Reconstruction, as it was called—ruin were a fitter name for it—had
just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The
Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal
Union faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time
was martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress.
Radicalism, vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by
the inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of
Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland
and a negroized Ireland.
The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have
interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the
Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies and
federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously
menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier
auspices.
There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,
playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused
to admit that the head of the South was in the lion’s mouth and that
the first essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to
stroke the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between
two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic
monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into
a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline.
Touching its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way
perilously through the cross currents of public opinion. There was
scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its
enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it
down and drive it out.
Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had
to be created. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources,
sustained by the courage of the venture, by the integrity of its
convictions and aims, and by faith in the future of the city, the state
and the country.
Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sunday, November 8,1868.
The night before the good people of Louisville had gone to bed
expecting nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an
uninvited guest arrived a little before the dawn. No hint of its coming
had got abroad; and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to say, it
was not a pleased surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the
startled citizen in big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there
issued thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted the _amour
propre_ of the sleepy villagers. They were used to a very different
style of newspaper approach.
Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The
Courier had its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their
friends. The trio stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and
familiar institutions. Here was a double-headed monster which, without
saying “by your leave” or “blast your eyes” or any other politeness,
had taken possession of each man’s doorstep, looking very like it had
brought its knitting and was come to stay.
The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman
and the Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of
those days successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many
changes. At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A
revolution had come into the business and the spirit of American
journalism.
In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled for
the right of way. Yet Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth
class, having hardly enough patronage to sustain one daily newspaper of
the first or second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus
contending to divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested
itself during the years immediately succeeding the war. But it did not
take definite shape until 1868.
Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not
altogether profitable pursuit of his “rights in the territories” and
had resumed the suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging
prospects. I had succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part
ownership of the Journal. Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to
the manner born and bred; old and good friends; and after our rivalry
of six months maintained with activity on both sides, but without the
publication of an unkind word on either, a union of forces seemed
exigent. To practical men the need of this was not a debatable
question. All that was required was an adjustment of the details.
Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and the
Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not
seem safe to leave outside.
V
The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican
Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs,
who had held to the Government—to save their slaves—resenting Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the
before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in
power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary
nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to
cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.
The situation may be the better understood when I add that “negro
testimony”—the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made
freedmen as witnesses—barred by the state constitution, was the burning
issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could
not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake
of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin
happened to be black.
[Illustration: 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]
To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery.
The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could
not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of
Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of
Southern men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength
and had broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who
were with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff
of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But
I proposed to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the
selfish and short-sighted time servers who thought the people had
learned nothing and forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in
the saddle I sought to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at
least for the time being mainly what I had to look to for a
constituency.
Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised
against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the
action I made a direct fighting issue, which—the combat
interdicted—gave me the opportunity to declare—with something of the
bully in the tone—that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten
paces, but could shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket
handkerchief, holding myself at all times answerable and accessible. I
had a fairly good fighting record in the army and it was not doubted
that I meant what I said.
But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against
odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians
were sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention
put its mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large
to the National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at
St. Louis to put a Presidential ticket in the field.
The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English
dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that
instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was
given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing the
local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple
competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to
engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival
and larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the
contracting parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming
together the two were able to put their trained faculties to the best
account.
Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side
by side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks
to which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the
closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical,
but they had one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently
under a high state of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound
cause of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing
short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to
see how the Courier-Journal’s cat was going to jump, in order that they
might take the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal
stood for the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system
of misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any
success.
Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and
tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the
paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for
sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and
patience to save it from destruction than it had cost to create it
thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue
complete, the tide turned and the future safe.