Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison arrives in American history with a paradox stitched neatly to the inside of his coat: a quiet man descended from noise. He is the grandson of a war hero president who died too soon to do much harm or much good, the son of a congressman with a frontier’s sense of town duty, and himself a lawyer whose sentences are careful at the edges and firm in the middle. He grows up with the knowledge that his name is already a quotation and decides, early, that the only answer to inherited echo is unshowy competence. Born in North Bend, Ohio, in 1833, he spends his first years under the long shadow of William Henry Harrison’s fame and the short shadow of that fame’s brevity. The family moves to Indiana, where weather and work combine to build the sort of character that lacks adjectives. He reads law under established hands, marries Caroline Scott—earnest, musical, attentive to improvement—and settles in Indianapolis to make a living by making arguments that judges can trust. His voice is clear without being theatrical; his industry is the kind that makes clerks smile; his piety is a daily grammar rather than a sermon delivered at strangers. If you are looking for a figure destined to belt a nation into a new shape, you will miss him at first glance. If you are looking for a figure designed to keep the machine of law from rattling itself apart, he is almost ideal.
Selenius Media
