William Henry Harrison enters the line of presidents like a figure carved from the timber of the Old Northwest—raw-edged, weather-tested, built more out of marching orders than out of pamphlets. He is not the architect of a doctrine; he is an officer trained to turn geography into sentences that can be obeyed. Before his presidency reduces itself in popular memory to the arithmetic of thirty-one days, he has already lived the better part of the republic’s first half century as a surveyor’s son, a soldier who learned the frontier’s grammar, a territorial governor who turned treaties into roads, a general who taught anxious towns to sleep through a spring, a diplomat who could be courteous without being vague, and a candidate who understood sooner than most that, in an age of crowds, a symbol can be as effective as a statute. His story is less a straight line than a succession of posts: this fort, that river, this assembly, that election—each a place where the young nation discovered how far it was willing to travel to make its maps true.

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