Beschreibung:

HARRISON, William Henry]. HARRISON, Henry, nephew of the President . Autograph letter signed ("H. Harrison"), to Benjamin Harrison, the President's brother, Washington, Saturday night, 10 p.m. [3 April 1841]. 1 page, 4to, FINE. HARRISON'S LAST MOMENTS: "IN A FEW MINUTES HE WILL DOUBTLESS BE AMONG THE DEAD..." A short, moving report on the final hours of William Henry Harrison. "It becomes my melancholy duty to apprise you," Harrison's nephew tells his father, "that Gen. Harrison is drawing his last breath. In a few minutes he will doubtless be among the dead. He is now as low as possible. This is to go by the express which carries the intelligence to Mr. Tyler." Harrison's hour and forty minute speech in a cold, driving wind on Inauguration Day left him with a heavy chest cold. He was still not fully recovered two weeks later when he went for a long walk and was caught in a soaking downpour. Now pneumonia set in. His attending physician, Thomas Miller diagnosed "bilious pleurisy," and followed the standard treatments of the time, bleeding and purging. This, of course, did nothing to improve his condition, and by 3 April he was telling his aides, "I am ill, very ill, much more so than they think me" (DeGregorio, Complete Book of U. S. Presidents , 145). And by late that same night, as his nephew pens this note, his lungs were nearly filled with fluid, and delirium had set in. He died just two and a half hours later, at 12:30 a.m. on the morning of 4 April 1841, one month into his Presidential term.