"Oh, where, tell me where, was the log-cabin made?
'Twas made by the boys that wield the plough and the spade."
There was no end to the songs, which were set to the most popular airs and sung over and over again. You would hear them in the middle of the night on some distant mountain-top, where the twinkling camp-fire showed that a party of Whigs were drinking hard cider and whooping it up for Harrison; some singer with a strong, pleasing voice would start one of the songs from the platform, at the close of the orator's appeal, and hardly had his lips parted, when the thousands of Whigs, old and young, and including wives and daughters, would join in the words, while the enthusiasm quickly grew to a white heat. The horsemen riding home late at night awoke the echoes among the woods and hills with their musical praises of "Old Tippecanoe." The story is told that in one of the backwoods districts of Ohio, after the preacher had announced the hymn, the leader of the singing, a staid old deacon, struck in with a Harrison campaign song, in which the whole congregation, after the first moment's shock, heartily joined, while the aghast preacher had all he could do to restrain himself from "coming in on the chorus." There was some truth in the declaration of a disgusted Democrat that, from the opening of the canvass, the whole Whig population of the United States went upon a colossal spree on hard cider, which continued without intermission until Harrison was installed in the White House.
And what did November tell? The electoral vote cast for Martin Van Buren, 60; for General Harrison, 234. No wonder that the supply of hard cider was almost exhausted within the next three days.
PECULIAR FEATURE OF THE HARRISON CAMPAIGN.
As we have noted, the method of nominating presidential candidates by means of popular conventions was fully established in 1840, and has continued uninterruptedly ever since. One peculiar feature marked the Harrison campaign of 1840. The convention which nominated Martin Van Buren met in Baltimore in May of that year. On the same day, the young Whigs of the country held a mass-meeting in Baltimore, at which fully twenty thousand persons were present. They came from every part of the Union, Massachusetts sending fully a thousand. When the adjournment took place, it was to meet again in Washington at the inauguration of Harrison. The railway was then coming into general use, and this greatly favored the assembling of mass-conventions.
FREMONT, THE GREAT PATHFINDER, ADDRESSING THE INDIANS AT FORT LARAMIE.