des Beaux Arts, Paris, under Cabanel and Carolus Duran; his “November” (honourable mention, 1882) was purchased by the French government. Another brother, Butler Harrison (d. 1886), was a figure painter.
HARRISON, WILLIAM (1534–1593), English topographer and
antiquary, was born in London on the 18th of April 1534. He
was educated, according to his own account, at St Paul’s school
and at Westminster under Alexander Nowell. In 1551 he was
at Cambridge, but he took his B.A. degree from Christ Church,
Oxford, in 1560. He was inducted early in 1559 to the rectory
of Radwinter, Essex, on the presentation of Sir William Brooke,
Lord Cobham, to whom he had formerly acted as chaplain; and
from 1571 to 1581 he held from another patron, Francis de la
Wood, the living of Wimbish in the same county. He became
canon of Windsor in 1586, and his death and burial are noted in
the chapter book of St George’s chapel on the 24th of April 1593.
His famous and amusing Description of England was undertaken for the queen’s printer, Reginald Wolfe, who designed the publication of “an universall cosmographie of the whole world . . . with particular histories of every knowne nation.” After Wolfe’s death in 1576 this comprehensive plan was reduced to descriptions and histories of England, Scotland and Ireland. The historical section was to be supplied by Raphael Holinshed, the topographical by Harrison. The work was eventually published as The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland . . . by Raphael Holinshed and others, and was printed in two black-letter folio volumes in 1577. Harrison’s Description of England, humbly described as his “foule frizeled treatise,” and dedicated to his patron Cobham, is an invaluable survey of the condition of England under Elizabeth, in all its political, religious and social aspects. Harrison is a minute and careful observer of men and things, and his descriptions are enlivened with many examples of a lively and caustic humour which makes the book excellent reading. In spite of his Puritan prejudices, which lead him to regret that the churches had not been cleared of their “pictures in glass” (“by reason of the extreme cost thereof”), and to exhaust his wit on the effeminate Italian fashions of the younger generation, he had an eye for beauty and is loud in his praise of such architectural gems as Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster. He is properly contemptuous of the snobbery that was even then characteristic of English society; but his account of “how gentlemen are made in England” must be read in full to be appreciated. He is especially instructive on the condition and services of the Church immediately after the Reformation; notably in the fact that, though an ardent Protestant, he is quite unconscious of any breach of continuity in the life and organization of the Church of England.
Harrison also contributed the translation from Scots into English of Bellenden’s version of Hector Boëce’s Latin Description of Scotland. His other works include a “Chronologie,” giving an account of events from the creation to the year 1593, which is of some value for the period covered by the writer’s lifetime. This, with an elaborate treatise on weights and measures, remains in MS. in the diocesan library of Londonderry.
For the later editions of the Chronicles of England . . . see Holinshed. The second and third books of Harrison’s Description were edited by Dr F. J. Furnivall for the New Shakspere Society, with extracts from his “Chronologie” and from other contemporary writers, as Shakspere’s England (2 vols., 1877–1878).
HARRISON, WILLIAM HENRY (1773–1841), ninth president
of the United States, was born at Berkeley, Charles City county,
Virginia, on the 9th of February 1773, the third son of Benjamin
Harrison (c. 1740–1791). His father was long prominent in
Virginia politics, and became a member of the Virginia House
of Burgesses in 1764, opposing Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act
resolutions in the following year; he was a member of the
Continental Congress in 1774–1777, signing the Declaration of
Independence and serving for a time as president of the Board
of War; speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1777–1782;
governor of Virginia in 1781–1784; and in 1788 as a
member of the Virginia Convention he actively opposed the
ratification of the Federal Constitution by his state. William
Henry Harrison received a classical education at Hampden-Sidney
College, where he was a student in 1787–1790, and began
a medical course in Philadelphia, but the death of his father
caused him to discontinue his studies, and in November 1791 he
entered the army as ensign in the Tenth Regiment at Fort
Washington, Cincinnati. In the following year he became a
lieutenant, and subsequently acted as aide-de-camp to General
Anthony Wayne in the campaign which ended in the battle of
Fallen Timbers on the 10th of August 1794. He was promoted to
a captaincy in 1797 and for a brief period served as commander of
Fort Washington, but resigned from the army in June 1798.
Soon afterwards he succeeded Winthrop Sargent as secretary of
the North-west Territory. In 1799 he was chosen by the Jeffersonian
party of this territory as the delegate of the territory in
Congress. While serving in this capacity he devised a plan for
disposing of the public lands upon favourable terms to actual
settlers, and also assisted in the division of the North-west
Territory. It was his ambition to become governor of the more
populous eastern portion, which retained the original name, but
instead, in January 1800, President John Adams appointed him
governor of the newly created Indiana Territory, which comprised
until 1809 a much larger area than the present state of
the same name. (See Indiana: History.) He was not sworn
into office until the 10th of January 1801, and was governor
until September 1812. Among the legislative measures of his
administration may be mentioned the attempted modification
of the slavery clause of the ordinance of 1787 by means of an
indenture law—a policy which Harrison favoured; more
effective land laws; and legislation for the more equitable
treatment of the Indians and for preventing the sale of liquor to
them. In 1803 Harrison also became a special commissioner to
treat with the Indians “on the subject of boundary or lands,”
and as such negotiated various treaties—at Fort Wayne (1803
and 1809), Vincennes (1804 and 1809) and Grouseland (1805)—by
which the southern part of the present state of Indiana and
portions of the present states of Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri
were opened to settlement. For a few months after the division
in 1804 of the Louisiana Purchase into the Orleans Territory
and the Louisiana Territory he also acted as governor of the
Louisiana Territory—all of the Louisiana Purchase N. of the
thirty-third parallel, his jurisdiction then being the greatest
in extent ever exercised by a territorial official in the United
States.
The Indian cessions of 1809, along the Wabash river, aroused the hostility of Tecumseh (q.v.) and his brother, familiarly known as “The Prophet,” who were attempting to combine the tribes between the Ohio and the Great Lakes in opposition to the encroachment of the whites. Several fruitless conferences between the governor and the Indian chiefs, who were believed to be encouraged by the British, resulted in Harrison’s advance with a force of militia and regulars to the Tippecanoe river, where (near the present Lafayette, Ind.) on the 7th of November 1811 he won over the Indians a victory which established his military reputation and was largely responsible for his subsequent nomination and election to the presidency of the United States. From one point of view the battle of Tippecanoe may be regarded as the opening skirmish of the war of 1812. When in the summer of 1812 open hostilities with Great Britain began, Harrison was appointed by Governor Charles Scott of Kentucky major-general in the militia of that state. A few weeks later (22nd August 1812) he was made brigadier-general in the regular U.S. army, and soon afterwards was put in command of all the troops in the north-west, and on the 2nd of March 1813 he was promoted to the rank of major-general. General James Winchester, whom Harrison had ordered to prepare to cross Lake Erie on the ice and surprise Fort Malden, turned back to rescue the threatened American settlement at Frenchtown (now Monroe), on the Raisin river, and there on the 22nd of January 1813 was forced to surrender to Colonel Henry A. Proctor. Harrison’s offensive operations being thus checked, he accomplished nothing that summer except to hold in check Proctor, who (May 1–5) besieged him at Fort Meigs, the American advanced
