Martin Van Buren Democratic William Henry Harrison Whig Presidential elections were held in the United States from October 30 to December 2, 1840.

In the shadow of an incomplete economic recovery from the Panic of 1837, Whig nominee William Henry Harrison defeated incumbent President Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party.

Van Buren faced little opposition at the 1840 Democratic National Convention, but controversial Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson was not renominated.

With Van Buren weakened by economic woes, Harrison won a popular majority and 234 of 294 electoral votes.

Van Buren would be the last incumbent president to lose his reelection bid in a general election until Grover Cleveland in 1888.

However, the vice-presidential nomination was left vacant due to opposition to Vice President Richard M. Johnson's personal life.

James G. Birney, Myron Holley, Joshua Leavitt, and Gerrit Smith proposed the creation of an anti-slavery party.

In July 1839, two resolutions proposed by Holley at the American Anti-Slavery Society's meeting in Cleveland, called for the creation of an abolitionist party.

Although Harrison was comfortably wealthy and well educated, his "log cabin" image caught fire, sweeping all sections of the country.

Harrison avoided campaigning on the issues, with his Whig Party attracting a broad coalition with few common ideals.

Said one Democratic newspaper: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and ... a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year ... and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.

"[6] Whigs took advantage of this quip and declared that Harrison was "the log cabin and hard cider candidate", a man of the common people from the rough-and-tumble West.

They depicted Harrison's opponent, President Martin Van Buren, as a wealthy snob who was out of touch with the people.

Harrison however moved to the frontier and for years lived in a log cabin, while Van Buren had been a well-paid government official.

[citation needed] Nonetheless, the election was held in the wake of the Panic of 1837, one of the worst economic depressions in the nation's history,[7] and voters blamed Van Buren, seeing him as unsympathetic to struggling citizens.

The extent of Van Buren's unpopularity was evident in Harrison's victories in New York, the president's home state, and in Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson himself had come out of retirement to stump for his former vice-president.

After giving the longest inauguration speech in U.S. history (lasting about 1 hour and 45 minutes, in cold weather and rain), Harrison served only one month as president before dying of pneumonia on April 4, 1841.

Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–257.