Review: Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy

Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy by Robert M. Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I continue my exploration of American Midwestern pioneer history with this biography of William Henry Harrison, and I am pleased to find it a thoughtful and generally well written, It also recontextualizes some things I knew from different perspectives.

Above all, I am struck by the way in which Harrison himself was both of and not-of the Midwest. He was born in Virginia to a father prominent enough to have been a signer of the Declaration. In fact, the family remained prominent for generations. I knew that his grandson Benjamin was also elected President (though I always have to check whether it’s his son or grandson), but I didn’t realize that he was cousins with Carter Harrison, Sr. and Carter Harrison, Jr., two mayors of Chicago whom I’ve encountered in my Chicago and gangster history work.

At the same time, Harrison was largely a self-made man – self-made with the benefit of strong connections. His father died when he was still young, he made foolish decisions about the real but not overwhelming inheritance, and joined the army at a time when it was on the dangerous side.

He didn’t seem initially to imagine a future for himself in the Northwest Territory but, like second sons of the Britain at the time who volunteered for duty in India, the remote location amplified both the risk and the reward.

So, he landed in the region as a mostly broke but well-educated young man among generally more rough-hewn colleagues.

Those contradictions seem to have followed him as he rose in the military and then the proto-state government of the region. As I read it, he was enough of the Eastern establishment to get the blessings of Washington for his political rise and yet ensconced enough in the Midwest to retain legitimacy.

More interesting to my own research questions, though, is the way he understood Native American conflict as part of the larger global conflict. Owens argues that he generally saw Native conflict as an extension of the war with Britain. Others may have been fundamentally racist – and there was real barbarity in the way some Ohioans and Indianans butchered Natives – but Harrison saw them as legitimate allies of the British power that he feared. (Owens reads Thomas Jefferson the same way.)

Harrison’s most famous military victory came at Tippecanoe when he scattered the confederacy that Tecumseh was attempting to build across sometimes warring Native tribes. Owens sees it as a not-quite-impressive bit of generalship, but what strikes me in particular is the language Harrison used to describe Tecumseh (who was not present at Tippecanoe – he lived another couple of years and was then killed and shamefully desecrated after death at another battle). He saw Tecumseh as a great orator and politician, a man very much to admire who just happened to be on the other side.

It’s fascinating stuff, and, while it doesn’t diminish some of the ugliness of Harrison’s anti-Native campaigning, it does remind us that the total victory of Manifest Destiny wasn’t always the obvious outcome. Harrison had reason to fear the Native armies that he faced, and he rose as he did in part because – however nearly inept he might sometimes have been – he was a brave man himself.

We get a glimpse of Harrison’s notoriously short time as President only at the very end of this book. Then, famously, he ran as “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” playing on a later generation’s nostalgia for a time when Native power really was strong enough, in theory, to arrest Western expansion of the U.S. (Note that Andrew Jackson rose to prominence from similar success in wars against the Natives…which were often simultaneously wars against Britain.)

That Harrison sounds, again, like a man of the East, a President, no less. But he became famous, and utilized that fame, from his time helping to build and defend the Midwest and – as the title here says – for shaping the way the East would see the threat (and eventually the bravery and honor) of the very Natives he was also often killing and exploiting in treaty negotiations.


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