Henry Watterson

Henry Watterson (February 16, 1840 – December 22, 1921), the son of a U.S. congressman from Tennessee, became a prominent journalist in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as a Confederate soldier, author and partial term U.S. congressman. A Democrat like his father Harvey Magee Watterson, Henry Watterson for five decades after the American Civil War was a part-owner and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, which was founded by Walter Newman Haldeman and would be purchased by Robert Worth Bingham in 1919, who would end the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's association with the paper.

Early and family life

Born in Washington, D.C., on February 16, 1840, to the former Tilithacumi (Talitha) Black of Spring Hill, Tennessee and her husband, Harvey Magee Watterson, a Shelbyville, Tennessee lawyer and U.S. Congressman. His father was close to President Andrew Jackson, also from Tennessee, and in 1843 would become the publisher of the Washington Union, the main newspaper of the Democratic party of that era. His uncle in Ohio would also become a newspaper editor, lawyer, Union soldier during the Civil War and ultimately Republican U.S. Supreme Court justice Stanley Matthews.

Henry was an only child. He was sickly, with very poor eyesight and that only in one eye, so that his mother home-schooled him in Washington, D.C., and their home in Nashville, Tennessee until he was twelve years old. She then sent him to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he received his only formal education, at an academy run by an Episcopal priest, and he also ran the school paper, the New Era, on a press his father donated.