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Indiana University 
submitted to a liberal portion of personal abuse.®^ It was 
a year of conventions and meetings, county, district, and state ; 
first voters’ conventions, young men’s conventions, and great 
barbecue assemblies.'^- The picturesque military record of 
General Harrison made him an ideal newspaper and stump 
orator candidate, and the appeal both to the gregarious in- 
stinct and hero-worship propensities of the frontier was too 
much for the Democrats. In their efforts to belittle such out- 
rageous tactics the Democrats almost hit upon the temper- 
ance issue. In their competition for the rough and simple 
life the Whigs had gained the jump,^^ so Democratic cam- 
paign orators and papers attacked the federal brawls, and the 
corruption of the youth of the land was denounced and 
ministers of the gospel appealed to.^® 
Harrison was said to believe in property qualification for voters, in selling poor 
white men into slavery, imprisonment for debt, and favoring- the placing of foreigners 
on a level with negroes and mulattoes. He was a defaulter, a seducer, and a Black 
Cockade Federalist in favor of alien and sedition laws and a standing army. While 
Wellington lost 60,000 to become the hero of AVaterloo, Napoleon 1,000,000 to gain his 
title, and General Jackson 2,000 to win lasting fame. General Harrison to become the 
great hero of the land had killed, 000,038 of the enemy in a skirmish and lost twice 
as many of his own men. He didn’t have sense enough to answer his own correspondence 
or make speeches, so had to be closely guarded by a committee of conscience-keepers. 
When the caged hero or “General Mum’’ got loose in part he always let some kind of 
a cat out of the bag. He had drawn $200,000 from the public treasury and been elected 
to fewer offices than any public man ; he held a $6,000 sinecure obtained by influence, 
lived in a white mansion on a thousand-acre farm, and called it a log cabin. 
As for Van Buren, he was said to be also a Blue Light Federalist in 1812, an 
enemy of Jackson in 1824, an Abolitionist, supporter of negro suffrage, unfriendly to 
the West, to free labor, opposed to internal improvements, and, worst of all, a pampered, 
STiobbish aristocrat, who lived like a king and spent lavishly the money of the people, 
whom he despised, for curtains, foreign mirrors, roses, lamps, footstools, silk cord, 
gilt, satin, chairs, and gold spoons. While Adams’ yearly expenditures had averaged 
$12,000,000 and Jackson’s $18,000,000, Van Buren and his defaulters had averaged $37,- 
000,000. 
Ohio Statesman (semi-weekly) , May 13, July 5, 7, 10, 22, and 28, 1840, etc. Illinois 
State Register (Springfield, 111.), October 30, 1840; Western Sun, July 11, 25, August 1, 
September 19, 1840 ; Madison (Ind.) Courier, July 25, 1840 ; Green County (Ohio) 
Torchlight, April 16, 1840. 
For an account of the great meetings at Columbus, Fort Meigs, Detroit, Spring- 
field, and Tippecanoe Battleground see Green County (Ohio) Torchlight, April 16, 
March 5, 1840. Detroit Daily Advertiser, June 13, June 17, September 22, 1840. 
‘ The latest and most convincing argument for General Mum is that he intends 
to sleep on a bundle of straw in the White House. When Foreign Ministers and his 
cabinet council visit him he will turn up a half bushel or peck measure and an old 
barn bucket for them to sit upon. To sleep on a pile of straw with a stable door for 
covering, would be the prettiest thing imaginable. Oh for a Whig president and an 
‘east room’ of cider barrels and coon skins, and owls, and bank rags. . . . We 
Democrats do these things out of necessity. . . . But when the ‘shade covered’ 
lawyers and bankers do it to catch our votes, surely their sufferings are sufficiently 
intolerable to tap our tearful sympathies, as a Tippecanoe committeeman would tap 
a fresh cider cask.” 
See Ohio Statesman, July 14, July 22, 1840. 
