CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY. EVERY citizen is free to contend for honor and preferment in our country, and the contention is perpetual. A peculiarity of the struggle is that the whole people witness the start, the effort, and the outcome. When at length a contestant emerges from the throng, ready to lay his hand upon one of the great prizes, every spectator demands to know all there is knowable of him. The subject of this sketch has just reached that point in a career for the Presidency, and it is to at least partially gratify the hunger of the multitude for information of the man that these pages are respectfully offered them. There shall never be a perfect biography that does not tell the reader who its subject is, and what, aside from his name and the place and date of his birth. That shall be the best biography which gives us the incidents of his life, and at the same time an insight into his nature and character; so that, when we have risen from the reading, it will be possible to say and believe we know him in and out, and that he is worthy or unworthy our respect and confidence. To every life there is a beginning and an end; it is the same in the narration of lives, only the difficulty in the latter is to find the true beginning. That difficulty is before the writer now." Undoubtedly the American people, when sitting in judgment upon an individual who has ventured to claim their attention and bespeak their good will, care little for his ancestry. It is the person himself that is on trial. They know that good fathers have base children; and in such cases the invocation of the worthy progenitors, by exciting compassion for them as a result of comparison, but intensifies the opinion invariably reached respecting the descendants. On the other hand, if the record discloses a scion in whom the noble traits of his forefathers are continued and yet further exemplified, the same people rejoice at the discovery and make haste to take him into favor. In fact this is the American law of the case-well for the parent if he have a worthy son, well for the son if he have had a worthy parent. With such a view of the law, there would be no hesitation on the part of the writer in dealing with the ancestry of the Benjamin Harrison whose life he is called upon to give. There is no fear of the consequences of fair comparison. The traits that endeared the forefathers to their countrymen will be found in the descendant. The qualities of mind that raised them to distinction have been not less promotive of him. Their devotion to freedom, to the good of the masses, to principle, to truth and God, he has equally illustrated. They were wise in peace; so is he. Their courage in war has been a matter of emulation with him. They were willing to be offered in sacrifice for their country; he has made it possible for his generation to believe them sincere in the offer. The question, however, admits of another view. Simple literary requirement bids that notice be taken of the antecedent Harrisons. A man's history is often found quite as much in what has gone before his birth as in what has succeeded it. Omission of the first part would leave his biography but half written. If the reader is careless of the first part, he is at liberty to skip it: nevertheless, as certainly as a book has a reader, it has also a critic. We take the liberty of giving this chapter to the ancestry of Benjamin Harrison, the Republican candidate for President. THOMAS HARRISON. There was in the first half of the sixteenth century a Thomas Harrison, known as Harrison the Cromwellian. It is thought that he began life as a vendor of beef in the open market, and he might have continued such indefinitely in his native England but for the quarrel between Charles I. and Parliament. Macaulay has made |