Harvey Magee Watterson was born at Beech Grove, Bedford County, Tenn. His father, William S. Watterson, emigrated from Virginia to Tennessee in 1804, served on Andrew Jackson's staff in the War of 1812, accumulated a fortune as a cotton planter, and was a prominent figure in the Tennessee railroad movement at the time of his death in 1851.
Harvey Watterson was educated at Cumberland College, Princeton, Ky. He studied law.
He was admitted to the bar, and began the practice of his profession at Shelbyville, Tenn. , in 1830. The next year he was elected to the lower house of the state legislature and by successive reëlections served until 1839. In that year he was elected to the federal House of Representatives and was reëlected in 1841. According to the testimony of his son, Watterson did not take his duties at Washington seriously, but, provided with an excellent income by his father, directed his energies to revelry and occasional escapades of a graver nature, "his principal yokemate in the pleasures and dissipations of those times being Franklin Pierce". At the end of his second term in the House he was sent by President Tyler on a diplomatic mission to Buenos Aires to obtain information on the foreign relations of Argentina, commercial matters, and the war then raging with Uruguay. In February 1844 he was nominated chargé, but the Senate in the following June rejected the nomination. Returning to Tennessee in 1845, Watterson was at once elected to the state Senate and was made its presiding officer. In September 1849 he became the proprietor of the Nashville Daily Union, whose editorship he took over the following year. He remained as editor of the Nashville paper until 1851, when he went to Washington as editor of the Washington Union. He retired to private life in Tennessee, refusing the governorship of Oregon, and, in 1857, a nomination to Congress. He supported Stephen A. Douglas in the campaign of 1860. He was a member of the secession convention of Tennessee but opposed secession. He remained a Unionist throughout the war, living in retirement on his plantation at Beech Grove. He supported Andrew Johnson during his presidency, and for the ten years after the war lived at Washington engaged in the practice of law. After the death of his wife he divided his time between Washington and Louisville, Ky. , where his son, Henry Watterson, was editor of the Courier-Journal. At the time of his death he was on the editorial staff of the Courier-Journal, in which his writings were signed "An Old Fogy. " He was buried in the Cave Hill Cemetery at Louisville.
Watterson had always been a Democrat, but he was opposed to the extension of slavery and retired from the editorship of the Union because he could not support the policy of the administration in regard to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
He was a member of the Presbyterian Church. He was sponsored in his political life by Andrew Jackson, the close friend of his father. In ante-bellum days he was a man of great influence in Tennessee politics and was the recognized leader of the Union wing of the Democratic party in the last decade before the war. He was a vigorous editor and a writer of merit, but his reputation in that line as in others has been obscured by the fame of his son, and only child.
Watterson married in 1830 Talitha Black, daughter of James Black of Maury County, Tenn.
