U.S. Presidents & Presidency: W.H. Harrison

William Henry Harrison served the shortest time of any American President—only thirty-two days. He also was the first President from the Whig Party. He had won his nickname, “Old Tip,” as the tough commanding general of American forces who defeated hostile Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in the Ohio River Valley in 1811.

William Henry Harrison, an American military officer and politician, was the ninth President of the United States (1841), the oldest President to be elected at the time. On his 32nd day, he became the first to die in office, serving the shortest tenure in U.S. Presidential history.

"Sunday Morning" correspondent Mo Rocca explores the life and abbreviated time in office of America's 9th President, William Henry Harrison, who took ill during his Inauguration and died a month later.

Jackson's Democrats thought of freedom as the privilege to be wealthy, and that liberty was a negative, not positive, idea. Blaming Martin van Buren for the depression, voters elected William Henry Harrison as the first Whig president. But Harrison died a month after inauguration; his vice president, John Tyler, was an old-line Democrat who promptly reinstalled the Jackson agenda.

A Credo Reference landing page on William Henry Harrison. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.

The William Henry Harrison Papers, one of twenty-three presidential collections in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, contains approximately 1,000 items dating from 1734 to 1939, with the bulk dated from 1812 to 1841. Harrison (1773-1841), an army officer, representative, and senator from Ohio, served as the ninth president of the United States. His collection includes a letterbook, 1812-1813, correspondence, and military papers stemming mostly from his military and political career in the Northwest Territory, his service in Indian wars and the War of 1812, his time as territorial governor of Indiana Territory (1800-1812), and his role as Whig Party candidate in the unsuccessful 1836 presidential bid and the successful 1840 election, the latter leading to his abbreviated presidential term, cut short by his death one month after his inauguration.