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Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy

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The three best things about this book are the extensive primary research, the author's clarity, and his unrelenting fairness to all his subjects. Every time Owens describes any peculiar behavior--whether by William Henry Harrison, other American politicians or by Native Americans leaders--he explains it in its context and then goes on to point out if it fits with the circumstances or if the actors are being inconsistent or hypocritical. While most historians work to understand the nuances and characters of their subjects, Owens is unique in explicitly laying these out along with the logic of his assertions. This helps the reader to really understand the motivations of these frontier people instead of just having to accept an author's implicit assumptions. To paraphrase a line from The Razor's Edge, Owens gives the reason and the intent--most historians just give the reason.

Besides the historical quality and the impressive research, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer is just a highly enjoyable read. Owens writes very vividly and uses lots of colorful language. The last two chapters, which describe Harrison wheeling and dealing for land and build up to the death of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, have the pacing of a novel or at least a popular history. The author also has a snappy way of characterizing people and actions that make the book a lot of fun to read.

One somewhat noteworthy omission is that the section entitled "Everyday Life in Early Indiana" hardly mentions farming (except a couple of lines in passing), which one would suspect would be the most sizeable component of everyday life. He discusses ideological and cultural issues that are more related to the narrative, but it just seems that he could have included more about farming in that part or renamed the section.

That, however, is a small complaint about an issue that does nothing to detract from the author's intent to explore the rationale behind and the unfolding of U.S. and Indian relations on the frontier. I really love this book and think anyone interested in U.S. history would do much to clarify and add depth to their understanding of this period by reading it.

I am reading successive presidential biographies. When I looked for a book on the one month term of William Henry Harrison, I decided that it made more sense to look for one related to his impact on the country of the time and how that got him elected to the presidency. This was the book. It described a piece of history that was entirely new to me. It explained another reason that I think of Thomas Jefferson as more of a character than a man of character. The information within this book describes the origins of our own color of racial prejudice in the adolescence of the USA. Good book and quick read, but a little hard to fall asleep after reading some parts.

When most people think of William Henry Harrison....Wait a minute, I forget that normal people almost never think of William Henry Harrison or even his grandson Benjamin Harrison. Perhaps they do think of Harrison Ford. I will start over.
When American history teachers think of William Henry Harrison, assuming they did not do graduate work on his career, they only have a line or two in their minds. First, they will remember that Harrison served the shortest term in elected Presidential history--one month. (In recent decades, Vice Presidents have been sworn in during times when the President was undergoing surgery or was in some way incapacitated.) Concerning Harrison's one month term, more knowledgeable students will recall that he gave the longest inaugural address ever (which led, in part, to his subsequent illness) and that great controversy followed his successor's taking office, referring here to John Tyler, sometimes referred to as 'His Accidency.'
The second point usually remembered about Harrison is the catchy, and at its time, convincing campaign slogan: Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too. In a ruthless and invenctive campaign, filled with lots of sound and fury and little thought and wisdom, the association of the military victory of Harrison over the Indian tribes at the battle of Tippecanoe served to convince voters to elect him over the incumbent, Martin Van Buren.
Robert M. Owens is an Associate Professor of History at Wichata State University in Kansas. This book, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, grew out of his dissertation. The book is published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The OUP publishes many fine works on the history of the American west, Native Americans, and the 19th century. This might well be expected from a university press located in Oklahoma. Along with those areas of specialization, they also publish some outstanding studies of military history (the Campaigns and Commanders series) and ancient and classical studies. Like many fine university publications, the subtitles explain the book: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy.
This is an important study because Harrison's Presidency was an abrupt coda on the end of an influential career. He appears in history at a time overlapping the eras dominated by Jefferson and Jackson and preceding the breaking up of the Union in the 1850s. He was a Presidential candidate twice, but his greater role was on the mid-western frontier where he was not just an Indian fighter, but an administrator, territorial governor, and policy maker. As the title says, he was President Jefferson's policy hammer.
Owens says, "Henry Clay was a far greater statesman, Andrew Jackson a far greater warrior, and Thomas Jefferson a far greater scholar. But Harrison was on the ground in question, and his decisions, foolish and wise, had immediate impact. He exercised tremendous authority over a vast area and was empowered to negotiate with numerous Native American peoples. He held extraordinary military and civil power for much of his tenure as Indiana's governor."
He further notes, "To this day we live with the echoes of Harrison's proclamations, the boundaries of his treaties, and the ramifications of his actions."
Far from being just a blip on the screen of Presidential history and trivia, Harrison had an illustrious, although maybe not admirable, career. This book promises to be a good study.

This book is at it's best in describing Harrison's role in dealing with the Native American population of the Indiana Territories in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Harrison was the Territorial Governor and then Military commander of this region during a turbulent era of controversial Indian treaties and Indian wars including part of the War of 1812. From the standpoint of the then existing American government Harrison was a hugely successful negotiator who successfully achieved huge transfers of Indian lands to the United States. He did so for the equivalent of pennies on the acre. However as Owens points out this overreaching ultimately lead to the rise of Tecumseh and a major Indian war.

I thought the book occasionaly fell into criticism of Harrison for his support of slavery and his autocratic rule as Governor which didn't really have anything to do with the "origins of American Indian policy" as stated in the subtitle. However that is a small complaint and this material certainly didn't detract from the real strength of the book which again is the story of Harrison's dealings with the local Native Americans. Those negotioations are covered in detail and are very well done. This is a relatively short book but is very good at describing the goals of the Americans in their dealings with the native population. Recommended.

There has been very little scholarship on President William Henry Harrison; the last scholarly work came out during the Second World War. For that reason alone, Robert Owens's work has value. Although Owens only covers Harrison's life in detail for the period between Harrison's enlistment in the army before 1800 and his resignation during the War of 1812, the author give a fine assessment of Harrison's character and the post-Revolutionary frontier mentality as a whole. Much of what was included in this work was covered in a book that I had read recently and that the author cited heavily: Andrew Clayton's Frontier Indiana, but there is still value in Owens's interpretations. Harrison was driven by the desire to maintain his personal honor, deeply distrusted the British and viewed Indians as their dupes, prone to savage outrage; he also had deep personal ambitions including the desire to improve his finances. While Harrison can be seen as a ruthless and even conniving careerist, he embodied the frontier gentleman persona that Andrew Jackson would perfect. Our culture may vilify such behavior today for supporting the dispossession of American Indians or supporting the spread of slavery, but in Harrison's worldview his actions were almost natural. Indeed, the author never lets the reader forget this principle, brining it up to the point of annoyance. The author does everything but fall all over himself trying to convince readers that he does not condone Harrison's behavior, but must remind us that he was a character of his time and place. Still well worth a read, especially if you are interested in the shortest serving president.

Mr. Jefferson's Hammer has been repeatedly reviewed as a biography of William Henry Harrison, but this book is undoubtedly not simply an account of Harrison's life. The chronological range of this book - from Harrison's enlistment in the Army, to his "retirement" at his Ohio farm in 1814 - omits his childhood and, much later, his short stint as president. Described alternatively as a "cultural biography" by Robert Owens, this book is much more akin to a microhistory than a biography, using Harrison's life as a lens to view a wider trend in American frontier policy (xx). It explores the cultural background of the "rustic gentility" of the Virginia political elites in determining federal attitudes about Indian removal and land policy (37).
In post-revolutionary America, eastern populations were booming and pushing up against the Appalachian boundaries previously set by the British before the war. Jefferson recognized that to build his idealized republic of yeoman farmers, something had to be done about Indians that inhabited the old northwest territory. Thus, Colin Calloway has said that the "Jeffersonian generation devastated Indian culture and laid the groundwork for removing eastern Indian peoples beyond the Mississippi River" to make room for these settlers. William Henry Harrison was on the front line of attack, aggressively acquiring Indian lands and laying this groundwork Jeffersonian-style American farmer settlement in the Ohio River valley. Justification for Indian removal stemmed from American popular belief about Indian political motivations. The legacy of British-Indian alliances during the Revolutionary War, and the British suggestion for establishing an Indian buffer state between Canada and the old Northwest frontier conveniently painted Native Americans as an enemy, like the British, to be fought or eliminated. The association of Native groups with the British served Jeffersonian Indian policy, and Harrison's career. Clyde R. Ferguson observed that "Anglophobia stemming from the Revolution" infused everything for the first thirty years of Harrison's life . "The vast majority of Americans... took it as a given that Great Britain was the ultimate source for any Indian trouble" (xv).
As opposed to the image of Jefferson as a leader who bestowed peace medals to Plains Indians via Lewis and Clark, Owens effectively argues that Jefferson instead coveted Indian lands and wished to eliminate Indian culture. Jefferson ordered Harrison, then the Indiana territorial governor, to promote Indians to accumulate debt at trading posts so that the federal government could later demand settlement of their amassed debts with cessions of tribal lands. In other cases, "Jefferson and Harrison" were able to coax the Kaskaskias to relinquish "the vast bulk of their lands and independence for monetary and material rewards" hoping to "inspire other chiefs to make large cessions to the United States" (81). Not surprisingly, few tribes followed suit once it was apparent that the Kaskaskias' agreement with the United States government resulted in diminishing remittances after tribal members died. As for the overall pattern of land cessions in the Indiana territory, Owens includes a number of fantastically helpful maps, illustrative of the aggressive land acquisitions shepherded under Harrison's watch. "Harrison's treaties bought title to about half of what became the state of Indiana", shaping American land holdings to "jut threateningly into Indian territory" enraging Indian leaders like Tecumseh and inciting conflict (xxiv). The success of policies such as land-for-debt and the threatening nature of land purchases inspired massive resistance to American encroachment and led to the rise of the Indian leader, Tecumseh. A pan-tribal Indian movement aligned with the British in an attempt to repel American military forces, in part led by Harrison, during the war of 1812. This coalition, albeit with different aims, failed to succeed. Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. "Tecumseh's death knocked the wind out of militant pan-Indianism" and the resistance to Jefferson's dream of American land acquisition and expansion had crumbled (241). Harrison had led the way.
According to its bibliographical information, this book circulates within the purview of modern native studies scholarship. Some critics, however, have correctly pointed out that while Owens' grasp of American archival documents is rich, his understanding of Midwestern Indian cultures, "especially their social, political, and economic structures," is lacking (Robert E. Bieder). A deeper understanding of ethnographic methods, or the implementation of them, would have expanded the depth and authority of this book. As the text stands, it is an excellent exploration of early federal Indian policy but a less thorough look at the effects thereof. Another point of contention is the failure to include the role of women. While it is true that American military service was restricted to men, and that this book's main subject-matter is located around Harrison's military career, surely it is not the case that women feature nowhere in the account of this story. Small problems aside, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer is an meticulously researched and well-written account of Jeffersonian Indian policy in the old Northwest. Owens taps an amazing number of archival documents, both those in archival libraries and those published primary sources in compilations by authors like A.P. Nasatir. Owens delves into a huge new cache of documents collected and published as The Papers of William Henry Harrison (Indianapolis, 1999). His wonderfully organized bibliography lists major players in native studies, names like Francis Paul Prucha, Frederick Hoxie, David Edmunds, Colin Calloway, and James Axtell. It is an excellent source for a number of historical sub-disciplines, including cultural history, legal or military history. In a mere three-hundred pages, Robert Owens manages to pack an amazing amount of information into a concise, and truly enjoyable narrative that expands our understanding of Jeffersonian attitudes about Indians, and early American federal Indian policy.
Robert M. Owens is an Associate Professor of Colonial and early United States History at Wichita State University in Kansas. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2003. He is currently working on a book about the Southern Indians in the Early Republic.

Poor William Henry Harrison stood in the rain at his inauguration, contracted pneumonia, and was dead within a month. This makes writing his presidential biography difficult, so Owens chose to focus on Harrison's life before his presidency, especially the time he spent on the frontier, working with American Indians. I'll be pretty candid here: through the lens of the twenty-first century, Harrison looks kind of sleazy. He knowingly made contracts with Indians to sell property they never owned to the United States. In other cases, he invited a group of tribes to negotiate property deals when everyone knew that only one of the five or six tribes actually owned the property in question, and then he would promise to pay when all the tribes signed - essentially getting Indians to peer pressure each other into giving away their land. I've tried to see it the way that they would have in Harrison's time - that the Indian way of life would never have worked, and that it was best for them to move West - but I can't really bring myself to do it. Not a bad biography, but the subject made this book hard to enjoy.

Robert Owens gives a fair and comprehensive biography of Harrison's career and value system. Harrison experiments in anti-slavery idealism during his college years. like many scions of Virginia, he finds himself not inheriting as much wealth and property as his parents. he squanders what land he did inherit selling it to his brother and some others for Bonds that don't get paid. Fortunately there is a frontier of Northwest Territory larger than the 13 colonies. It is full of indians and British rabblerousers. Harrison uses the influence of his family to petition for a commission in the U.S. army. He does his job well, his early failures are only the failures of the entire army.

The Northwest Territory is slow to develop. Part of the reason it is slow to develop is that settlers can claim so much land at once. There isn't a population density high enough to require greater efficiency in agriculture, or enough industry to float a population with greater demand agricultural products. The answer seems to have been acquiring land from the Indians in bigger swoops, which were generally unscrupulous. the semi-aristocracy of the territories favored importing slaves to develop the land. the smaller landholders and workers didn't want slavery to diminish the value of their own production, or big manor slave owners lording it over them.

Once in the private sector, big land holders tried to make money producing vast amounts of alcohol. This abundance of alcohol ultimately produced the slow talking yokel dialect later encountered in the rural midwest and south.

In the end Harrison is a relatively decent person, occasionally taking opportunities that obscured this decency.

This book is a study of William Henry Harrison's career as the territorial Governor of Indiana. The authors point was generally a focus of the various Indian land acquisitions that Governor Harrison initiated during his tenure. Much repetition follows about successive land deals and how WHH bargained his way to success by using the power of annuities that were to be paid for previous treaties with the native americans. We see in this book how WHH uses these annuities as "leverage" to expand his land acquisitions to gain a larger land deal than the tribes were willing to agree to. Many times WHH only negotiated with a one or two tribes who owned "rights" to the land negotiated in the treaty. The author also spends an inordinate amount of time on WHH's attempts to bring Indiana into the Union as a "slave" state. I thought the information was extensive and the author struggled with organization in the book. I was somewhat dismayed by the presentation but I understand that this was a college thesis where it was necessary to examine new information on WHH. I just thought the author could have been more "consistent" in the flow of his manuscript. Sometimes he tried to cover too many different themes in each chapter and at times I felt lost with the transition.