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.
Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such
sights and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply
affected. Until I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had
complete possession of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing
all the hymns. Being early taught in music I began to transpose them
into many sorts of rhythmic movement for the edification of my
companions. Their words, aimed directly at the heart, sank, never to be
forgotten, into my memory. To this day I can repeat the most of
them—though not without a break of voice—while too much dwelling upon
them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life of activity in
very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I have been
always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain.
The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and
there. I never had the young man’s period of disbelief. There has never
been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene—no
matter how festal—I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome;
never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had
opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!
Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to
my mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and
divide the churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough
for my ethical guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee
inspiration enough to fulfill my heart’s desire; and though I have read
a great deal of modern inquiry—from Renan and Huxley through Newman and
Döllinger, embracing debates before, during and after the English
upheaval of the late fifties and the Ecumenical Council of 1870,
including the various raids upon the Westminster Confession, especially
the revision of the Bible, down to writers like Frederic Harrison and
Doctor Campbell—I have found nothing to shake my childlike faith in the
simple rescript of Christ and Him crucified.