of the home. Expansive grounds spread out from this plantation centerpiece in all directions and to the south include manicured gardens that lead one down a gradual slope to a dock on the James River. In total, Berkeley stands as a prime example of settled, affluent, civilized power.
And, walking the grounds, Carol and I noted it was also clearly the inspiration for the Grouseland mansion Harrison would construct a thousand miles to the west.
So what explains the “LOG CABIN" and “HARD CIDER" moniker? Pure, undiluted politics. And even, with a terrible irony, these two homes suggest an explanation of the other hackneyed pieces of Harrison trivia: his extravagantly long inaugural speech and his short-lived Presidency.
In 1840, the Whig party was desperate for a viable presidential candidate. And, what is more, they were sure that, with the right man, they could win. For the Whigs, the Presidency of Andrew Jackson had been an extended nightmare. In fact the Whig party itself, rather than being any sort of a defined political organization, was a hodgepodge of various factions which could agree only on the need to oust the dominant Democratic control of the Presidency, personified first in Jackson and, more recently, in his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren.
Now, in the upcoming 1840 election, the Whigs saw their chance. The financial panic of 1837, caused largely as a reaction to Jackson's war on the Second Bank of the United States, had left his successor in a tight financial bind. Yet even this economic downturn, Whigs feared, might not be enough to woo American voters to abandon their beloved “General Jackson" and his minions. What the Whigs needed was another western, tough-as-nails, Indian fighting General. And William Henry Harrison appeared to fit the bill perfectly. But Harrison was also a gentleman from Virginia, the civilized builder of Grouseland, who hailed from one of the most prestigious patrician families of the Virginia tidewater.
“Forget all that," his political handlers counseled. “Let's make him out to be the Whig Andy Jackson: a down-to-earth western fighter, a man of the people." And so, with an early and brilliant example of political spin, William Henry Harrison was presented and touted as a relatively unlettered and unsophisticated man, upon whom a pension, a “LOG CABIN," and a barrel of “HARD CIDER" would suffice to render him content for life.
The result was a landslide electoral win for the Whigs, but a discontented victor. One gets the distinct impression that Harrison, though obviously gratified to have been raised to the highest position in the land, wanted, perhaps even needed, to let the American people know that, however hardened his life on the frontier might have made him, they had elected no bumpkin to the Presidency. After the election he returned to his ancestral home, Berkeley Plantation, and there crafted his inauguration speech, brimming with prolonged classical allusions and erudite phraseology.
What he hadn't counted on was the weather. On inauguration day in early March, a bitterly cold wind swept through the capital city. Regardless of the chill, Harrison spoke at length, even refusing to wear an overcoat or hat. He was, after all, old Tippecanoe, and thirty days later, he was dead of pneumonia.
It is hard not to feel an irony implicit in the two homes which are associated with this great man. If they could have spoken to him, one wonders whether or not they might have counseled the old soldier and territorial governor to insist on staying closer to his genuine lineage. William Henry Harrison was no unlettered backwoods figure, emerging out of obscurity and armed only with a smattering of common sense, coupled with militaristic gusto. He was the son of privilege (his openly aristocratic Vice President, John Tyler, resided only one or two plantations up from Berkeley on the same Virginia tidewater section of the James River). Harrison was a soldier of great cunning and courage. And, as the architecture of both his birthplace and the home he built in the western wilderness territory clearly attest, he also was a man of refinement and taste. There was nothing trivial about him except the political world which he, unwisely it turned out, had allowed to define his legacy.
John Tyler: A Party without a President
When John Tyler left the Presidency in 1845, he returned to a home he barely knew that was located on a peninsula where he had lived all his life. Originally named “Walnut Grove," the beautiful plantation to which Tyler and his second wife, Julia, retired was renamed “Sherwood Forest" after a spurious rebuke hurled at the exiting “President without a party" by his political adversary Henry Clay. It was Clay who had mockingly suggested that Tyler, now exiled from both the Whigs and the Chief Executive's office, should run off and hide like Robin Hood of yore. Tyler, unoffended, had enjoyed the allusion, and he and Julia would spend the rest of their lives living in and adding on to their impressive “Sherwood Forest" estate until, by the time of Tyler's death, the house would stretch 300 feet in length, though often only a single room in depth. It remains to this day the longest frame house in the United States.
As Carol and I drove into the plantation's parking area, I found myself wondering if “Sherwood Forest" would offer the sort of illuminating parallels with and insights into the couple who created it in its final form, as had so often been the case in our visits to other such sites. And, even more special would be the fact that President Tyler's grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, would be our guide throughout this magnificent structure. Our visit in August 2009 would turn out to be one of the more memorable days of any of our many tours of presidential homes. But for reasons we could not have guessed before arriving.
President John Tyler, historians have often noted, was a man of many firsts. He was the first President who had changed political parties prior to serving as Chief Executive (he had begun his career as a Jacksonian Democrat and had become a Whig, in part, at least, to protest of some of Jackson's more “imperial" tendencies). Tyler was the first Vice President to become President as a result of the death of a President (William Henry Harrison). Tyler was the first to establish the fact that a Vice President coming to power under such conditions would, in fact, assume the full mantle of the Presidency for the duration of his term. Tyler was the first President to be officially expelled from his own political party during his administration. Tyler was also the first President to marry (after, in his case, being the first sitting President to be widowed) during his years in office. And he was the first President—and thus far the only President—to father fifteen children, eight with his first wife and seven with his second.
In addition to these “firsts," Tyler would enjoy a more controversial place in history as either the first President to become a citizen of another country, subsequent to his Presidency, or the first President to become a traitor to his nation, subsequent to his Presidency. The determination of which of these mutually exclusive “firsts" one accepts depends on the side one espouses regarding the American Civil War. Tyler, after a failed attempt to reconcile the interests of North and South in a peace commission held in 1861, allowed himself to be elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, dying before he had been officially sworn in to take his seat in that governing body. For some, his willingness to serve in the Confederate congress was an act of treason. For others it bore testimony to his lifelong dedication to state's rights and his willingness to serve what he saw as his new nation, the Confederate States of America. Whichever way one sees it, this was the final, most controversial “first" in Tyler's remarkable political life.
In many ways this larger than life list of “firsts" seemed beautifully reflected in the extraordinary scope of the Tyler home here in the Virginia tidewater region. But the political impulses of both John Tyler and of his second wife, Julia, remain difficult to discern behind all these “firsts." Their grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, would be interested almost exclusively in the personalities of his famous forebears, and not so much in the public lives of his grandfather and grandmother. It would be the stories he told us, rather than any meaningful historical or political revelations, that would linger in the memory, after our visit here on this lovely summer day.
Harrison
