USA > Ohio > Ross County > Chillicothe > Ohio centennial anniversary celebration at Chillicothe, May 20-21, 1903 : under the auspices of the Ohio State Archaelogical and Historical Society : complete proceedings > Part 47
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There can be no doubt that there existed a real and wide- spread enthusiasm for the hero of Tippecanoe. His nomination, like his election, was due to a tremendous popular upheaval. As William Creighton, Jr., of Chillicothe, wrote (Sept. 3, 1835) :
"Old Ross will move this fall in all her strength. . . We intend to call a great meeting for the last Saturday in this month to nominate Harrison for the Presidency. We cannot get along without heroism. We shall present in strong terms the hero of three wars, and will sweep the country. Our opponents will not see for the dust we raise."
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An old newspaper says :
"A gentleman passing through the State of Indiana recently, says he stopped at a tavern in one of the principal towns, where a register of the names of travelers was kept, and each individual was desired to write opposite his name the name of the person he would prefer for Presi- dent, and that nine out of ten were for Harrison, but few for Clay, and only one for Van Buren out of a list of several hundred."
The Ohio Convention, held at Columbus, February 22, 1836, where General Harrison was first put in nomination for President, is described in a letter from John M. Creed, of Lancaster (Feb. 23, 1836), as "the largest ever held in the western country, and perhaps in the Union." Everybody was for Harrison. In the resolutions Clay and Webster were lauded to the skies. They were eulogized as "god-like men;" but when it came to nominat- ing a candidate Harrison got all of the votes.
In the great national Whig Convention which met at Harris- burg in December, 1839, to place their candidate for President in nomination, General Harrison was overwhelmingly the choice.
The campaign which followed will always be memorable. A few of the war-cries of the Whigs are well-known :
"Van, Van is a used-up man"; "She's went, "Hell-bent, "For Governor Kent"; "The Whigs, the Whigs, they come, they come";
and the like.
Van Buren was the "fox holed at Kinderhook;" or after the analogy of "Old Hickory" was dubbed "Slippery Elm."
The Loco-focos lacked the war cries, but were ready with attacks on General Harrison. These are fairly summarized by the Harrison Eagle (May 16, 1840) as follows :
"Among the serious, fatal and unanswerable objections which the Locos bring against General Harrison, we find the following, namely : He is poor, ignorant and a coward - drinks hard cider, eats crackers, and treats his company with the same, instead of champagne -is an old granny - the petticoat candidate - the imbecile - the Log-cabin and hard-
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cider farmer - who works with his own hands -is under the supervision of a committee who receive and answer letters, questions, etc.,-is en- titled to no credit for any services, or bravery, during the last war, all his victories having been achieved by those under him."
In point of fact, Gen. Harrison was proud and tenacious of his opinions and quite ready to express them freely. The Com- mittee of Correspondence was established largely to save him labor and postage. In a letter quoted in the Boone's Lick (Mo.) Times, he says: "I have actually from necessity been obliged to give up the correspondence of many of my best friends."
It was unwise to call attention to his poverty. Millions of the public money had passed through his hands, and they were empty and clean ; and on his farm at North Bend were the fam- ilies, not small, of three deceased sons, and an adopted child the orphan daughter of one of his military aides, all entirely depend- ent upon him. The Loco-foco sneers only gave zest to counter- cries such as the cry of "Gold-spoons," raised by the Whigs be- cause President Van Buren had had gilded some of the spoons of the White-House furnishings.
As to his personal courage, it was vouched for, with one voice, by all of his old soldiers, including the Loco-foco Vice- President Richard M, Johnson, who "slew the great Tecumseh." Some of the stay-at-homes of 1812 tried to question it, but to no avail. The Loco-foco Governor of New Hampshire, who called Harrison a coward in 1840, had named a son for him during the war of 1812.
But the Locos committed their fatal blunder in ridiculing the General's log-cabin and his hard-cider hospitality. Thereby they gave the Whigs something popular to shout about, and a fine drink to wet their whistles with. For it was a time when in many sections of the country log-cabins were still the only dwellings known. There was not a section in which they were not numer- ous, and the "raisin" was an event for neighborly service and merry-making. Mr. Webster, at Saratoga (Aug. 19, 1840) said :
"It did not happen to me to be born in a log-cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log-cabin, raised amid the snow- drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early as that when the smoke first rose from its crude chimney and curled over the frozen hills, there
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was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode."
So it very naturally came about that log-cabins were raised in every hamlet, and the large cities like New York were dotted with them. Smaller cabins were mounted on wagons. A friend, born in 1840, told me recently that she remembers as a child hav- ing for a play-house one of these cabins, large enough for a number of children to play in, which had been hauled about over the whole of the northern part of the State of New York, and which her father bought at the close of the campaign.
Mr. Carl Schurz, in his admirable life of Clay, has described the campaign briefly and vividly as follows :
"There has probably never been a presidential campaign with more enthusiasm and less thought than the Whig campaign of 1840. As soon as it was fairly started, it resolved itself into a popular frolic. There was no end of monster mass meetings, with log-cabins, raccoons and hard cider. One-half of the American people seemed to have stopped work to march in processions behind brass bands or drum and fife, to attend large picnics, and to sing campaign doggerel about "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." The array of speakers on the Whig side was most imposing: Clay, Webster, Corwin, Ewing, Clayton, Preston, Choate, Wise, Reverdy John- son, Everett, Prentiss, Thompson of Indiana, and a host of lesser lights. But the immense multitudes gathered at the meetings came to be amused, not to be instructed. They met, not to think and deliberate, but to laugh and shout and sing."
But the songs were not all doggerel. It is true that we cannot defend more than a few lines of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," nor that song, a mere snatch of which has come down to me by tradition, about the Whig party, running :
"they cannot spile her, While we have Tom the wagon-boy And Tom the old salt-biler."
"Biler" was an important word in the Whig rhyming dic- tionary.
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. "Go it, Harrison, Come it, Tyler, And we'll bust Van Buren's biler."
There were, however, some stirring songs. All the familiar airs -"Hail, Columbia," "The Old Oaken Bucket," "Auld Lang- Syne," "Hail to the Chief," "Bonnets of Blue," "Little Pig's Tail," "There's no Luck in the House," "Old Rosin the Beau,"- were brought into requisition, to carry to the hearts of the peo- ple verses telling of "the battles, sieges, fortunes," which their old hero had passed, and of the good times he would bring in again. Take this song for the Tippecanoe battleground gather- ing as a sample :
"Come from the cabins, come ! Sons of the brave and free, As your fathers came when the stirring drum Beat loud for Liberty ! 'Tis Freedom calls, as then She called upon your sires. Go forth like men, to the field again Where burned their battle fires."
As Mr. Schurz says, the meetings were immense. I cite a few instances: Twelve thousand are reported at Springfield, Illinois ; fifteen thousand at Greenville, Ohio; at Ft. Meigs, thirty thousand ; and on the Tippecanoe battlefield forty thousand gath- ered; the meeting lasted for three days, and three thousand two hundred wagons were actually counted upon the grounds. At Hagerstown, Maryland, one of the speakers said he did not num- ber the crowd "by hundreds or by thousands, but by acres." At Syracuse, New York, in September, it is said that fifty thousand people were present. A newspaper of the day reports of the meeting as follows :
"A whole fleet of boats from the West came up the enlarged por- tion of the canal, three abreast, in a long line of procession. Every boat had its banners and decorations and the fine looking and well clad free- men that thronged them made the welkin ring with their music, joyous melodies and enthusiastic hurrahs."
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At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a procession was formed up- wards of three miles in length, eight abreast, the crowd in the procession and in the town being estimated at seventy-five thou- sand.
At Chillicothe, where the idea of log-cabin raising originated, the procession at the first meeting, May 16, 1840, included a wagon carrying a Buckeye-cabin drawn by six horses, with a barrel of hard-cider outside the cabin, raccoon skins nailed to the logs, and a live raccoon climbing about the roof. The Kingston boys brought a canoe thirty feet long. The cabin raised was forty feet by seventy-five feet, and could seat a thousand people .. On the occasion of General Harrison's visit to Chillicothe in Sep- tember of that year, the double column of carriages and the pro- cession of horsemen eight deep which went out to meet him ex- tended over two miles. The General came down the road into the town in a barcuche drawn by four horses and followed by an es- cort of horsemen and carriages a mile in length. A single citi- zen of the town, Henry Brush, is said to have entertained at table twenty-five hundred guests.
The procession at the log-cabin raising at St. Louis, the home of "the Hon. Gold Humbug Benton," is described at length in the Harrison Eagle of May 30, 1840, and more briefly as fol- lows: First, the Tippecanoe Club with a banner showing an. eagle strangling a green and yellow serpent whose tortuous folds were terminated with a fox's head; citizens with banners; ladies in carriages ; the boys of the various schools; uniformed companies with coon-skins dangling from their heads to their waists ; horsemen ; procession of laborer's carts ; laborers on foot with shovels, pick-axes, etc .; printers with a press mounted on a car, printing Tippecanoe songs which were distributed among the crowd ; drays loaded with barrels of hard cider ; a log-cabin drawn by six horses with the inscription "The string of the latch never pulled in"; blacksmiths with a forge and the motto "Strike for our country's good" ; joiners and cabinet-makers with a miniature shop and men at work; a "tippe-canoe" drawn by six horses and filled with men; two smaller canoes filled with men throwing the lead and singing out the soundings; Fort Meigs, filled with soldiers, drawn by twelve yoke of oxen, ; in the Fort was a band of
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drums and fifes, also cannons; the brick-layers ; a log-cabin with an Indian canoe behind drawn by four horses; a regiment of Suckers; and finally, a body of men on foot with inscriptions : "Rhode Island victory," "Connecticut election 4,600 majority," and a comical looking wag with his thumb on his nose and twirl- ing his fingers in Sam Weller style and the legend "You can't come it, Matty."
But the grand monster meeting, called, according to the lan- guage of the campaign, a "convention," was held at Dayton, then a town of five or six thousand inhabitants. Here, on September Ioth, was gathered a crowd which, by actual survey of the space covered with people around the speakers' stand, and an allowance of four persons to the square yard, was estimated to number more than seventy-five thousand, while fully twenty thousand were scattered about the town and its vicinity. The meeting be- came famous as the convention of one hundred thousand !
This gathering is described in the Cincinnati Gazette of the time as follows :
"Delegates with their appropriate banners were there from Louisi- ana, Kentucky and Indiana. Old Kentuck told us she had finished her work and bade us go and do likewise. Louisiana pledged a majority of 4,200 for 'Old Tip' in November, and Indiana related a comical story of the way in which one Matty Van scampers down hill yelling 'Stop that cider barrel!' whenever he hears a report from one of the states as they successively cast their votes against the usurpers and spoilsmen.
"There is living in and animating our breasts at this time the one general impression of an immense congregation of the people, above whose countless heads rise banners without number, and among whom move hither and yon log-cabins, mechanics' shops, a fleet of ships, canoes, cars, filled with young misses singing patriotic songs, bands of musicians playing national airs, emblems of freedom, denunciations of tyranny and badges of Union which proclaim that one purpose gathered all this together, by one spirit is it pervaded, and to one result does it tend."
At this time there were not more than fifty miles of steam- railway in the Northwest Territory. The only other means of conveyance were by the rivers, canals, and wagon-road. Sixteen canal boats laden with people, on February 2Ist, made the trip from Chillicothe to Columbus, in a pouring rain. It took twenty hours to cover the fifty miles. As for travel by road, an old
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story tells of a traveler who saw a hat in the road and picked it up; under the hat was a man and under the man was a horse,. sunk down in the mud.
Of course the crowds had their fun. They were American people, men, women and children, full of humor, good humor. Of course, large quantities of hard-cider were consumed. It was a campaign when staid old church-going farmers went about with canteens of hard-cider hung from their necks; and we, perhaps, must not discredit the statement of the Toronto Patriot that "the folks who now so loudly cry out for hard-cider at the same time prudently drink rum." A raising had always been a time for jollification. Thomas Corwin, the Whig candidate for Governor of Ohio, was, with the possible exception of Harrison, the great- est drawing card. He complained bitterly in later years that he would go down in history as a buffoon. He was, in fact, a man of lofty ideals and fine sense ; but as a humorous stump-speaker, we probably never have had his equal in this country. One of his speeches during the campaign of 1840, delivered in the House of Representatives, will always be remembered. Isaac E. Crary, a young member from Michigan, attacked General Harrison's mili- tary career and reputation ; and in the course of his speech, mod- estly let it be known that he himself was a brigadier-general of militia in Michigan on the peace establishment. Corwin, in his memorable reply, suggests that Alexander the Great might have- made a man of himself in the art of war, had he been a member of Congress and heard the military debates there. Then he goes on to describe what he calls a "water-melon" campaign of the Michi- gan militia. His speech contains one burst of satirical and mock- heroic declamation, which, though well-known, I must be per- mitted to quote. He said :
"We all, in fancy, see the gentleman from Michigan in that most dangerous and glorious event in the life of a militia general on the peace establishment - a parade day; the day for which all the other days of his life seem to have been made! We can see the troops in motion; umbrellas, hoe and axe handles, and other like deadly implements of war overshadowing all the field; when lo! the leader of the host approaches; 'Far off his coming shines.'
His plume, white, after the fashion of the great Bourbon, is of ample:
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length, and reads its doleful history in the bereaved necks and bosoms of forty neighboring hen-roosts !"
But in appreciating the fun we must not lose sight of the sterling sense in this remarkable speech. It had only "wit enough to keep it sweet."
It came to be quite the custom for the rival parties to hold meetings in the same town upon the same day. This started, probably, by way of joint debates, which frequently degenerated into rival meetings. I have a letter from the Hon. Samuel F. Vinton to Mr. Ewing (dated September 10, 1840), which givés a lively account of one of these affairs, as follows :
"The Whigs of Athens had written to you and myself and I be- lieve to Murphy to come and meet a challenge which the loco-focos had put out for a debate yesterday with Allen and Shannon. I went. In the morning, before going to the grounds, they backed out, pretending to make a difficulty about terms. I sent word to them that I would meet them on any terms they might name. They refused. I went down to the grounds and before the speaking began challenged the whole cara- van, told them to take their own terms; they publicly declined. I then told them they must consider themselves backed out. The Whigs shouted over them and hallooed backed out; crowed and bantered - some hallooed Petticoat Allen. They took it all as quiet as lambs. I then told the Whigs I would address them at the Court House. We formed a procession in front of them, took off more than one-half of the assembly, and spent the day in speeches and crowing."
A letter from Thomas Corwin (dated September 12th, 1840), describes a joint debate at Zanesville as follows :
"They had a real flare-up here last night. Taylor and Mathiot addressed the people by agreement, half an hour each, and Goddard was to close the case. He went reading Taylor's bank votes from the legislative journal, including his negative votes on the individual re- sponsibility clause, etc., until the General and his folks became furious and called out to leave, as Goddard's half hour had expired. Charley went on and two meetings sprung up, each addressed by its own orators. Amongst other things Goddard talked of M-'s drawing cash twice from the State Treasury some years ago, whereupon the Colonel talks of caning and all that to-day. You must know there is a two-days' muster here, ending to-day. The General is now out at the grounds and I have not yet seen him. As to the aforesaid caning, you know that is only
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in my eye. As to the charge, what is said is said, it will remain, for our friend Goddard is not the man to back out when he sets down his foot."
Doubtless there was much provocation for the cry of the Loco-focos against the "log-cabin foolery" of the Whigs, but they were themselves a good second. Senator Allen went about Ohio with Colonel Richard M. Johnson, then Vice-President, holding him up as the real hero of the battle of the Thames, and calling upon him to show his wounds. A specimen of Johnson's oratory has been preserved in a letter written from Piqua shortly after the close of the campaign, from which I quote as follows :
"Colonel Richard M. Johnson delivered a speech among us, in which he said: 'I love the Germans and I love the Irish, for just as soon as they touch our soil they become good Democrats, and I love the democracy. If the democracy says, 'Possum up the gum stump,' I say, 'Possum up the gum stump'; if democracy says, 'Kooney in the hollow,' I say, 'Kooney in the hollow.' I go with the democracy."
General Harrison made a personal canvass. He was the first presidential candidate to do so ; and, referring to this in his speech at Chillicothe, he deprecated the necessity for it lest it should prove the establishment of a bad precedent, but added :
"I am here because I am the most persecuted and calumniated in- dividual now living; because I have been slandered by reckless oppo- nents to the extent that I am devoid of every qualification, physical, mental and moral, for the high place to which at least a respectable portion of my fellow-citizens have nominated me."
A portion of one of his tours is stated in one of the Cin- cinnati papers, as follows : On the afternoon of Friday, he passed from Chillicothe to Lancaster; on Saturday from Lancaster to Somerset and back, speaking three hours at Somerset and travel- ing thirty-three miles ; on Monday from Lancaster to Circleville ; on Tuesday from Circleville to Columbus ; leaving Columbus on Wednesday, he reached Cincinnati on Thursday, after twenty- four consecutive hours of traveling. This was cited to give the lie to the cry of "granny petticoats," as the Loco-focos called him. Senator Allen had started this nickname. Just before the battle of the Thames some Indian deserters had reported that General Proctor had promised his Indian allies to turn Harri-
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son over to them should he be captured. Harrison reterted that when he should capture Proctor the Indians would be permitted to dress the British General like a squaw. And Senator Allen re- lated how the ladies of Chillicothe presented Harrison with a pet- ticoat in token of his courage. In reply to this General Murphy, of Chillicothe, in the Scioto Gazette of January 20, 1836, pub- lished a savage attack upon Allen.
The amenities have grown in politics since that day, when Whigs and Loco-focos held little social intercourse. The cam- paign was marked by much bitterness and by one tragedy. At the Baltimore convention, Thomas H. Laughlin, a marshal of the Whig procession, was killed while trying to prevent a gang of ruffians from breaking through the line.
But underneath all the roistering, rollicking and horseplay, underneath all the savagery of political warfare, there was on the part of the Whigs a deep and abiding feeling that our institu- tions were endangered by usurpations of the Executive and that they were rallying under a great and popular leader to save them.
As John A. Wise put it, it was "Union of the Whigs for the sake of the Union." It was the cause of American liberty which they rallied to sustain. To quote from a letter by Mr. Ewing (May 12, 1840) :
"It is indeed the cause of self-government, the true Republican principle, the supremacy of the popular will acting by and through its constitutional agents, that we seek to reinstate and sustain against irre- sponsible and despotic power.
"We maintain the supremacy of the constitution which that power tends to subvert. We go for the protection of property, of labor and its hard earned fruits, against the wild spirit of destruction which is clearly taking possession of our fair land and blasting the energies of the people.
"We maintain the freedom of opinion, of thought, and action, in politics as in everything else. We maintain it against the tyranny of party, the most absolute and unrelenting that ever fettered the human mind.
"We go for the freedom of elections and require them to be un- controlled by executive interference; that an electioneering corps of exec- utive officers paid out of the public purse shall be no longer suffered to pervade and infest our land.
"We go for the ancient democratic principle of appointment to office, for the service of the country and not the service of the party.
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We claim the restoration of the ancient test 'Is he capable? is he honest? is he faithful to the Constitution?' instead of that which has usurped its place, and which practically is this - 'Is he loud? is he reckless? will he go through thick and thin for the party?'
"We demand the safe keeping of the public money and that it be not entrusted or continued in the hands of men who consider it and treat it as spoils.
"We go for retrenchment and reform, in solemn truth, and not as a mere catch-word of party-our suffering country requires it -the people demand it, and they know how to compel obedience.
"And we have selected from among the great and good of this mighty nation a well-tried patriot and an honest man who stands forth the exponent, the visible representation of our principles; and with one heart and one voice we unite in his support. Long as I have known and highly as I prize him, I need not speak to you, citizens of Indiana, of his merits. Forty years of his valued life has been devoted to our com- mon service. In peace, in the councils of the nation he has been the advocate and friend, in war he has been the victorious defender, of the now great and powerful West, and the battlefield on which you meet is one enduring monument of his fame."
The appeal was to all "who duly appreciate civil liberty" and were "identified with the great cause of constitutional freedom ;" to all who would "unite in putting down the revolutionary dy- nasty now in power and in bringing again to the people the con- stitution which the present executive, like the past, has trampled under foot."
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