This week marks the 250th anniversary of American independence. To mark that, I’ll have a series of 250th-themed columns this week.
When it came time to sign the Declaration of Independence — something that didn’t happen until Aug. 2, 1776 — one delegate described the mood as “pensive and awful silence.”
Those who inked their names to the document knew that while they were signing the Declaration of Independence, they might also be signing their death warrants if the revolution failed.
Elbridge Gerry of future gerrymandering fame was about to sign his name into history when a portly delegate from Virginia approached him and, in a loud voice, told the slender legislator from Massachusetts: “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”
That jokester was Benjamin Harrison, one of our founders who was quite colorful at the time but whose name has now faded into the gray recesses of history. That’s too bad because Harrison was more than just present when the Declaration of Independence was adopted and later signed — he presided over the debates that led to independence. When it came time to announce that the delegates had approved the Declaration, he was the one who made the announcement. If television had existed back then, he’d be in every news report on the dramatic events of early July 1776. Instead, today Harrison is so ignored that his character doesn’t even appear in the musical “1776.” At best, we confuse his name with other Harrisons in our history — Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. The former was his son, the latter his great-grandson. In the late 1700s, though, Benjamin Harrison was a political power. As we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, let’s devote a few words today to the man who wielded the gavel that day in Philadelphia.
The Harrison we’re dealing with was Benjamin Harrison V; the Roman numeral gives some hint as to the family’s status in colonial Virginia, although that’s something historians have assigned to keep all the Benjamin Harrisons straight. The family didn’t use them. Benjamin Harrison I had been on the Governor’s Council back in 1633, just three years after he arrived in Virginia. More than a century later, the Harrisons were wealthy and powerful; the Berkeley Plantation in Charles City County was the family seat. It was there that tragedy struck the family in 1745. A summer storm blew up, and Benjamin Harrison IV went to close a window. A lightning bolt killed him and one of his young daughters who was holding his hand.
“Thus, at the age of 19, Benjamin V became a very wealthy man,” the Constitution Center says in its biography of Harrison. Even after his father’s estate was divided between other children, Benjamin owned thousands of acres — and upwards of a hundred enslaved people. Harrison also inherited his family’s taste for politics. In 1749, when Benjamin Harrison was just 23, he was elected to the House of Burgesses, although he wasn’t old enough to take the seat until 1752. He’d be in politics until the end of his life — he died in 1791 just days after being reelected to the legislature, although we’re skipping over most of his story, so let’s back up.
Harrison became a political force in the House of Burgesses — and a leading critic of British policies. When the House recoiled against taxes imposed by London, it appointed a committee to draft a response; Harrison was on it. Harrison even went so far as to suggest that the British Parliament had no authority over the colonists. Others were moving in that political direction, but Harrison was one of the first to get there. Like many Virginian planters of his generation, Harrison was conflicted on the issue of slavery: He owned people and would not have been wealthy otherwise, but he also joined with Thomas Jefferson to call for Britain to end the slave trade. (Some historians have suggested this opposition to importing more enslaved people was more monetary than moral; imported slaves reduced the value of the existing people held in servitude.)
Come 1774, the crisis in relations between the colonies and Britain was starting to boil. When the colonies decided to assemble a Continental Congress — a rogue body the king didn’t recognize — Virginia appointed a seven-member delegation that historian Virginius Dabney says was the strongest of any colony. Benjamin Harrison was one of the seven.
Fellow Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph heaped praise on Harrison: “A favorite of the day was Benjamin Harrison. With strong sense and a temper not disposed to compromise with ministerial power, he scruples not to utter any untruth. During a long service in the House of Burgesses, his frankness, though sometimes tinctured with bitterness, has been the source of considerable attachment.”
The Massachusetts delegation — led by John Adams and Samuel Adams, the radicals of their day — was not so enamored of Harrison. Their personalities clashed almost immediately. John Adams was a puritanical sort; Harrison was fond of a good bottle of liquor. Harrison’s expanding waistline also betrayed his appetite for a good meal.
The traits that had made Harrison popular in Virginia did not translate to the flinty New Englanders. John Adams wrote in his diary that Harrison was “another Sir John Falstaff” — the hard-drinking and somewhat rotund buffoon in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Adams dismissed Harrison as “obscene,” “profane” and “impious.” Adams did grudgingly concede that Harrison was so adamant in his anti-British views that if a carriage hadn’t been available to take him to Philadelphia, “he would have come on foot.” In time, even Adams conceded that Harrison’s sense of humor was good for easing tensions. Harrison got along much better with another Massachusetts delegate: the Boston merchant John Hancock, who made his money smuggling one of Harrison’s favorite products. Rum.
Politically, Harrison was something of a centrist at the meetings in Philadelphia. He was not as radical as the Adamses, although few were. But when Congress took up a conciliatory message to the king known as the Olive Branch Petition, Harrison wasn’t in the mood for what he considered obsequiousness. John Dickenson of Pennsylvania was among the least inclined to make trouble with the king. Dickenson said he disapproved of only one word in the petition: “Congress” (since it was, in the king’s view, an illegal body). That drove Harrison to snap back: “There is but one word in the paper, Mr. President, of which I do approve, and that is the word ‘Congress.’”
Harrison was part of many of the big events of the day. He was there in St. John’s Church when Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. One of Harrison’s roommates in Philadelphia for a time was a fellow Virginian — George Washington. He was on the committee sent to Massachusetts to inspect the new army that his former roommate now led.
Then it came time for Harrison to move front and center — literally. Although Harrison never quite got along with the New England delegates, he was considered a steady hand and someone respected enough to keep the Congress together during controversial debates. In early July 1776, he presided over the climactic debate over the resolution from fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee on whether to declare independence. Then he presided over the debate on whether to adopt the words of another fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, as the official explanation for independence, which meant that he was the one tasked with reading it aloud to the delegates. It took 13 colonies to make independence work, but three Virginians were at the center of the action in Philadelphia: Lee, who introduced the resolution for independence; Jefferson, who wrote the words explaining independence; and Harrison, who wielded the gavel for perhaps the most important debates in American history.
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Harrison’s political career continued long after the events in Philadelphia. The Virginia legislature elected him speaker of the House — 51-23 over Thomas Jefferson. When the British army came to Virginia late in the war, Benedict Arnold took over the Harrison family estate — and burned every portrait of any Harrison he could find. Shortly after the American victory at Yorktown, Harrison took on a new position, as Virginia’s governor. He found the treasury nearly bare. In the west, George Rogers Clark was urging the governor to take military action against Native American tribes. Harrison told Clark that Virginia couldn’t afford more warfare.
Not only was the state out of money, Harrison nearly was, too. The war had ravaged his estates, and he spent his later years fretting about finances. When Harrison died in 1791, his eldest son had just started medical school in Philadelphia. With his father’s passing, his son could no longer afford to attend school, so he joined the military instead. That path led William Henry Harrison to become a war hero and, eventually (although briefly), president. Even in death, Benjamin Harrison influenced the course of American history.
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