William Henry Harrison was inaugurated as President on 4 March
        1841 and died exactly one month later---before his wife, Anna Symmes 
        Harrison, who was unwell, had even been able to join him in 
        Washington. He is commemorated, somewhat negatively, for having 
        established a number of presidential records. Aged sixty-eight, he is 
        the oldest man to habve been installed in the office; and his has been 
        the shortest Administration. Harrison's inaugural address, which took 
        an hour and three-quarters to deliver, still holds the record for 
        length. Perhaps his successors took the achievement as a cautionary 
        tale. He wore neither hat nor coat, despite the rigor of the 
        Washington winter, while he read his speech. After this unwise ordeal 
        he attended three inaugural balls. He ended the day with a cold; the 
        cold developed into a chill, the chill into pneumonia. The lesson 
        would seem to be that for Presidents on such occasions longevity and 
        longwindedness may be incompatible. 
             Harrison is also remembered in popular accounts as the principal 
        figure in the famous "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" election of 1840. In 
        the familiar story, Harrison's Whig party decided to take a leaf out 
        of the book of the rival Democratic party. The Democrats had 
        capitalized upon their claim to be the party of the people and had 
        conducted themselves accordingly, with a good deal fo demagogic 
        flamboyance. The Whigs, though more conservative in style, adapted 
        their appeal to the electorate. Denouncing the Democratic candidate, 
        President Van Buren, as an aristocrat, they presented Harrison as a 
        plain, unaffected, Western pioneer and an old Indian fighter who had 
        beaten the Shawnees at Tippecanoe in 1811 and later killed the warrior 
        Tecumseh. This portrait was, to say the least, incomplete. 
              "Old Tip" was the son of Benjamin Harrison and Elizabeth 
        Bassett, representatives of two distinghuished Virginia families. His 
        father was a "signer" of the Declaration of Independence. His wife was 
        was the daughter of Judge John Cleves Symmes, who had been a member of 
        the Continental Congress and who had secured title to a land grant of 
        several hundred thousand acres in the Ohio county. 
             William Henry Harrison had attended Hampden-Sidney College in 
        Virginia, and as a professional Army officer had rised to the rank 
        of Major-General. His home at North Bend, near Cincinnati, was much 
        less primitive than the simple log cabin of electioneering legend, 
        although it did incorporate a five-room structure he had raised at the 
        time of his marriage in 1795. 
             The actual William Henry Harrison was a decent, dignified person. 
        He was less combative than Andrew Jackson, and less canny than Van 
        Buren. He was unwise enough, for example, to be affable to too many of 
        the men who besieged him for federal appointments. Some convinced 
        themselves he had promised them jobs. Their pestering when he was 
        tired and ill may have contributed to his collapse and death. 
             Harrison's final, negative claim to uniqueness, in the history of 
        the Presidency, is that as the first man to die in office, he raised a 
        constitutional issue the nation had not yet had to face: did the 
        Vice-President automatically become President? 

Source: Burke's Presidential Families of the United States of America.