He died of the presidency.(Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(William Henry Harrison)

Lacking an Arthur Schlesinger to paint his mayfly-brief administration in purple hues of glory, poor William Henry Harrison died and became an asterisk. Aside from a few libertarian wise guys who praise his month-long Presidency for its magnificent brevity, Old Tippecanoe is the President who doesn't really count.

A Tidewater Virginia aristocrat and son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison served as governor of the Indiana Territory, U.S. senator and representative, and minister to Colombia. In 1811, he commanded the territorial militia at the trippingly named Battle of Tippecanoe, whence his quaint sobriquet. Two years later his army killed the Shawnee leader Tecumseh.

Ignoring the lesson every mother has imparted to every child since time began, the 68-year-old Harrison refused to wear a coat or hat at his inauguration on a raw, windy March 4, 1841. He spoke to a crowd of 50,000 for almost two hours, delivering the longest inaugural address in U.S. history even though "not one person in a hundred could hear it" as New Yorker Philip Hone complained. (Harrison's grandson, Benjamin, also delivered a cruelly long inaugural speech, although Benjamin, having learned his lesson, used an umbrella.)

William Henry Harrison was at pains to counter the general belief of the country's mandarins that he was a lightweight. During the campaign, the Whigs had seized on a silly slander by a Baltimore Democrat to fit the cultured Harrison for populist clothing as an alcohol-guzzling, Indian-slaying frontiersman. ("Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.")

Thus his epic speech. Derided as pretentious for its many classical references (Daniel Webster, after taking a shot at editing it, joked, "I've just killed 17 Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts"), Old Tippecanoe's marathon address does traverse the path of tedium. But give President Harrison credit: he kept his central promise, which was "that under no ...