Benjamin Harrison Facts & Worksheets

• Harrison was finally elected to the U.S. Senate from Indiana, where he served from 1881 to 1887. He was in charge of the Transportation Routes and Territories committees. He supported Republican policies like generous Civil War pensions, education for freedmen, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first significant federal law to ban a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the US, halting Chinese labourer immigration for 10 years and making Chinese residents ineligible for naturalised citizenship.
• Harrison stayed in the spotlight despite fights within the party and the Democratic redistricting of Indiana. This set the stage for his presidential ambitions. After a contested convention in 1888, he won the Republican nomination with the help of James G. Blaine and chose Levi P. Morton as his running mate. Harrison ran a “front-porch” campaign that focused on protective tariffs and key swing states. He won the Electoral College even though he got fewer votes than Democrat Grover Cleveland.

PRESIDENCY

• On 4 March 1889, Chief Justice Melville Fuller swore in Benjamin Harrison as the 23rd president of the US. His first speech, which was much shorter than his grandfather William Henry Harrison’s, stressed the importance of religion and education in the growth of the nation. He also promised a protective tariff and called for industrial growth in the cotton states and mining territories. Harrison pushed for statehood for US territories, pensions for veterans, updating the Navy and merchant marine, and a foreign policy of not getting involved under the Monroe Doctrine.
• Harrison made independent cabinet appointments during his time in office, which often upset Republican party leaders. He chose people based on their Civil War service, ties to Indiana, and Presbyterian faith. Harrison still wanted to reform the civil service, but he only did so in small ways, like appointing Theodore Roosevelt and Hugh Smith Thompson to the Civil Service Commission. He mostly stayed away from bigger reforms. 
• However, officials’ poor management led to accusations of corruption. Harrison also supported the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the McKinley Tariff. These were all difficult issues to deal with because they involved monopolies, tariffs, and bimetallism, but enforcement and compromise were hard to come by. Harrison pushed for civil rights laws that would protect voting rights, fund education regardless of race, and add an amendment to the Constitution to counteract the Supreme Court’s Civil Rights Cases (1883).
• However, most of these efforts failed in Congress. He was in charge of labour reforms, such as rules for workplace safety, an eight-hour workday for federal workers, and an investigation of urban slums. Harrison’s Native American policy was based on assimilation, as shown by the Dawes Act. However, his administration was in charge of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The massacre was also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, involved nearly three hundred Lakota people killed by soldiers of the US Army.
• The White House got electricity and a modern steel navy was built as part of technological modernisation. Harrison also had a strong foreign policy. He negotiated tariff reciprocity treaties with Latin America, settled the Samoan three-power protectorate dispute, restored US pork exports to Europe, handled crises in Alaska and Chile, and backed the annexation of Hawaii, even though the treaty failed after he left office.
• Harrison’s campaign for re-election in 1892 was hurt by problems within his own party, a weak economy, the rise of the Populist Party, and the death of his wife Caroline. Grover Cleveland beat him, winning both the popular and electoral votes.

LATER LIFE

• Benjamin Harrison went to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in June 1893 after he left the presidency. He then went back to his home in Indianapolis. He was elected commander (president) of the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States on 3 May 1893, not long after. Harrison lived in San Francisco for a few months in 1894, where he taught law at Stanford University. 
• Some Republicans urged him to run for president again in 1896, but he said no and instead travelled around the country to speak in support of William McKinley’s campaign.
• Harrison was a trustee of Purdue University from June 1895 to March 1901. Harrison Hall, a dormitory at the school, was named after him. He wrote and published a number of articles about the federal government and the presidency during this time.
• In 1897, these articles were collected into a book called This Country of Ours. That year, when he was sixty-two, he married Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, the widow of his late wife and niece of his late wife. Harrison’s adult children from his first marriage did not like this marriage and did not go to the wedding. He and Mary later had a daughter named Elizabeth. Harrison was the lawyer for the Republic of Venezuela in its fight with Great Britain over British Guiana in 1898.
• He wrote a long 800-page brief and spent more than twenty-five hours making his case in front of an international court in Paris. Harrison did not win the case, but his work in court made him famous around the world. He was an active Presbyterian all his life. He was an elder in his Indianapolis church and on a special committee to change the creed of the national Presbyterian General Assembly. However, he died before he could vote at its meeting.