Discovering our rich political history

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By Albert Witherington
Germantown

There is no end to the types of historical artifacts that Americans have left behind in the soil of this great country, including military, civilian, urban, rural, monetary, and political artifacts.
Occasionally, a Civil War relic hunter with the aid of his metal detector will dig out of the ground with a shovel an artifact that tells a story of this country’s political past. These precious artifacts remind us why over the years millions and millions of people risk everything to come here to seek freedom and fulfill the American dream.
Political artifacts can come in many forms but most are related to a particular political campaign.
These artifacts are like a time capsule, taking us back to that brief period and helping us relive the issues, scandals, turning points, and results that have shaped our country’s history.
Most of these political artifacts are in the form of campaign pins, buttons, tokens, medals, and hundreds of other forms, which is the reason why these bits of political history are so interesting and collectible.
I do not find large numbers of political artifacts, usually a few every year, but they are a much-anticipated and rewarding recovery.
This article is about two similar campaign items I excavated, one in Germantown and the other in Piperton, Tenn. I dug these artifacts within three weeks of each other, a William Henry Harrison campaign button and token from the famous presidential election of 1840.
William Henry Harrison was born on Feb. 9, 1773, at Berkely, the family’s plantation near Richmond, Va. His father was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Governor of Virginia. Harrison attended Hampden-Sydney College and studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out in 1791 to join the Army.
He fought at the famous Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, which gave the United States control of Ohio from the Indians, and was a captain and commander of Fort Washington in what is now Cincinnati, Ohio.
Harrison married in 1795 and had 10 children; one of his sons was father to 23rd President, Benjamin Harrison.
Harrison had an impressive military career. He was Secretary of the Northwest Territory in 1798 and Governor of the Indiana Territory in 1800.
In 1811, he led a military force against the Shawnee Indians and won the Battle of Tippecanoe, which became one of his nicknames.
During the War of 1812, holding the rank of Brigadier General, he captured Detroit from the British and won the important Battle of Thames, in which Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh was killed. Harrison used his reputation as an Indian fighter to gather political support in the election of 1840.
Harrison’s political career began when he was elected to the statehouse of Ohio in 1819 and later in 1825 was sent to the U.S. Senate from Ohio.
He resigned in 1828 and became United States Minister to Colombia. In 1836, he was one of the Whig Party’s candidates for president. He lost to Martin Van Buren but ran again in 1840 against Van Buren’s attempt for a second term.
Harrison’s opponent newspapers made statements that if you gave Harrison some hard cider and a two hundred dollar a year pension, he would be content to sit on the porch of a log cabin for the remainder of his life. Harrison embraced this image, using this to appeal to the common voter and emphasizing his military career against the more pompous, aristocratic Martin Van Buren. Harrison also had an inventive slogan for the election: “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” John Tyler being his Vice President. Harrison’s strategy worked and at every political rally his supporters built log cabins and passed out hard cider to the delight of his supporters.
One particular whiskey company, named Booze, sold bottles of whiskey shaped like log cabins to the crowds and the company’s name became synonymous with alcohol. Harrison won the election with 234 electoral votes to 60, which was 53 percent of the vote.
At the time of his election, Harrison was the oldest president ever elected at 68. He gave the longest inaugural address in history in very bad weather without a coat or hat. The result of this even was that he got sick and was dead of pneumonia within a month, the first president to die in office.
There was a wide variety of 1840 political campaign memorabilia produced, consisting of buttons, tokens, badges, and bottles. Much of this memorabilia is long gone today and to find a Harrison campaign button or token is highly prized.
I was lucky enough in 2010 to find, in downtown Germantown, in a Civil War camp area, a perfect William Harrison campaign log cabin button among many Civil War bullets, buttons, coins, and belt plates.
One the front of the button is a log cabin with a flag flying from the roof and a barrel of hard cider next to the house.
I was able to find this artifact thanks to a grading off of the area by a bulldozer where Civil War troops had camped near the railroad. This area is part of Old Germantown and I assume before the Civil War, homes stood on the site.
I knew the minute I held the button in my hand before the dirt was removed, this button was special. I have found over 1200 Civil War buttons and this button was shaped differently and was a different size than most common Civil War buttons. When I washed off the button in a nearby mud puddle and the log cabin appeared, my first thought was how old it was, 21 years before the Civil War.
The second William Henry Harrison artifact I found was an 1840 Harrison campaign token. I found this artifact the size of a nickel in a large pasture by a creek south of Collierville, not fifty yards from a pre-Civil War road.
In this large pasture were four old home sites that are no longer visible except for the tattle-tale trees that surround an obvious space where a house should be.
Another clue to an old home site is the wildflowers that grow in predictable patterns around the old homes.
All one has to do is run a metal detector over a suspected home site because the detector does not lie. Tons of signals will emanate from the ground: nails, hinges, brass pieces, horseshoes, and bricks are everywhere above and below the ground.
Mixed in with all of this junk are old coins, bullets, buttons, and almost anything you can think of a person would own and lose in the 1830-1890s period.
I was searching near one of these home sites 30 yards from what would have been the front porch when I dug up from five inches deep a dark coin that was not the right size for an Indian-head penny but too thin for a shield or buffalo nickel.
An hour later, while back at the car, I washed off the artifact with some water and what appeared was a total surprise.
On one side was the bust of William Henry Harrison; on the other was a log cabin with a barrel of cider and below the cabin were the words, “Hero of Tippecanoe.”

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