Henry Watterson, the foremost Kentucky journalist, and one of the most
widely known newspaper men in the United States, was born at Washington,
D. C., February 16, 1840. This accident of birth was due to the fact
that his father, Harvey McGee Watterson, with his wife, was in
Washington as a member of the lower house of Congress from his native
state, Tennessee. In consequence of defective vision, Henry Watterson
was educated by private tutors; but he did attend the Episcopal School
at Philadelphia for a short time. At the age of eighteen years he became
a reporter on the Washington _States_; but, in 1861, he returned to
Nashville, Tennessee, to edit the _Republican Banner_. Watterson was a
staff officer in the Confederate Army, and in 1864 chief of scouts for
General Joseph E. Johnston, but throughout the war he was also editing a
newspaper. After the war he married and revived the _Banner_, which he
edited for about two years, when he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and
succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the _Journal_. In the
following year Watterson, with Walter N. Haldeman, consolidated the
_Journal_, _Courier_, and _Daily Democrat_ to form _The
Courier-Journal_. The first issue of this paper appeared November 8,
1868, and Colonel Watterson has been its editor ever since. He has made
it the greatest newspaper in Kentucky, if not in the South or West, and
one of the best known papers printed in the English language. His
editorials are unequalled by any other writer in America, either from
the point of thought or construction; and his style is always more
interesting than his substance. Colonel Watterson has held but one
public office, having been a member of the Forty-fourth Congress, in
1876, and the personal friend and most ardent supporter of Samuel J.
Tilden in the infamous Hayes-Tilden controversy of that year. Colonel
Watterson has been a delegate-at-large from Kentucky in many Democratic
presidential conventions, in all of which bodies he has been a
conspicuous figure. He is famous as a journalist, orator, and author.
His eulogy upon Abraham Lincoln has been listened to in almost every
state in the Union, and it is his best known effort in oratory. Though
now past his three score years and ten, Colonel Watterson is as vigorous
and vindictive as ever in the handling of public questions and of his
legion of enemies, as the country witnessed in the presidential campaign
of 1912. He edited _Oddities of Southern Life and Character_ (Boston,
1882); and he has written _The History of the Spanish-American War_
(Louisville, 1898); _The Compromises of Life: Lectures and Addresses_
(New York, 1902), containing his ablest speeches delivered upon many
occasions; and _Old London Town_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1911), a group of
his European letters to _The Courier-Journal_, edited by Joseph Fort
Newton. Colonel Watterson has an attractive country home near
Louisville, "Mansfield," but in recent years his winters have been spent
at Naples-on-the-Gulf, in Florida, and his summers in "grooming
presidential candidates!"
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (February, 1904); _Harper's Weekly_
(November 12, 1904); _The Booklovers Magazine_ (March, 1905).