Marse Henry: an Autobiography (volume 1)

Part 1

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"Marse Henry"

An Autobiography

Henry Watterson

Volume I

TO MY FRIEND ALEXANDER KONTA WITH AFFECTIONATE SALUTATION

"Mansfield," 1919

A mound of earth a little higher graded: Perhaps upon a stone a chiselled name: A dab of printer's ink soon blurred and faded-- And then oblivion--that--that is fame!

--HENRY WATTERSON

Contents

Chapter the First

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau Hickman"--Old Times in Washington

Chapter the Second

Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at Washington in the Fifties

Chapter the Third

The Inauguration of Lincoln--I Quit Washington and Return to Tennessee--A Run-a-bout with Forest--Through the Federal Lines and a Dangerous Adventure--Good Luck at Memphis

Chapter the Fourth

I Go to London--Am Introduced to a Notable Set--Huxley, Spencer, Mill and Tyndall--Artemus Ward Comes to Town--The Savage Club

Chapter the Fifth

Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianæ--A Joke on Murat Halstead

Chapter the Sixth

Houston and Wigfall of Texas--Stephen A. Douglas--The Twaddle about Puritans and Cavaliers--Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge

Chapter the Seventh

An Old Newspaper Rookery--Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and Louisville--The Courier-Journal

Chapter the Eighth

Feminism and Woman Suffrage--The Adventures in Politics and Society--A Real Heroine

Chapter the Ninth

Dr. Norvin Green--Joseph Pulitzer--Chester A. Arthur--General Grant--The Case of Fitz-John Porter

Part 2

Chapter the Tenth

Of Liars and Lying--Woman Suffrage and Feminism--The Professional Female--Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America

Chapter the Eleventh

Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The "Quadrilateral"--Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A Queer Composite of Incongruities

Chapter the Twelfth

The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers-- The Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Persona and Character of Mr. Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal

Illustrations

Henry Watterson (About 1908)

Henry Clay--Painted at Ashland by Dodge for The Hon. Andrew Ewing of Tennessee-The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"

W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.

John Bell of Tennessee--In 1860 Presidential Candidate "Union Party"--"Bell and Everett" Ticket

Artemus Ward

General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A. Killed in Georgia, June 14, 1864--P. E. Bishop of Louisiana

Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the Courier-Journal. Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center

Abraham Lincoln in 1861. From a Photograph by M. B. Brady

Mrs. Lincoln in 1861

"MARSE HENRY"

Chapter the First

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau Hickman"--Old Times in Washington

I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me into many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest.

Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which these have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feel painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's defacing waves. Assuredly they have not obliterated his sense either of vision or vista. Mindful of the adjuration of Burns,

Keep something to yourself, Ye scarcely tell to ony,

I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or mysteries of the soul to reveal.

It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after the manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in the main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and speak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and have sometimes in a way helped to make history.

In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity." But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my fair young brow.

Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had the prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the great American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came to verify.

When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or political either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, I became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--now and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a free nigger and not a slave nigger."

Part 3

Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefield my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spirit of the times. We passed to and fro between Washington and the two family homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father and mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County. Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. My Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, who lived, preached and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was descended, I am assured, in a straight line from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as Burkle tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of England was a harlot, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went to prison for it--all honor to his memory.

My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly a constructive--the projector and in part the builder of an important railway line--an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was all too busy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained the ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had migrated directly from Virginia to Tennessee.

The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and my father had entered public life with plenty of money, and General Jackson for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his career that interested me--that is, not until I was well into my teens--but the camp meetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word of God with more or less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent and convincing fervor.

The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom was still alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled with thoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and the life everlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp ground witnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The revival was a religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The sermons were appeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of the soul in ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing, proscriptive sort; nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future rewards and punishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal rule. There was a good deal of doughty controversy between the churches, as between the parties; but love of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every confession.

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