These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

For their presidential candidate, the Whigs nominated sixty-eight-year-old William Henry Harrison, ran him as a war hero, and tried to pitch him as a Jacksonian man of the people, and even a frontiersman, which required considerable stretching of the truth. Harrison had served as governor of the Indiana Territory, and as a senator from Ohio, but he came from eminent forebears: his father, a Virginia plantation owner, had signed the Declaration of Independence. Writing in 1839, Harrison’s campaign biographer tried, in The People’s Presidential Candidate, to present the staggeringly wealthy Harrison as a humble farmer who had “never been rich.” Harrison exerted himself, delivering, at a hotel in Ohio, the first-ever presidential campaign speech, but his campaign urged him not to say too much. “Let him then rely entirely on the past,” they advised. “Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing.” Critics dubbed him “General Mum.” Democrats mocked Harrison by suggesting that, so poor as he was, he lived in a log cabin and drank nothing but hard cider. Whigs took this as a political gift. Calling Harrison the “Log Cabin Candidate,” they campaigned in log cabins mounted on wheels and hitched to horses, handing out mugs of hard cider along the road. Harrison, of course, lived in a mansion, but after the log cabin campaign of 1840, few presidential candidates, whether they started out poor or whether they started out rich, f...