The following was published in the Dec. 8, 2005 edition of the Falls Church News-Press. It was based on original research done by me in 1981, in the months following the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan at that time, in response to the popular discourse that followed it on the notion that every U.S. president who was first elected at the top of a decade — Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy — died in office (Reagan, as it turned out, broke that so-called “curse”). The decision to publish it when I did in the News-Press was based on the combination of a slow news week and my nagging sense that I needed to throw this into the public domain. To me, actually, it is a fairly compelling argument. In those days, no one would admit that a U.S. president could possibly be vulnerable to foul play for fear of the public reaction. At any rate, you read it here first:

Did the ninth president of the United States, the first to die in office, actually succumb to pneumonia one month after his inauguration, or was he the victim of foul play?

A review of the medical reports of the so-called “treatment” regimen imposed on the 69-year old Gen. William Henry Harrison when he fell ill shortly after taking office in March 1841 provides circumstantial evidence that the elderly hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe might have been done in by medical assassins. An official report at the time stated that he died not of pneumonia, but of the treatment he was subjected to for “an ordinary winter cold.”

When combined with the dramatic reversal of vital national policies that occurred in the wake of Harrison’s untimely death, the circumstantial medical evidence becomes cause for even greater suspicion.

In other words, when the legal question, “cui bono?” or “who benefits?” is applied to the death of President Harrison, startling answers emerge showing a dramatic advantage obtained for Harrison’s and his Whig allies’ political adversaries by his death.

Given this accrued advantage, it is curious that history has not produced any record of healthy skepticism about his actual cause of death. Only one author, a John Smith Dye writing in 1864 in a book entitled The Adder’s Den, or Secrets of the GreatConspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America, has ever alleged that Harrison was assassinated, by use of arsenic, because he opposed a pro-slavery scheme to annex Texas, a matter left to his vice-president John Tyler to achieve.

It is not surprising that, at the time of Harrison’s demise, the nation’s leaders dared not even so much as breathe suspicion of foul play, especially as it could not be firmly established short of very severe and messy accusations against ostensibly respectable physicians. That could have profoundly destabilized the young republic already being sorely tested by internal divisions that would lead to the great Civil War within two decades.

But there is circumstantial evidence, at least, that secretly many people thought Harrison did not die of natural causes.

The most visible was the Currier lithograph depicting the death of Harrison in his bed with his grieving wife and friends at his bedside. While he is shown dead and others are gazing upon him or weeping with faces in their hands, there is one person, identified as Secretary of State Daniel Webster who is looking away from the scene, at the “audience,” so to speak.

Rather than a look of mourning, he has a distinctly sinister look with the forefinger of his right hand elevated, as if to be a code or signal of some kind. It could be disputed whether the figure identified as Webster was really Webster or one of the physicians.

Next to the figure identified as Webster is a physician identified as N. W. Worthington, but that is neither of the names of the chief physicians attending to Harrison as later reported by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Those names were Drs. Miller and May.

Even more curious is the fact that there are at least two more each slightly different Currier lithographs of the Harrison death bed scene, one of which does not show the Webster figure in this way, but shows the same finger signal being delivered by the Postmaster General. In one, a figure has his hand in his jacket, in another, he does not. In one, the Webster figure is holding a scroll out, in another he’s not.

It is well known that secret conspiratorial societies were rampant in that era, including the Knights of the Golden Circle (which evolved into the Ku Klux Klan) that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, belonged to. These societies were known to include the cultivation of techniques of assassination by poisoning in their arsenal.

The official medical record of the treatment Harrison received in the hospital also adds tremendously to the grounds for suspicion.

In fact, the August 1841 edition of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, published just a few months after Harrison’s death, suggests that it was the medical treatment that Harrison received, and not any virus or bacteria, which caused his demise.

According to its account, following Harrison’s inauguration on March 4, 1841, he was well until about mid-March, when he was reported “mildly fatigued and under the weather,” but still carrying on a normal schedule.

In other words, the popular notion that Harrison came down with pneumonia immediately upon completing his snow-driven inaugural ceremonies and extended inaugural address was simply not true.

It was not until March 27, more than three weeks after the inauguration, that Harrison “took a violent chill,” for which one of his physicians, a Dr. Miller, prescribed “mustard to the stomach, heat to the extremities, warm drinks and a mild laxative.”

According to the account, the next morning Harrison felt worse. Dr. Miller “bled the president from a vein in the arm, then, seeing that caused his pulse to weaken, stopped that and resorted to cupping. He gave a pill every two hours.” (Cupping is a method of causing local irritations. An inverted cup is held over a lighted candle. When the cup is hot, it is applied to the patient’s skin. As the cup cools, the skin of the patient is sucked up into the cup.)

Next, Dr. Miller administered “a blister over the side with 20 gtts. of calomel and 11 gtts. of laudanum,” which caused Harrison “to pass into a deep sleep.”

Dr. Miller then called in still another physician, Dr. May, for consultation. The two administered “two more pills, another blister, calomel, ipecac and rhubarb.” They reported the treatment “debilitated the president.”

They followed with “opium, camphor, weak brandy toddy, wine whey, more pills and an infusion of serpentaria and seneca.” (Serpentaria is the root of the Virginia snake weed, and seneca is a crude petroleum used by the Seneca Indians as a linament.)

On the fourth day of treatment, April 1, the physicians administered “more calomel, ipecac and rhubarb with light opiates, occasionally medicine discontinued and stimulants given.” When the medicines brought on “sinking spells” they gave Harrison brandy. His blistered side was rubbed with “Mucurial ointment.”

Miraculously, Harrison held out under the barrage for three more days before dying on April 4. The physicians declared the cause of death: “Pneumonia was used as a general term. It was in fact one of our ordinary winter fevers of low grade in which pneumonic inflammation, hepatic congestion and gastro-intestinal irritation were the prominent traits.” The report concluded that Harrison was “so worn out, nothing could save him.”

Thus, the physicians’ own diagnosis implied, as the Boston medical journal subsequently stated, that the death was the result of treatment of an “ordinary winter cold.”

Still, understand, it is not the circumstances of the death, per se, of Harrison that should arouse healthy suspicions about what really happened, but the political about face in the policy direction of the nation that subsequently occurred when his vice president, John Tyler, assumed the presidency.

Two days before Harrison’s death, a correspondence between two leading opponents to the policy package that Harrison had hammered out with fellow Whig, Senate majority leader Henry Clay of Kentucky, exclaimed, “We have won over Tyler, he is on our side!”

Clay and other Whig leaders, meanwhile, were kept from seeing Harrison by the White House staff. “The President is better,” they were told.

The rapid unraveling of the Harrison-Clay agenda followed.

Upon his election in November 1840, Harrison, the son of a signer of the U.S. Constitution, began frequent meetings with Clay, who was to become the Senate majority leader given a sweep by the Whigs in the 1840 election that included the political rise of future U.S. President and fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln.

Harrison and Clay crafted a legislative package that included the reinstatement of a national central bank and aggressive national rail of canal infrastructure development. It was a legislative package that, due to Harrison’s death, would have to await Lincoln’s presidency to get implemented when it helped spur the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution.

Harrison and Clay agreed to call a special session of Congress within two months after Harrison’s inauguration to sweep through their policy package, which they coined, “The American System.”

Then came Harrison’s untimely death.

Clay proceeded according to plan, and the special session of Congress was convened. It passed the entire package that Harrison and Clay devised.

But Tyler vetoed every key component. A former Jacksonian Democrat who “converted” to the Whig party in 1832, Tyler emerged as Harrison’s vice presidential running mate through a series of backroom deals that forged an unholy alliance between northern and southern wings of the Whig party. Tyler was from pro-slavery Virginia. While born and raised in Virginia, Harrison had become, following his famous military defeat of the Indian leader Tecumseh at the Tippecanoe River in Indiana, the first elected representative to Congress from the Ohio Territory and subsequently its governor.

Tyler’s allegiance was clearly not with the economic development thrust of the Clay-led northern Whigs, and when he vetoed the entire Whig legislative package in the wake of Harrison’s death, his entire cabinet, made up of Harrison appointees, resigned en masse.

Tyler became a lame duck one-term president at that point, a “man without a country” trusted by neither party. But he had carried out the dismantling of the Whig agenda made possible only by the death of President Harrison, and arranged for the annexation of Texas.

Meanwhile, the Whig party proved fatally wounded by Tyler’s treachery. Clay won his party’s presidential nomination in 1844, but lost the election to James K. Polk. The Whigs succeeded in claiming the presidency in 1848 with the election of another aging military hero, Gen. Zachary Taylor, but he, too, died in office. With the death of Clay, himself, in 1853 came the death of the party, requiring one of its strongest figures, the future President Lincoln, to align with a new party in time to preserve the union through the Civil War, then only to become the third Whig/Republican president to die in office in just 25 years.