Об этой статье мне рассказал мой товарищ, который узнал про качественные http://www.oxyhealth.ru/pulsoximeters/ и купил один для своей тети. Тетушка очень обрадовалась, теперь ей гораздо легче следить за состоянием своего пульса. When William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840 his campaign stimulated more excitement than any previous one. Parades, slogans, whiskey, and songs rallied voters who saw in him a common man risen to the ranks of a military hero. On election day more than 80 percent of all eligible voters turned out, and in a close popular vote they chose him over the incumbent, Martin Van Buren. They had high hopes that Harrison would lead America out of a deep William Henry Harrison 77 economic depression and speak for the common folk more forcibly than did established politicians. Those hopes were quickly dashed when, one month after his inauguration, he died. "In memory of President Wm. H. Harrison,” a funeral ribbon said, "Deeply lamented by 16 millions of people.” k William Henry Harrison’s heritage was far different from the image of him as a simple farmer presented to the public in 1840. He was born on February 9, 1773, to Benjamin Harrison and Elizabeth Bassett Harrison at a manor house called Berkeley on the James River in Virginia, 24 miles east of Richmond. The distinguished Byrd family’s Westover mansion stood nearby, and on the opposite side of the James stood the Brandon mansion, occupied by others in the Harrison family. The Harrisons played an important role in Virginia’s settlement, some having served in the House of Burgesses. William’s father, Benjamin, owned thousands of acres and many slaves. When the colonies moved toward revolution, Benjamin Harrison served in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. With his father active on the Patriot side, William met the marquis de Lafayette and George Washington when they stayed at Berkeley. In 1781, at age nine, he watched British troops as they marched through his father’s plantation, burning furniture and destroying other property. Soon after, Benjamin Harrison fought with the Virginia militia in the defeat of the British at Yorktown. After the Revolution, the elder Harrison served three terms as governor. William’s early education consisted of tutoring before he attended Hampden-Sidney College in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He left there in 1789 to study medicine under Dr. Benjamin Rush, the nation’s leading physician, in Philadelphia. This choice, though, was more his father’s than his own, and soon after Benjamin Harrison died in April 1791, the affable young man decided to join the army. As a lieutenant on duty in the Northwest Territory he directed the building of two forts in 1793–94, and under General Anthony Wayne he fought at Fallen Timbers against a combined force of British troops and about 1,000 Indians, helping to achieve an important American victory. In 1795 Harrison married Anna Tuthill Symmes, daughter of a prosperous local farmer and judge. They had 10 children. Harrison resigned from the army in 1798 and accepted appointment as secretary of the Northwest Territory, a rugged frontier region under constant turmoil from battles between Indians and non-Indians. One year later he was elected the territory’s first delegate to Congress. Although it was a nonvoting position, a territorial delegate could make recommendations, and in December 1799 Harrison suggested a study of the land distribution system important to the Northwest. Congress agreed, and he chaired a special committee that recommended land be sold in small plots to reduce the role of speculators and enhance the individual’s opportunity to own a homestead. Where the Land Act of 1796 had stipulated that 50 percent of the territory’s land be sold in tracts of 5,770 acres and the rest in tracts of 640 acres, Harrison’s bill allowed land to be sold in tracts of 320 acres at just $2 an acre. Northwesterners applauded this substantial reform, modified slightly by the Senate on its way to passage. At the same time Harrison helped Congress devise a plan to divide the Northwest Territory in two, creating the Indiana (comprising present-day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), and Ohio territories. In recognition of his prominent role in developing the Northwest, in 1800 Harrison was appointed governor of Indiana Territory, a position he held for 12 years. With the governorship came substantial power to formulate policy, and Harrison had the difficult task of maintaining peaceful relations with the Indians while acquiring more land from them for white settlement. He often disliked the way whites 78 William Henry Harrison treated Indians and said if he were an Indian he would be resentful. Nevertheless, he skillfully negotiated treaties that resulted in the territory obtaining millions of acres, as was the case with the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, signed with the Miami, Potawatomi, and Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribes. This treaty and the continuing white intrusion onto Indian lands angered two Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (known as the Prophet), who united several tribes in a confederation. Tecumseh refused to recognize the Fort Wayne treaty and told Harrison that if he entered Indian Territory it would result in "bad consequences.” The consequences soon followed. In spring 1811 Harrison began training more than 1,000 volunteer and regular soldiers. He was subsequently appointed general, and that August he received orders to march north through the Wabash River Valley. He was told to meet with the Indians and try to arrange a peaceful settlement; if the Indians refused, he was to attack and destroy their confederation. With Tecumseh away, Harrison led his men toward the Prophet’s encampment. On November 6 he negotiated an armistice with the Prophet’s messenger and camped out along the Tippecanoe River. Early the following morning, with the sky still dark, the Indians attacked; Harrison’s men barely withstood the assault. A bullet went through the general’s hat, and another grazed his skull. "Indians were in the Camp before many of my men could get out of their tents,” he later reported. "Confusion for a short time prevailed, but aided by the great activities of the officers, I was soon enabled to form the men in order. . . .” Harrison repelled the attack with a bayonet charge, and swords, tomahawks, muskets, and battle axes all clashed in a fierce engagement. The following day his men entered the Prophet’s encampment and burned it. The victory, which dealt the Indian confederation a mortal blow, cost Harrison 188 casualties. At the time it raised questions as to whether he had blundered; as the years passed and white settlers overran more Indian land, the battle at Tippecanoe assumed epic proportions, with Harrison a heroic leader. Tippecanoe won William Henry Harrison a powerful supporter in Washington: Kentucky congressman Henry Clay. When the War of 1812 began, Clay obtained for Harrison a commission as brigadier general in the regular army, and later general commander of the army of the Northwest. After Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet defeated the British on Lake Erie, Harrison marched north and encountered a combined British-Indian army, with the Indians led by Tecumseh, at the Thames River on October 15, 1813. Tecumseh was killed during the battle, a rare victory for the Americans in a war mostly known for its botched military strategy. When the War of 1812 ended, Harrison returned to his farm near Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 1816 he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served one term and then was elected to the Ohio senate in 1819. After he was defeated for reelection, he again went back to his farm. In 1825 he won election to the U.S. Senate, where he supported federal funding of internal improvements. He argued for extending the Cumberland Road, which began in Maryland and traversed the Appalachian Mountains, saying it would benefit the entire nation. In fall 1827 he called for a protective tariff and supported the nationalist president, John Quincy Adams, for reelection. His service in the Senate provided an outline for his later presidential agenda: an activist national government committed to promoting business interests and economic expansion. Harrison’s Senate term was cut short when, with the help of Henry Clay, he was appointed minister to Colombia in 1828. Clay acted partly from friendship, but mainly from an ulterior motive: Harrison wanted to be John Quincy Adams’s running mate that year, and if that happened and Adams won, it would position Harrison for the presidency. Clay, however, coveted the White House for himself and by sendWilliam Henry Harrison 79 ing Harrison to Colombia he hoped to thwart him. As it turned out, John Quincy Adams lost the 1828 election. During the 1820s American politics underwent great change. The lowering of property qualifications for voting meant nearly all adult white males could cast ballots. This encouraged an opportunistic system geared to winning the popular vote, as first developed by the Democratic Party. Using such tactics, the Democrats ran Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1828 and won. By the mid-1830s, however, Jackson’s policies had antagonized those who thought the presidency too strong and who for a variety of reasons—everything from seeing their hopes for appointment to political office ruined to having their principles violated—disagreed with Jackson’s policies. These dissatisfied political leaders formed the Whig Party to oppose the Democrats and win the presidency. The Whigs were a curious combination. Many were refugees from the fading National Republican Party who wanted a federal government that would charter a national bank, fund internal improvements, and support a protective tariff as measures to help business and expand the economy. Others were states’ righters who thought President Jackson had sold them out with his stand against South Carolina’s nullification principle, and still others were Democrats disgruntled with Jackson’s destruction of the national bank. Despite its internal differences, the Whig Party’s dislike for Jackson held it together. Whigs especially opposed his accretion of power at the expense of Congress, as well as his attempt to form a coalition of northern businessmen and southern planters to govern America. Although the Whigs distrusted the masses, they concluded that to win office they had to copy the populist Democratic tactics. In 1836 they decided to run three candidates for the presidency, thinking they could defeat Democratic nominee Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president, by preventing any one person from gaining a majority in the electoral college. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they expected to broker a victory. Consequently, they ran Hugh L. White of Tennessee, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and William Henry Harrison, at that time holder of a minor political office, clerk of the Cincinnati Court of Common Pleas. Their strategy failed, but Harrison won 73 electoral votes, far more than the other Whig candidates. President Van Buren encountered serious political problems when an economic depression began soon after his inauguration. As the 1840 election approached, the Whigs sensed they had a good chance for victory. Henry Clay, then a senator, fully expected to win the Whig nomination and reside the following year in the White House. He wrote to a friend: "Our cause everywhere is making sure and certain progress, my particular cause could hardly be improved.” But many Whigs worried about nominating Clay. In political parlance, they thought he came with too much "baggage.” His outspoken call for a new national bank antagonized too many people; his ownership of slaves displeased Northerners critical of the practice; his defeat in the 1832 presidential election made him appear to be a loser. When Daniel Webster threw his support for the presidential nomination to William Henry Harrison, Clay’s candidacy faltered. Then New York political boss Thurlow Weed began working for Harrison’s nomination. At the Whig national convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839, Clay commanded a plurality of the delegates, but Weed slyly maneuvered a change in the voting procedure that gave Harrison the advantage and the victory. Neither Weed nor any other Harrison backer thought much about the general’s views, as long as they fit what the Whigs wanted. They chose Harrison precisely because few people knew where he stood—a shift away from Clay’s baggage to no baggage at all—and because they thought they could promote him as a military hero and frontiersman, just as the Democrats had done with Andrew Jackson. One Whig leader said, "Let no Committee, no convention, 80 William Henry Harrison no town meeting, ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now or what he will do hereafter.” Parades, rallies, and songs saturated the Harrison campaign. These devices were used to avoid the issues and make "Old Tip,” as newspapers called him, a folk hero. "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!” Whigs chanted to remind voters of Harrison’s greatest military victory and of his running mate, John Tyler of Virginia. One image for the campaign actually came from a Democratic newspaper that scoffed at the idea of the general becoming president: "Harrison for President! Why, he’s just a backwoodsman. He eats corn pone and drinks cider. His mother still lives in a log cabin.” Harrison’s promoters jumped on the statement and gleefully portrayed him as a hard cider and log cabin man, completely submerging his aristocratic origins and his wealth. Everywhere it could, the Harrison campaign draped its man in the symbols of the frontier. At one rally, a speaker sitting with the candidate on a platform rose and said: Log cabins, sirs, were the dwelling places of the founders of our Republic! It was a log cabin that sheltered the daring pioneers of liberty. . . . It was in view of the rock of Plymouth, my friends, that the Puritans of New England first erected the log cabins which sheltered the mothers and fathers of a race which now overspreads a continent. The crowd hooted and cheered: "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!” For his part, Harrison contributed to the image making. He wrote in 1840: "I would have preferred to remain with my family in . . . our log cabin . . . rather than become engaged in political or other disputes.” As Tippecanoe clubs sprang up around the country, E. G. Booz, a Philadelphia distiller whose name soon would be indelibly attached to liquor, distributed whiskey in cabin-shaped bottles. Log cabins, whiskey, frontier masculinity . . . all of this contrasted Harrison with the incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren, and a Whig song brought the differences to life: Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine, And lounge on his cushioned settee, Our man on a buckeye bench can recline, Content with hard cider he. While Van Buren explicitly opposed nationalistic projects such as internal improvements and argued against any interference with slavery, the Whigs never even bothered writing a platform. One Democrat compared the Whigs to the image of Nebuchadnezzar, "made of clay and brass and various materials, a single stone must shatter it to pieces.” As the Democrats and Whigs sidestepped the issue of slavery, those who considered human bondage morally reprehensible formed the Liberty Party and ran James G. Birney for president. Birney won few votes, but the party’s appearance signaled an abolitionist storm brewing on the political horizon. In the huge turnout of more than 80 percent of all eligible voters, Harrison polled 1,275,612 votes, a narrow margin over Van Buren’s 1,130,033. But in the electoral college Harrison won handily, with 234 votes to Van Buren’s 60. Harrison had once said, "To be esteemed eminently great it is necessary to be eminently good.” He would now try to apply that maxim to the country’s highest office. At age 67 the oldest man ever to be elected president, Harrison headed east for Washington in the spring of 1841 on a grueling trip made more difficult when crowds greeted him with ringing bells, receptions, and nearly endless dinners. He had shaken thousands of hands during the campaign, and he shook many more in the days before his inauguration. Former president and congressman John Quincy Adams, frequently critical of others, said about Harrison: "His popularity is all artificial. There is little confidence in his talents or firmness.” If by artificial Adams meant an appeal to the masses as opposed to an educated elite, he had assessed the situation accurately. The William Henry Harrison 81 enthusiasm surrounding Harrison’s inauguration reached feverish heights; frequent ceremonies and a constant flow of office seekers besieged the president-elect. In an expression of cordiality, President Van Buren invited Harrison to the White House for dinner and subsequently said about his successor: "He talks and thinks with . . . much ease and vivacity. . . . He is as tickled with the Presidency as is a young woman with a new bonnet.” The activity took its toll, though, and wore Harrison down. On March 4, 1841, without an overcoat and hat, Old Tip rode on horseback to his inauguration on a gray, rainy, and raw day. He presented his address to the largest inauguration crowd ever, more than 50,000 people, and spoke for longer than 90 minutes. In his speech he offered an idea of how his administration would operate. He said executive power would be wielded sparingly, and he vowed to serve only one term. The president, Harrison cautioned, should never intrude on Congress, and while he would recommend legislation written by others, he would never be the source of it. In a rebuke to Andrew Jackson’s arbitrary removal of federal funds from the national bank, he insisted Congress should control revenues. In another contrast to Jackson, he promised to use the veto sparingly, mainly to protect against violations of the Constitution. He criticized the spoils system, by which government bureaucrats were appointed according to their party loyalty, and in another dig at Jackson who had removed two treasury secretaries in his effort to kill the national bank, Harrison promised never to remove a treasury secretary without a full accounting to Congress. Harrison’s emphasis on congressional power reflected Whig principles and, combined with his friendly personality, made it appear he could be easily pushed around. Some said the real president would be powerful Kentucky senator Henry Clay. Harrison contributed to this view and displayed considerable diffidence when he said shortly before entering the White House that if the Constitution allowed it, he would be happy to relinquish the presidency to Clay and return to his farm. Clay indeed tried to exert control when he told Harrison whom to appoint as treasury secretary, but Old Tip rebuffed him and in a heated exchange supposedly said to the Kentuckian: "Mr. Clay, you forget that I am the President.” When Clay pressed Harrison to call a special session of Congress to consider economic issues that would ease the depression, the president at first refused. He may have realized that a special session would put Clay in the limelight. To Clay’s protests he said, "You are too impetuous.” But after a report from the treasury revealed a looming revenue shortfall, Harrison changed his mind and called the session for May. The Whigs planned for Harrison’s cabinet to govern in concert with Congress, in effect making the president a mere single vote among many. By late March, though, Harrison was having trouble with this arrangement and showed signs of wanting to take greater control. Then, as the crush of office seekers continued to sap his energy, he caught a cold, one that may have festered since his inauguration, and in the closing days of March it turned to pneumonia. The treatment he received almost assured he would die. To the consternation of more progressive physicians, the attending doctors bled the president; then they fed him opium, camphor, brandy, and Serpentaria, the root of the Virginia snake weed. His death came a few hours after midnight on April 4, 1841. His last spoken words were reported to be: "I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.” For the first time, America faced the crisis of a president’s death in office. In choosing John Tyler to be Harrison’s running mate, the Whigs had hardly considered his suitability for the presidency. They had picked him because he came from a populous state, Virginia, and because his states’ rights views and ownership of slaves appealed to the more conservative wing 82 William Henry Harrison of the party. Now their choice would resound in ways never expected. William Henry Harrison occupied the White House for too short a time to leave a notable presidential legacy, but his 1840 campaign continued the popularization of politics begun under Andrew Jackson and refined modern campaign tactics. Even more, it demonstrated the growing tendency of the masses in a democratic country to consider themselves the
makers, or breakers, of their presidents.