December 1839 — The Whig Party (United States), at its first ever national convention, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, nominates former U.S. Army General William Henry Harrison to be its candidate for President of the United States in the 1840 election. Although Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky has received 103 of the 128 necessary votes on the first ballot, he obtains only 90 on the final vote, while Harrison gets 148. Former U.S. Senator John Tyler is unanimously nominated for vice president.
Postscript — The foregoing must seem like an odd event for me to mention a couple of days before Christmas in 2024, but it might make more sense to you if I also mention that the holiday season back in in 1839 would be the first Christmas for four-year-old Sammy Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and his family in beautiful downtown Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River. The family had moved from Florida, Missouri, which was about thirty miles away, only a few weeks earlier, about three months after the August death of Sammy’s nine-year-old sister, Margaret. So, now that you have all those historical tidbits and the contexts to ponder, however irrelevant they might seem to you, I now return to my leisurely reading of the book shown below:
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