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 pa