Background
Henry Watterson was born in Washington, D. C. , the son of Harvey Magee Watterson, a member of Congress from Tennessee, and of Talitha Black, also of Tennessee. At that time the "Tennessee dynasty" was in the ascendant. The child, small and sickly, each year made the journey from the capital to the two family homesteads: that of the Wattersons, Beech Grove, in Bedford County, and of the Blacks, Spring Hill, in Maury County, Tenn. A juvenile onlooker in the House, playing at page with the consent of his indulgent father, Watterson was on the floor when John Quincy Adams, then a member, was stricken and carried from his seat to die. He had visited the Hermitage with his father about 1844 and sat on Jackson's knee, and he later met all the other presidents between Jackson and Harding. He died in Harding's time, but he already numbered among his acquaintances Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Career
The youthful Watterson was for a time looked upon as the possessor of rare talent as a pianist. But a weak left hand and the early failure of sight in his right eye (which later became totally blind) ended his musical studies, although the influence of rhythm upon his journalistic and literary style remained a marked characteristic. As a youth of twelve he played an accompaniment for Adelina Patti, herself aged nine. By 1856 the family was back in residence in Tennessee, the elder Watterson a strong Union Democrat. The son remained until 1858, when he went east again to engage in newspaper work. After a brief experience working on reportorial assignments for the New York Times, Watterson became a reporter for the Daily States of Washington-oddly enough holding at the same time "a clerkship, a real 'sinecure' in the Interior Department" - and it fell to his lot to report the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. A Unionist through conviction, although he became a secessionist and Confederate soldier because of sectional sympathies, he was drawn strongly to Lincoln, and some of his best-known writings were devoted to appreciations of the Civil War president. In 1861, for reasons which Watterson thought unsavory, Secretary of War Simon Cameron offered him, through the clerk of the House, J. W. Forney, a commission as lieutenant-colonel and private secretary. Watterson went home to Tennessee instead, determined to spend his time peacefully in writing until the war cloud was dispelled. He did not think the South could hold out long. But at home he found himself alone. "The boys were all gone to the front, and the girls were all crazy". So he joined the Confederate army and, by some loose arrangement not defined, was in and out of it for four years. He was on the staff of Gen. Leonidas Polk until he fell ill; then, in his grey jacket, he worked on a Southern propaganda newspaper in Nashville. After the fall of Nashville he engaged in more desultory soldiering, but he soon found himself appointed editor of the state newspaper at Chattanooga, which he named the Rebel, and turned it into the organ of the army. This remarkable journal, copies of which are preserved in Southern archives, was the first medium through which Watterson displayed that color and force of style which were later to make him outstanding among American editors throughout a half-century of active editorship. While editing the Rebel, he met his future business partner, Walter N. Haldeman, proprietor of the Louisville Courier, who, being a strong Southern sympathizer, had suspended his newspaper and retired behind the Southern lines. Editing the Rebel, however, became too precarious as the Union army moved on Atlanta, and, after serving Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood in various staff capacities, Watterson was offered by the Confederate government an opportunity, if he could reach Liverpool, of selling some cotton to British buyers. The young soldier, after various fantastic adventures with friendly Union officers, found the exits of the country closed, and settled down once more as an editor in Montgomery, Ala. In 1865 the future "Marse Henry" of editorials and cartoons, the war just over, got an editorial job in Cincinnati on the Evening Times, owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. Upon the editor's sudden death Starbuck gave Watterson the place at $75 a week. The Cincinnati Commercial, under the inspiration of Murat Halstead, greeted the young editor's first issue with some telling references to his fresh connection with the Confederate cause. Watterson went to Halstead and asked for quarter, saying that he meant to leave Cincinnati as soon as he could get a grubstake. That visit was the beginning of a friendship and political association which flowered notably through the famous "Quadrilateral" at the Greeley convention in 1872. A brief and successful newspaper venture at Nashville lasted almost through 1866. He returned to Nashville to join the staff of the Republican Banner. Simultaneously came two offers from Louisville - one from the senescent George Dennison Prentice to help edit the Louisville Daily Journal, another from Haldeman to become editor of the Courier, its publication resumed after the return of its publisher from behind the Southern lines. Watterson proposed consolidation to Haldeman, who declined. He joined the Journal, and, after half a year's lively but kindly battle with the Courier, the merger was made, and on November 8, 1868, the Courier-Journal began its existence. The Courier-Journal was one day old when its young editor began the struggle for the restoration of Southern home rule ("Carpet-Baggery and Peace, " Courier-Journal, November 9, 1868). Always a foe of slavery, Watterson agitated for the complete bestowal of civil and legal rights upon the Negroes in exchange for the return of the South to its homefolk. Carl Schurz and Horace Greeley ranged themselves with the Louisville editor, and, although their cause had a setback in the Greeley-Liberal campaign of 1872, it was won four years later. The Greeley campaign was always held by Watterson to have "shortened the distance across the bloody chasm", and it was at the Liberal Republican nominating convention at Cincinnati that he, Schurz, Samuel Bowles, Murat Halstead, and (later) Whitelaw Reid and Horace White formed the Quadrilateral (though they were six, not four), and first met Joseph Pulitzer, a delegate from Missouri. About 1874 Watterson fixed upon Gov. Samuel Jones Tilden as the hope of the party and a reunited country. Carefully and intelligently he began to build up the governor of New York for the presidency, this culminating in the nomination of 1876. To Watterson, Tilden was the "ideal statesman. " Except for Lincoln he was the editor's only public hero. During the 1876 campaign Watterson, at Tilden's request, took advantage of a Congressional vacancy through death in the Louisville district and sat, during the summer of 1876 and part of the winter of 1877, in the House as Tilden's floor leader, vociferously watching the contest that ended with the certification of Hayes. It was in this period that the passionate correspondence to the Courier-Journal from its Representative-editor in Washington appeared, including the suggestion - so alarming to the Northern press - that "a hundred thousand petitioners ten thousand unarmed Kentuckians" come to the capital to see that justice was done (Courier-Journal, January 5, 1877). After the inauguration of Hayes, the editor returned to his tripod, never again to hold public office, although once he considered being a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Kentucky if that was overwhelmingly desired - which it was not. Never again did he express more than temporary fealty to any Democratic presidential nominee or White House incumbent. He was highly critical of Cleveland and bitterly opposed his third nomination in 1892. The pair never got on, and many were the stories of private reasons for their long estrangement. In 1896 the Courier-Journal announced it would oppose William Jennings Bryan on the free silver issue. Watterson, on holiday abroad, had no part in the decision. But, learning of it, he cabled back to his partner, Haldeman, the message: "No compromise with dishonor" (Courier-Journal, July 13, 1896), and - save for one long editorial, sent from Switzerland - left the conduct of the fight for John B. Palmer and Simon B. Buckner (which meant McKinley) in Kentucky largely to his associate editor, Harrison Robertson. The stand almost destroyed the Courier-Journal, so resentful were the Democrats of the state against it, for - chiefly because of its activity - that was the time when, in Robert Ingersoll's phrase, "hell froze over, " and Kentucky went Republican. Watterson and Haldeman, working to regain their lost ground, supported William Goebel for governor against the Republican nominee in 1898, and by 1900 had managed to figure out a way to support the second nomination of Bryan. In 1908 Watterson allowed Josephus Daniels to use his name as "honorary publicity chairman" in the third Bryan campaign. But he deplored Bryan's appointment as secretary of state by Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (Courier-Journal, December 21, 1912) and assailed him as an impractical dreamer when the Secretary left the cabinet on the war issue. During the first decade of the twentieth century Watterson's chief national contribution was a series of philippics against "The Man on Horseback, " as he called Theodore Roosevelt. Since his editorials were generally carried by telegraph to all newspapers in the country as a matter of news, this crusade became very famous. In the course of it Watterson announced that Roosevelt was unquestionably a paranoiac, determined to assume dictatorship of the country, and urged his family to sequestrate the Colonel. In 1909 he offered to bet the New York World a dinner that Roosevelt would quarrel with his chosen successor, Taft, and won the bet easily. George Harvey in 1910 deeply interested Watterson in Woodrow Wilson, behind whom the editor marshaled his forces through the primary contest with Senator James Smith, calling the Governor "the hope of Democracy. " But Wilson's blunt admission to Harvey, in answer to a question from the latter, that Harvey's editorial support in Harper's Weekly was damaging him with liberals and progressives, offended and alienated the sentimental Watterson, and he attempted to prevent the nomination of Wilson in 1912 (Courier-Journal, Feburary 21, 1912). Failing, he became a lukewarm observer and critic, varying from mild to severe, until the issues raised by Charles Evans Hughes and Theodore Roosevelt in 1916 ranged him on Wilson's side. He supported the President enthusiastically that year, and through the war, but he could not accept the idea of the League of Nations, and once more parted company with the President. Charged with being unable to stand by Democratic presidents, he reminded his critics through the Courier-Journal that "things have come to a hell of a pass when a man can't wallop his own jackass, " an affectedly crude type of retort that, appealing strongly to the humorous sense of the American people, was part of his hold upon his readers. Many trips abroad and Florida holidays punctuated editorial duties from 1880 on, but invariably Watterson wrote voluminously and frequently from wherever he was. The summer before the World War he was abroad, but he returned after Sarajevo to throw himself strongly into an editorial assault against the Central Powers, which he attacked as foes of Christianity. "To hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, " he exclaimed in the Courier-Journal on September 3, 1914, and from then until the armistice, he repeated this stirring objurgation. In 1917 he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for his editorials hailing the declaration of war against the Central Powers by the United States. In August 1918, with two of the three children of his late partner, Haldeman, after litigation with the third growing out of the suppression of a Watterson editorial, the editor sold control of the Courier-Journal to Robert W. Bingham, and, after a brief connection as editor emeritus, Watterson, nearly eighty, retired finally to private life, which he spent on his estate, Mansfield, near Louisville, or in Florida and New York City. He showed a mild interest in James M. Cox in the 1920 campaign, but he viewed the triumph of Harding and the anti-Leaguers with serenity. In these years he wrote little, save an occasional letter, with the exception of "Marse Henry": An Autobiography, more important for its observations of life and anecdotes of the great than for a real revelation of an astonishing public career. He died at Jacksonville in December 1921, at the age of eighty-one, and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. During his lifetime he was temporary chairman of several national conventions and author of the resolutions passed by four of these. In these resolutions he put into circulation many resounding phrases which rang from the hustings and were elaborated in his own writings. He was famous and in demand as a public speaker and lecturer. He once in youth wrote a novel, but it is not preserved; for potboilers, he collected his lectures as The Compromises of Life (1903), and edited a book of genre stories by Southern authors, called Oddities in Southern Life and Character (1883), a best-seller of its epoch. His amazing zest for life, his gift for conversation and conviviality, his unusual personal appearance (the fierce blue eye under penthouses of bushy white eyebrows, the flaring mustache and slight goatee, the high, staccato voice combining to make a striking physical type), and his genius for "setting other editors to chattering" about what he wrote - these served to distinguish Watterson among his contemporaries at a time when journalism was personal and editorial writing often had immediate and dynamic effect.
Personality
Despite the legends, the tipple he liked best was champagne, and, after that, wine and beer; although known as "the Colonel, " a term he himself abjured, he did not relish whiskey, and the mint-julep yarns and cartoons were imaginative. He was a prodigious worker, a hard and frequent bon-vivant, a gifted idler when occasion permitted, and - in his home circle - a patriarch. Never were his famous personality and conversational gifts more glamorous than when he sat on the broad verandahs or in his large library at Mansfield, surrounded by his wife, his children, their children, and an assortment of guests and household pets. It was then that he was wont to say, looking back on a life both full and crowded: "I'm a free nigger at last and will never be anything else, hallelujah!" He died convinced that civilization was facing a crisis that might obliterate it "in seventy years, " ascribing this largely to godlessness, for he himself was of undoubting Christian faith, though indifferent to the tenets of the sects. But his pessimism about the future was due partly to the triumph of national prohibition and equal suffrage, championed by those whom for many years he had attacked as "red-nosed angels, " "Sillysallies, " and "Crazyjanes. "