in his log-cabin and be content for the rest of his life. That
sneer furnished the keynote of the campaign. Hard cider became almost
the sole beverage of the Whigs throughout the country. In every city,
town and village, and at the cross-roads, were erected log-cabins, while
the amount of hard cider drank would have floated the American navy. The
nights were rent with the shouts of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," and
scores of campaign songs were sung by tens of thousands of exultant,
even if not always musical, voices. We recall that one of the most
popular songs began:

"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, a