By William “Skip” Deegans
Henry Watterson, one of the most prominent orators of his day, spoke at Lewisburg’s Carnegie Hall about Abraham Lincoln in 1903. The Greenbrier Independent reported that “The lecture was as fine as a specimen of English composition as we ever heard from the platform and was intensely interesting from start to finish.”
Watterson was editor of Louisville’s The Courier-Journal, where he had a made it one of the finest newspapers in the South. Raised in Tennessee, Watterson served briefly in the Confederate Army despite being opposed to session and slavery. Following the war, he was a strong proponent of unification and wrote, “There can be no peace as long as the North allows itself to look on the South either as a quasibelligerent, or as a conquered province. That is not the road to peace. There must be a spirit of mutual forgiveness.”
Watterson was related by marriage to Mark Twain who came from a slave-owning family and also served in the Confederate Army. In 1901, Twain was the master of ceremonies at New York’s Carnegie Hall for a fundraiser, and the featured speaker was Watterson. The program that included northern and southern Civil War veterans raised money for Tennessee’s Lincoln Memorial University (LMU). Following the Civil War, Lincoln wanted to do something to help the people of East Tennessee who were opposed to session and had no affinity for the political control by wealthy slave-owning planters. To that end, General Oliver Otis Howard founded the university in 1897. In the audience to hear Watterson speak in New York was Andrew Carnegie.
In 1904, Carnegie donated $20,000 (about $740,000 in today’s dollars) to build a library at LMU. Among the alumni of LMU are Appalachian writers Jesse Stuart and Don West, who along with his wife Connie, founded the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia.
Sources: Greenbrier Independent, The Courier-Journal, Marse Henry by Henry Watterson, Henry Watterson, The Coincidental Redeemer.
