Marse Henry | Page 3

linger upon my fair young brow.
Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily
no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had
the prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to
publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me
"the great American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too
partial friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died
and his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that
performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres
values subsequently came to verify.
When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or
political either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction
and resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed
tragi-comedians of literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.
Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted,
I became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the
press--now and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was
nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a
journalist. I did this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some
faint ambitions of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding
everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the
world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the
Kentucky vernacular, "a free nigger and not a slave nigger."

II

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