- Historic Sites The Harrisons Of Berkeley Hundred Five
successive Benjamin Harrisons created a private empire of
tobacco and trade and a great Virginia plantation April 1957 |
Volume 8, Issue 3 With a commission as an ensign in the Army
obtained for him in 1791 by Washington, young Harrison rose fast
in what Virginians called “the West” and won national fame for
his victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. He had inherited his
father’s cheerfulness, generosity, and forthrightness, and it
was simple to express his innate courtesy in the plain manners
of the frontier. Too self-assured for snobbishness, he quickly
put others at their ease. All of this caused him to be accepted
as a simple son of democracy. As in the day of the big planters
his ancestors became the biggest, in the day of the plain man
William Henry became the plainest. It was Harrison’s folksiness
that the powers in the new Whig party seized upon as a campaign
asset when they nominated him for President in 1840. The son of
Virginia’s plantation a