preeminence in the Senate, it would have been impossible to be subservient to the Senate while resisting Clay. Thus, it appears that Harrison understood that a president could be somewhat, perhaps even largely, deferential to Congress, but he could not always defer to congressional leaders’ demands. More importantly, Harrison apparently realized that a president’s reflexive deference to Congress undermined the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, which required presidents to maintain their authority and to protect their prerogatives and the executive branch from congressional domination. Harrison had almost said as much at his inauguration—words that may have fallen on deaf ears: “the great danger to our institutions does not appear to me to be in a usurpation by the Government of power not granted by the people, but by the accumulation in one of the departments of that which was assigned to others. Limited as are the powers which have been granted, still enough which have been granted to constitute a despotism if concentrated in one of the departments.”15 By the time he died, Harrison had given signals that he understood that legislative supremacy posed the danger of allowing Congress to usurp presidential powers.
Harrison’s resistance suggests he appreciated that the president had to be strong enough to protect its peculiar prerogatives from congressional encroachments. Moreover, Harrison’s retorts to Clay reflect his apparent realization of the significance of the president’s election itself, suggesting that he had some obligation to represent a different constituency than congressional leaders did. If checks and balances were to be genuinely meaningful, legislative supremacy could not be reconciled with presidential abdication of authority. Something had to give.
Of course, it is impossible to know what Harrison would have done had he completed his term. Even if Harrison and Clay made peace, it seems unlikely that Harrison could forget the words he had spoken to Clay. Nor is it likely that Clay could forget them. Moreover, Harrison, who had pledged to serve a single term, was not likely inclined to weaken his defense of presidential prerogatives from further attacks by Clay. Harrison’s resistance to Clay’s domination was no secret. Nearly everyone understood why Clay had departed before the end of the legislative session, and its significance was not lost on two younger Whigs who revered Clay—Millard Fillmore and Abraham Lincoln, each of whom later resisted legislative supremacy even more than Harrison did.
II .
As the ninth president of the United States, Harrison followed eight other chief executives, who were split over the practice known as rotation in office— replacing people appointed by their predecessors with their friends and allies.
Figure 2.1 A rare anti-Whig satire, giving a cynical view of the party’s image-building and manipulation of candidate William Henry Harrison. Two influential Whigs, Senator Henry Clay (left) and Congressman Henry A. Wise, operate the strings of a “dancingjack” toy figure of Harrison in military uniform. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print)
Four of Harrison’s predecessors had opposed the practice—Washington (in his second term), John Adams, Madison, and John Quincy Adams, while Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren had embraced it.16 The presidents who opposed rotation in office maintained that federal appointees were entitled to remain in office as long as they were performing their jobs well. Monroe had signed the first Tenure in Office Act, which limited the tenure of certain federal appointees to four years but provided that they could be removed at the president’s pleasure. John Quincy Adams consistently reappointed people who did not support him once their commissions expired.
With Van Buren’s help, Jackson created a political firestorm when he implemented the spoils system, which was rotation in office by another name. The point of this system was to replace an outgoing president’s appointees with allies of the incoming president. Jackson saw this system as a basic presidential privilege—one that was essential for ensuring that a president had in place people whom he could trust to carry out his preferred policies. He believed a president should have complete removal power over any executive branch officials to ensure that they implemented hispreferred policies or could be replaced with people who would. While, as the last chapter showed, Van Buren supported rotation in office, he had little or no need to rotate Jackson’s friends out of office, for they were also his allies.17
As a candidate, Harrison followed the Whig orthodoxy of urging reform of the spoils system that Jackson and Van Buren had championed. In his inaugural address, Harrison had pledged, like a good Whig, not to replace Van Buren’s appointees with Whigs or to coerce governmental employees to make contributions to the Whigs to retain their positions.
Harrison sought a middle ground between Jackson’s and Van Buren’s practice of rewarding their friends with appointments and John Quincy Adams’s practice of allowing hostile, unsupportive political appointees to remain in office. Harrison’s problem was that keeping Van Buren’s people in place meant frustrating Whigs who had elected him. To many if not most Whigs, reforming the spoils system meant replacing Democrats with Whigs. Nevertheless, Harrison promised in his inaugural address that treasury officers should not be removed without cause and vowed he would not remove a treasury officer without explaining why to Congress.
After four weeks in office, Harrison had a mixed record in keeping his word not to replace political appointees for partisan reasons. Although Harrison had been the recipient of an unusually large number of political appointments, he repeatedly vowed to oppose the wholesale removal of Democrats without cause. The vow echoed sentiments he had written in a letter prior to the election of 1836 declaring that executive power was granted for the public good and “not to requite personal favors or gratify personal animosities.”18 Moreover, Harrison’s cabinet included Webster and Thomas Ewing, both of whom had argued as senators against rotation of office.19 Shortly after his inauguration, Harrison asked Webster to circulate to all department secretaries a message instructing them that the payment of contributions or assessments by governmental employees would be regarded as cause for dismissal. He issued a strict order to all public officers and agents against interference in popular elections and receipt of compensation for party services. He declared that federal employees “are not expected to take an active or officious part in attempts to influence the minds or votes of others, such conduct being deemed inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution and the duties of public agents acting under it.”20Harrison wanted efficiency and honesty in government and took the unusual step of visiting every department to observe its operations. He requested reports detailing the activities and responsibilities of every office, and he promised to protect officeholders who were performing their jobs well. Yet in spite of Harrison’s protestations to the contrary, the pressure from other Whig leaders to remove Democrats to create jobs for their friends was enormous. (Their persistence was undoubtedly one of the pressures exacerbating Harrison’s failing health.) Harrison’s cabinet even voted to make an extensive purge of Democrats. Ironically, Ewing defended the purge to counter Van Buren’s “policy . . . to retain in office none but their active political adherents, those who would go for them thorough in all things; and the performance of the official duty, was far less requisite to a tenure in office, than electioneering services. Hence the offices had become for the most part filled with brawling offensive political partisans, of a very low moral standard—their official duties performed by substitutes, nor not performed at all.”21 Postmaster General Francis Granger probably had the highest numbers of dismissals. As one historian found, Granger, during his six months in office, had removed “39 of the 133 presidential postmasters, and by September 1841 almost 2500 postmasters had been appointed in the lesser offices to vacancies [which were caused] by removals. Granger later boasted that that he had removed 1700 postmasters and had he remained in the cabinet two or three weeks longer he would have removed 3000 more.”22
Although Harrison did not fulfill his pledge to reform civil service, his limited success reflected the powerful forces aligned against such reform. No other president did better than Harrison until the obstacles to genuine civil service reform were overcome in 1881.
III .
Harrison further deviated from Whig orthodoxy in using his cabinet. The Constitution provides that a president “may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.”23 While Jefferson construed this text as allowing his cabinet to vote on the most important matters confronting the administration and vesting in him the power to overrule their decisions if he saw fit,24 the seven other presidents who preceded Harrison did not believe the cabinet had any authority to bind them and differed only to the extent to which they consulted their cabinets.25 Nevertheless, the six members of Harrison’s cabinet believed in the Whig principle that they should direct all presidential actions. This belief derived from the Whig conception that the presidency should be subservient to Congress and the cabinet, which occupied offices created by Congress, was appointed with Senate consent, and could check executive usurpation of legislative authority.26 Harrison’s cabinet allowed him to preside over their meetings, but they insisted decisions should be made by majority rule, with each cabinet member having a single vote and Harrison only having a tie-breaking vote if the cabinet was deadlocked.27
Harrison appears to have been ambivalent about being subservient to his cabinet. The most dramatic confrontation arose when Webster told Harrison that the cabinet had rejected his preferred candidate and instead appointed James Wilson as the governor of Iowa. After a prolonged silence, Harrison wrote a few words on a slip of paper, which he asked Webster to read to the cabinet. The message was succinct: “William Henry Harrison, President of the United States.”28 Rising to his feet, Harrison angrily told the cabinet, “And William Henry Harrison, President of the United States, tells you, gentlemen, that, by ——, John Chambers shall be Governor of Iowa.”29
While Harrison deferred to his cabinet on other occasions, it is probably no coincidence that Harrison’s declaration to his cabinet echoed his earlier remonstrance to Clay that he was the president. Clearly, it took some effort for Harrison to make these declarations. They went against his characteristic eagerness to please others and contradicted the fundamental philosophy of the party that had nominated him to be president and whose party leaders were insisting throughout his short presidency on compliance with their wishes on appointments and cabinet predominance. When Harrison’s protestations are coupled together, they suggest that once in office (and freed from the need to run for reelection) Harrison was recognizing the need to protect the presidency’s prerogatives and institutional needs. The second rebuke, like the first, reflected his growing awareness that the Whig conception of the presidency was impractical. He might have realized that Jackson was not wrong when he claimed that the president was entitled, even obliged, to assert constitutional views independently from Congress.
In Harrison’s short time as president, he took stands on three constitutional issues—legislative supremacy, rotation in office, and the proper role of the cabinet—that were important, incremental steps in the development of modern presidential power. And he took these steps after having accepted the constitutional innovation of managing party government begun under Jackson and Van Buren. These steps were small, but neither Clay nor other Whig leaders forgot them as they attempted unsuccessfully to assert their dominance over the next two presidents who, were more determined than Harrison to protect presidential prerogatives from congressional encroachments.