Henry Watterson

There did seem something both audacious and grotesque in this ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered antiquities of Britain, so that the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter.

Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their success in England was undeniable.

Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the novel—it was entitled “One Story’s Good Till Another Is Told”—was laid by and quite forgotten.

Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and those that may be called its dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions, the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild the Great.

Directly he came out and said: “I may be doing wrong, and don’t feel entirely sure of my ground, but I am going to let you gentlemen go.

If you carry him off a prisoner he will be exchanged back into the fighting line, and we make nothing by it.

They brought some “red licker” and I asked for some sugar for a toddy, not failing to cite the familiar Sut Lovingood saying that “there were about seventeen round the door who said they’d take sugar in their’n.” The drink warmed me to my…

He said he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was only waiting for his wound to heal to get back into the Confederate Army, and that if they wanted to hang him for a spy to go ahead.

From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold of the White House to the hour he went thence to his death, there was not a moment when he did not dominate the political and military situation and his official subordinates.

Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced the coming of a man, of a leader of men; and in its tone and style the gentlemen whom he had invited to become members of his political family—each of whom thought himself a bigger man than his…

One cynic tells us that “A statesman is a politician who is dead,” and another cynic varies the epigram to read “A politician out of a job.” Patriotism cries “God give us men,” but the parties say “Give us votes and offices,” and Congress…

In a nation of blind men,” we are told, “the one-eyed man is king.” In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitator is apt to drown the voice of the statesman.

What is to be,” says the predestinarian Mother Goose, “will be, though it never come to pass.

The world—the whole trend of modern thought—was set against slavery.

The Northern radicals were wont to say, “Let the South go,” the more profane among them interjecting “to hell!” The Secessionists liked to prod the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got to Boston.

I strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing—nigh heartbroken—when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the swift-flowing stream.

Thus, restricted to the South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a “right” which the South was bound to defend.

Whether the War of Sections—as it should be called, because, except in Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war—could have been averted must ever remain a question of…

The great man listened and replied: “I have noticed you scattering your means round here pretty freely but you haven’t said ‘turkey’ to me.

There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of whom the typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a claim against the Government, who dared not approach so great a man with so much as the intimation…

In one way and another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the other all cheek.

Men took their politics, as their liquor, “straight”; and this father of mine was an undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson.

In my early life—as it were, my salad days—I aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron called “one of those damned literary fellows” and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as “a leeterary celeebrity.” But some malign fate always sat…