John Scott Harrison (October 4, 1804 – May 25, 1878) was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio from 1853 to 1857. Harrison was a son of U.S. president William Henry Harrison and First Lady Anna Harrison as well as the father of U.S. president Benjamin Harrison. He is the only person to have been both a father and son of a U.S. president.
Early life
Harrison was born on October 4, 1804, in Vincennes, Indiana, where Grouseland, the family home was located. He was one of ten children born to then governor of the Indiana Territory, and future president, William Henry Harrison and future first lady Anna Tuthill Symmes. His elder brother, John Cleves Symmes Harrison, married the only surviving daughter of Zebulon Pike.
William's parents were Elizabeth ( Bassett) Harrison and Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Harrison V from the Harrison family of Virginia.
Harrison completed preparatory studies and studied law. After being defeated for a third term in 1856, Harrison retired to his estate "Point Farm" in North Bend, Ohio.
In August 1860 Harrison, along with Larz Anderson, was nominated as Constitutional Union Party candidate (organized largely by former Whig Party members from the Southern United States who opposed secession) for the second district at the Bell and Everett Convention. In 1861, he was nominated on the Democratic ticket as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio along with Hugh J. Jewett as Governor.
Personal life
In 1824, he married Lucretia Knapp Johnson (1804–1830). They had three children:
- Elizabeth Short Harrison (1825–1904), who married George Coleman Eaton.
- William Henry Harrison (1827–1829), who died young. He was interred in the family tomb in North Bend, today the William Henry Harrison Tomb State Memorial, with his parents and other family members. Harrison's body was stolen by grave robbers until it was eventually returned to its final place of burial.
Body snatching
At that time it was common practice for graves to be robbed for recently deceased bodies for use in teaching dissection and anatomy at medical colleges. As a result, many precautions were taken to secure Harrison's grave, including building a cemented brick vault, filling the grave with earth mixed with heavy stones, and employing a watchman to check the grave each hour of every night for a week.
On the day of Harrison's funeral, it was discovered that the body of Augustus Devin, which had been buried the previous week in an adjoining grave, had been stolen. The following day, one of John Harrison's sons, often believed to be Benjamin, together with a friend of Devin, traveled to Cincinnati to look for his body. With search warrants in hand they went to the Ohio Medical College, where they discovered not Devin's body but the naked body of John Scott Harrison hanging from a rope in a chute.
The outrage over the act, amid changing sensibilities regarding death, contributed materially to passage of the Ohio Anatomy Law of 1881, a landmark statute, whereby medical schools were provided with unclaimed bodies, which in turn discouraged grave robbers by removing their primary market. As to the personal results, suits were brought against the Ohio Medical College; the Harrison estate was entered in a separate damage suit, in the amount of $10,000. The result and decision in the three civil suits brought has been lost in the passage of time, and no documentation is known to exist with this specific information.