Benjamin Harrison A grandson of President William Henry Harrison and great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison V, Benjamin was born at 8:57 pm, on Tuesday August 20, 1833 in North Bend, Hamilton County, Ohio as the second of eight children of John Scott Harrison (later a U.S. Congressman from Ohio) and Elizabeth Ramsey Irwin. He attended Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where he was a member of the fraternity Phi Delta Theta, (later in life, he joined Delta Chi) and graduated in 1852. He studied law in Cincinnati then moved to Indianapolis in 1854. He was admitted to the bar and became reporter of the decisions of the state supreme court.
Harrison served in the Union Army during the Civil War, brevetting as a brigadier general, and mustering out in 1865. While in the field in October 1864, he was re-elected reporter of the State supreme court and served four years. He was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Governor of Indiana in 1876. He was appointed a member of the Mississippi River Commission in 1879, and elected as a Republican to the United States Senate, where he served from March 4, 1881, to March 3, 1887. He was chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard (47th Congress) and U.S. Senate Committee on Territories (48th and 49th Congresses).
Harrison was married twice. On October 20, 1853, he married Caroline Lavina Scott (1832-1892). They had two children who lived to adulthood, Russell Benjamin Harrison (1854-1936) and Mary Harrison McKee (1858-1930), as well as a daughter who died very shortly after birth in 1861. After Caroline Harrison's death of tuberculosis in 1892, while Harrison was in office, he married his wife's widowed niece and former secretary Mary Scott Lord Dimmick (1858-1948) on April 6, 1896. They had one daughter, Elizabeth Harrison (1897-1955).
