William Henry Harrison, by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

William Henry Harrison, Ninth President of the United States, (1841-1841) Born Berkely, Charles County, Va., February 9, 1773, died Washington, D.C., April 4, 1841. The following is excerpted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"When General Harrison was first proposed as a candidate for the chief office of the Federal government, he was almost unknown at the East and South. A new generation had come upon the scene. But at the West, where he lived, and fought, and served his country in high places of civil trust, his name was taken up with a shout, which rolled over theri broad lakes and prairies, and soon began to be echoed from the hills of New England.***A few weeks ago, from the very spot where, half a century before he had landed from a rude boat, a young ensign, with no patrimony but his sword, at a lone temporary fortress in the wilderness--he embarked on one of the hundreds of steamboats that now plough that beautiful river amid the shouts of congregated thousands, to proceed to the discharge of that high office. Never had prince or conqueror returning from his victories, a more triumphant journey. Everywhere the sight of his venerable but firm figure, his frank, confiding manners, and his unaffected interest in the public welfare, won for him new affection. At the appointed hour, his firm, clear voice pronounced, in the hearing of a countless multitude, the oath of office and his own exposition of the principles on which he expected to administer the government. Just one month afterwards on the morning of the fourth of April, the tidings went abroad that "the good President" was dead; and for the first time since the formation of the Constitution, the country was called to mourn the decease of its chief magistrate."***

"What was it that made Harrison so dear to the American people? It was not that they deemed him superior to others in those qualities which politicians value most, and on which ambitious men build their hopes of success. It was that they knew him to be the honest, disinterested lover of his country. It was that they knew him to be a plain unpretending man, of the simplest manners and habits--a man who after having had the control of millions of the public treasure, and after having had repeated opportunities of enriching himself, had retired from his public employments not to the accumulations from the spoils of office, but to his acres and his plough. The favor with which the people regarded him was heightened by the very cirucmstances of his having been so long withdrawn from the foul arena of what we call politics.*** In his retirement he had been long exempted from the aspersions and abusive assaults which are continually bandied about in the conflicts of parties; and it was this which enabled the people to see, and encouraged them to trust, those moral and intellectual qualities of his which are so much better than political cunning and adroitness in the management of a faction."--LENOARD BACON (1802-1881), from a Memorial Discourse at New Haven, April 17, 1841. Effective published copyright, ©Mickey Cox 2002. All rights reserved.