Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison: The First Lady Who Basically Never Was

I'm getting lazy about my blogging. I've been finding it hard to devote time to reading and writing after working full days. I've always been more of a TV watcher than a reader, even though I'm always reading something. So with keeping up with my shows, and what with getting married this past weekend 😍, I've been devoted to other things. Second, I'm getting tired of reading about Presidents instead of First Ladies because there is so little written about the ladies in this chunk of time. I'm hoping there are more books about the wives coming up soon. Whatever the reason, I've definitely lost my grad-school reading abilities. Back then, this 125-page William Henry Harrison book would have been "read" and analyzed in essay format within an afternoon. For this project, it took me months. Crazy!  

And when I say I'm getting lazy about blogging, I mean that I'm not even going to formulate my own essay here. I'm just going to copy some quotes from Collins's book that I think encapsulate who William Henry Harrison was in his time. I know it's basically cheating, but I really want to move things along (even if it's at this new and excruciatingly slow pace), and this way will work better than me trying to write my own thoughts because I generally hate writing and do it very slowly. Hopefully I can get back to real essay writing with Tyler and/or his wife.  

The few mentions in the book of Mrs. Harrison:  

"[c. 1793] Harrison returned to Washington, where he would soon be made commander. But first he was assigned to a blockhouse at North Bend, a settlement about fourteen miles west of Cincinnati. There, he had a chance to improve his relationship with Anna Tuthill Symmes, a calm, dark-eyed daughter of Colonel John Cleves Symmes. Anna's mother had died when she was a baby, and she was her father's pet. In a famous family incident during the Revolutionary War, he had disguised himself as a British soldier and crossed the battle lines with his four-year-old daughter to take her to safety with relatives in New Jersey. Anna was comfortable with frontier life, an excellent rider who seemed to have no fears of the dangers of the wilderness. (Her father wrote that his oldest daughter, Maria, who had married and moved to the much more developed city of Lexington, refused to visit the family in Cincinnati because 'the fear of the Indians deters her.') Anna was also well read, interested in politics, an eager consumer of newspapers and journals. As a girl, she had been sent to boarding school, where she was a classmate of Martha Washington's granddaughter, and later she would become the first wife of an American president who was known to have been educated outside the home.  [Honestly, this paragraph makes her sound fascinating; I really wish there was something more substantive written about her.]

"She first met her future husband in Lexington, at a party given by Maria and her husband, Peyton Short, a wealthy transplanted Virginian whose family had known the Harrisons back East. When the young Captain Harrison rode up to the Short mansion and saw the lovely Anna Symmes, the two fell into what they assured their children was love at first sight. William Henry found Anna 'remarkably beautiful,' and she was equally attracted. He had not inherited his father's corpulence. He was a thin man of medium height, with dark eyes and a large, straight nose that dominated his rather ascetic-looking face. He was extremely sociable, and among his generation he had an unusual combination of eastern gentility and western toughness. 

"Anna was twenty years old when Harrison asked for her hand. Colonel Symmes refused; he was reluctant to give his daughter up at all, and certainly not to a soldier. It's also possible that Symmes--who was a young officer at the fort--had unpleasant memories of the night Harrison was jailed for beating a drunken townsman. …. [He convinced her father he would support her with a military career, though he was already plotting a post-army career.] ….  

"Romance was going to triumph. Anthony Wayne supported the match, and the wedding took place, although without any help from the father of the bride. Exactly how the Harrisons were married is subject to debate. Some stories suggest that the couple gathered friends on a day when the colonel was out of town and pulled off a modified elopement, with a ceremony at the home of a friend. Other versions say that Anna was married in her own house, and that her father was present but stalked off in the middle of the ceremony.

"At any rate, the family was soon reconciled." [Harrison as hero of Indian wars, protege of General Wayne, well educated, and from one of VA's best families=good catch on the frontier] (21-22) 

"Anna Harrison, who never wanted her husband to run for president, was preparing to leave for Washington when word of William Henry's death reached her family. She stayed in North Bend, preparing a site for Harrison's final burial. ... Anna had borne more children than any other first lady but she would outlive all but one [John Scott]. Five of her six sons were already dead, and in the four years following William Henry's death, Anna lost all three of her remaining daughters. ...  

"Anna, who had always been interested in politics if not enthusiastic about her husband's involvement, kept close and disapproving track of William Henry's successor, John Tyler. But her main involvement in national affairs picked up on a theme of her husband's--lobbying important people in Washington to give jobs to her numerous grandsons and nephews.  

"In 1858, the fabled Big House/Log Cabin that had figured so centrally in American politics burned down. Anna moved in with John Scott's family, adding one more relative to a table that, like William Henry's, was crowded with nine children and other friends and relatives."  (oops, forgot to note the page here in my notes: probably 123, 124, or 125). 

A selection of quotes that well-summarize main points in the book or are just interesting:  

"Harrison's one-month term in office was really nothing more than a list of nonachievements (only president never to appoint a federal judge; his wife the only first lady since the construction of the White House who never saw it) and a cautionary tale about the importance of not making long speeches in the rain." (1)  

"Besides catching pneumonia during his inauguration, Harrison is famous for things he didn't actually do. He didn't win a big military victory at Tippecanoe--it was a minor fight against an outnumbered village of Indians, and because Harrison screwed up the defense of his camp the white American suffered most of the casualties ... He did better during the War of 1812. But his real impact on history arguably came from the work he did in the Grouseland years--acquiring several states' worth of territory from the Indians in deals that cost the federal government only pennies per acre. This is not a part of our history that we celebrate, and even back in 1840 the voters preferred stories of battlefield heroics." (4) 

"Politically, Harrison's greatest achievement was to star in what is still celebrated as one of the most ridiculous presidential campaigns in history. But even then, other men came up with the story line about Harrison the humble soldier and pushed it into the national memory forever with months of singing from The Log Cabin Songbook and dancing 'The Log Cabin Two-Step.' 

 "William Henry Harrison's own contribution was to become the first presidential candidate to personally campaign for the job, and he willingly plowed into crowds to shake endless hands and at least pretend to remember all the veterans who wanted to reminisce about serving under him." (4-5) 

[Harrison's inauguration was a nearly 2-hour speech on a rainy day with no overcoat, but not necessarily how he got sick. Perhaps trying to compensate for rumors that he was old tuckered out, Harrison walked everywhere in the early days of his presidency, even shopping for his own food. He was also "perpetually exhausted and beaten down by the demands of job seekers and by internal fighting within his party." (121-122)] 

"Harrison's body lay in state in the White House, in a coffin with a glass lid that allowed mourners to see the face of a president most of them had never actually gotten to know. On April 7, 1841, thousands of people lined the streets of Washington for Harrison's funeral procession. His horse Whitey trotted down the streets riderless, the traditional symbol of a fallen leader. Bells tolled, cannons were fired, and the parade of grieving dignitaries stretched for more than a mile. It was a blueprint for marking the untimely death of an American president that the country would continue to follow when Zachary Taylor and then Abraham Lincoln were lost, and ever after." (124) 

Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison: What I Know Going In

Again, a First Lady about whom no books have been written and a President with almost no book options to choose from. At least this time there is a good excuse: Willilam Henry Harrison is the infamous President who chose not to wear an overcoat, shivered through his inauguration, caught ill (three weeks later), and died a month into his term. According to a quick Wikipedia search, Anna Harrison was too ill to accompany William Henry to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration and never made it there before he died. Jane Irwin Harrison, the widow of the Harrison's late son, agreed to take on hostess duties until her mother-in-law's expected arrival. That's all I know. I look forward to learning more by reading:  

William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins, another in Schlesinger's The American Presidents series.  

Image taken from amazon.com

Unfortunately, the book is currently checked out by another patron at the library and is not due until mid-December. It'll probably be another couple months before I get to blogging again. I apologize in advance, dear reader. 

Van Buren Revealed

I started a new full-time job last month, so I have fallen behind on my reading and blogging. It's probably been a month or more since I finished my chosen Martin Van Buren biography. I hate to give short shrift to an already forgotten past president and first lady, but I need to power through this mostly-from-memory blog before the holiday rush really sets in.  

I learned basically nothing about either Van Buren's wife or his acting first lady from reading his biography. He married his cousin, Hannah Hoes, partly because Kinderhook, New York, was such an exclusively Dutch part of the state that Van Buren, though born in the United States, spoke Dutch as his first language and was criticized by some as too foreign to be president. The community was tightly interrelated. They quickly made a family, but Hannah died nearly two decades before Martin became president. The most important thing I remember about Angelica Singleton Van Buren, his daughter-in-law who helped complete some of the first lady functions in the absence of a president's wife, is that she was a Southerner who complimented the Southern visiting and socializing that Van Buren used as part of his political networking and strategy.  

Van Buren was a single-term president because he was forced to take the blame for the Panic of 1837, which hit just months after his inauguration, the complicated result of unregulated economic practices set in motion well before he took the executive office. And while Van Buren continued to hold political influence after finishing his presidential term, including a second campaign for the presidency, his most significant impact on American political history perhaps happened well before he held the highest office in the land. Basically, while Andrew Jackson is most often given credit for creating the modern Democratic Party because he was the first President elected by it, Van Buren is, in fact, the figure who deserves that credit because of all the organizing he did behind the scenes to create the coalition that would become the party. Basically, Van Buren spent years putting in the muscle to organize people into this new kind of political grouping that held power to elect and sway officials. He began locally in New York, then traveled across the country, pulling people into this political organization that supported a kind of Jeffersonian democracy that extended from the rural planter to the urban worker while also getting behind federal government projects enough to appease westerners like Jackson who wanted to see United States expansion. Basically, by putting the weight of his name and his organization behind Andrew Jackson for president, Martin Van Buren created the modern Democratic Party.  

Van Buren also helped define a modern understanding of federal spending, limiting it to projects that specifically spanned more than one state, leaving in-state projects to the states themselves. Van Buren continued the Indian removals put in motion by Andrew Jackson, and he once owned a slave who ran away. Van Buren held complicated, sometimes contradictory, opinions about slavery and abolition. Much of what he said while in the political spotlight was so non-committal it could be used by either side. As every president before him, he refused to tackle to the issue of slavery in any substantive way, but Van Buren eventually took a stand wholly against admitting new slave states into the Union, ending any chances of his political re-election and predicting a civil war if the country did not heed his warning. 

Our eighth president certainly led a more interesting life than I expected from a one-term president who has been largely forgotten to history. I just wish we could learn more about the ladies in his life.