He was born at North Bend, Ohio, in the old Harrison family homestead, established and defended by his pioneer grandfather. His boyhood was like that of the average farm boy, with its round of chores and farm pleasures.
The traditions of the Harrison family were of a high order. They demanded education for their children, and so, on the farm, two miles from the house, a small school was early built for the boys of the vicinity. No regular district schools were within a distance possible for their attendance. A log cabin with a dirt floor, rude benches without backs, slabs and blocks of wood for desks, walls sans paint or plaster—this little temple of learning was in its severe primitive rudeness a real school.
In church matters, too, young Harrison had a thorough training in the Presbyterian faith of his fathers. His father considered it his parental duty and responsibility to supervise his children’s religious training.
Sundays frequently brought visits and dinners with his grandmother, and from babyhood he heard tales of his grandfather President and, what he loved most, the tales of the wild, untamed wilderness and brilliant military achievements.
Harrison was graduated from the Miami University fourth in a group of sixteen on June 24, 1852.
Greek legends and mathematical problems did not fill his entire time. With the habit of youth, he had fallen deeply and seriously in love with his first sweetheart, the charming dark-eyed daughter, Caroline Lavinia, of Dr. John Scott, of a near-by academy. To the amazement and the chagrin of a host of young men students, she became engaged to eighteen-year-old Ben Harrison. Some of his mates were astonished and wondered and commented on the queer ways of love and girls. They asked each other, how could she—Caroline Scott—fall in love with a chap small and insignificant in appearance, plain of feature and of dress, afflicted with unusual diffidence and reserve, whose only claim to pretensions of any sort was the possession of an ancestor who had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence and another a President of the United States. True, Ben Harrison also claimed a descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas. But Miss Caroline was content. The two were married in the autumn of 1853 and started out in an Indianapolis boarding house with a total cash asset of $800, a sum which the young man had borrowed on a lot which he had inherited from a relative.
Harrison studied law and was admitted to the bar. Soon clients flocked to him. There was nothing aggressive or dominant about him; but the shyness or reserve, which at first was diffidence, wore away, leaving a quiet assurance that bespoke power of mind. In 1860, he began his political career as a candidate before the Republican Convention for the position of Reporter of the Supreme Court, to which he was elected by a substantial majority.
Two children soon came to more than fill Mrs. Harrison’s time. So the young couple found themselves a tiny cottage, where Mrs. Harrison did all of her housework, aided before breakfast, at midday, and at night by her husband. He chopped wood, filled the wood box and water buckets, and did all of the outside home chores.
This was their situation when the guns of Sumter sounded the tocsin of war and sent the blood of revolutionary ancestry bounding in Ben Harrison’s veins. However, he had a family dependent on him, and he gave the matter serious consideration. Meanwhile, he made a call upon Governor O. Morton, of Indiana, who settled for him the paramount matter of his place in the war. Mr. Harrison had said to his friend: “If I can be of service, I’ll go.” Without a moment’s hesitation, the Governor replied, “Raise a regiment in this congressional district, and you can command it!”
Harrison regarded this as a command as well as a promise. He went straight home, found Mrs. Harrison in full sympathy with his anxiety to do his part for his country. The Stars and Stripes were hung from the humble law office window, and Lawyer Harrison started recruiting, quickly assembling Company A, the nucleus foundation for the Seventieth Indiana Volunteers. Soon a regiment was assembled, for the Harrison name held a magic sound.