It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them; but, since it has that way of doing—of breeding away and breaking away from the innate good—it is well that a man should be born in any age with the faith of Abraham.
It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.
Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.
Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his faith, so simple his religion—so contrary to the worldliness of the religion of his day,—that the very practice of it made him an uncommon man.
As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, “Oh, kindness can't be classified—it takes in the whole world or nothin'.”
When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up. The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: “That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to find out you're busted.”
General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars—and the splendid estate was again free from debt.
There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial.
Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer.
“I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too,” he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent—prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses!