Publishers' Note



Congress. He accepted this seat in Congress at Mr.
Tilden's urgency and against his own inclinations, de-
clining a re-election. With this exception, he has per-
sistently refused office. "I resolved," he said, on one
occasion, when offered a distinguished position, "when
a very young man, that I would not perpetrate the
mistake of Greeley and Raymond."
  A notable figure wherever he has appeared, Mr.
Watterson's relation to the public questions of his time
has been that of a leader, who, having reached his own
conclusions, took no thought of the consequences. He
stood for the pacification of the courtry and the rec-
onciliation of the sections upon the acceptance of the
three final amendments to the Constitution, which he
described as the Treaty of Peace between the North
and the South, when not another voice on his own
side of the line could be heard in his support, and lived
to see his policy universally accepted. He stood for
the public credit and a sound currency, with scarcely
any but a silent following in his own party, during the
Greenback craze and through the succeeding Free
Silver agitation, still living to see his course vindicated
by the results.  Mainly through his efforts the old
black-laws were removed from the statute-books of
Kentucky, and the Kentucky negro was invested, with-
out the violence which marked other of the old Slave
States, with his new rights of citizenship.
  Years before Lamar delivered his eulogy of Sum-
ner, and while Grady was a school-boy, Mr. Watter-
son was passing backward and forward between the
two embittered sections laying the foundation for the
epoch-making utterances of those great orators.
Through all his writing and speaking one dominant
note will be found-the national destiny and the
homogeneity of the people-charity and tolerance-
constituting a key to his life-long labor of love.
                          vi