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518 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS edited by Mr. Watterson. It at once attained great popular- ity. The Confederate commanders made it the medium of their correspondence. Mr. Watterson lost no time at the close of the war lament- ing the fate of the Confederacy. The devastation wrought by contending armies was disheartening. Worse than this was the discouragement and gloom that settled down over the leading men of the South. Worst of all was the faction in the North which, after the death of Lincoln, determined to make political capital out of the results of the war. Here is where Mr. Watterson 's vision helped him to rise above the tem- porary questions on which the common politicians wasted their energy. The military occupation of the South, the op- pression of the f reedmen, the raids of the Ku Klux, the force bill, and freedman's bureau, in his eyes were partisan meas- ures which only hindered the restoration of the Union to its old-time glory. The only work worthy of a patriotic states- man under the circumstances was that which Lincoln had out- lined in his second inaugural, to bind up the nations 's wounds. ' * The results of the war should be frankly accepted. The smoke of battle had hardly cleared away before Mr. Watterson was publishing a newspaper in the capital of Ten- nessee. No State except Virginia had felt the ravages of war so keenly as Tennessee. Thousands of its most intelligent men were refugees north of the Ohio River. Other thousands had sacrificed both life and property for the Confederacy. Still other thousands whose sympathies had not led them into either army had been driven from their homes and for years had lived hke outlaws. Mr. Watterson soon realized that this was no place to try to establish a newspaper of national repu- tation. In this situation Mr. Watterson took advantage of an op- portunity which presented itself in the winter of 1866-67 to be- come editor and part owner of the Louisville Journal. This paper had been edited for many years by the celebrated George D. Prentice. With Henry Clay as its political sponsor and Prentice as its editor it had enjoyed a national reputation for nearly two scores of years. Before the war the Journal