Collection contains personal and business correspondence and papers of Henry Watson, Jr. (1810-1888), lawyer and planter. Early papers relate to John Watson (d. 1824), a frequent contributor to Joel Barlow's American Mercury, and include fragments and several complete literary manuscripts; papers relating to the settlement of John Watson's estate; and several letters to Henry Watson, Sr., from Elisha Stanley. This Stanley-Watson correspondence describes Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Kentucky; mercantile business and the activities of Kentuckians during the War of 1812; and the disastrous effects of peace on mercantile pursuits.

The papers centering on Henry Watson, Jr., concern his education at Hartford, Connecticut, and at Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; a visit to Greensboro, Alabama, in 1831; return to his home in East Windsor, Connecticut, for the study of law with Henry Barnard; his return to Greensboro in 1834 to begin the practice of law; the establishment of a lucrative practice; the accumulation of property including a plantation and slaves; the establishment of the Planter's Insurance Company; his marriage to Sophia Peck; his efforts to dispose of two shares in the Ohio Land Company; his residence in Europe during the Civil War; and the settlement of his father's estate.

Correspondence describes college life at Harvard College; life in Alabama, with accounts of the soil, settlement, and agriculture; politics in Alabama, 1834-1844; volunteers from Alabama for service in the Mexican War; westward migration; activities of Northern abolitionists in Alabama in 1836; panics of 1837 and 1857; Whig politics in the 1850s; fear in Greensboro of a slave insurrection, 1860; the presidential campaign of 1860; secession; the sale of cotton before and after the Civil War; mail service between the North and the South during the war; mobilization and preparation for war; the management of his plantation and the impressment of slaves, tools, and livestock during the war; the difficulties of Southerners in Europe during the war; inflation; railroad building in Alabama; the Union Pacific Railroad; and Reconstruction.

Also included is correspondence with John Erwin, Whig leader in Alabama; two land grants to Edwin Peck signed by Martin Van Buren; letters from Sophia Peck, her brother, William Peck, and her sister, Mary Eliza Peck, while in schools in Hartford, Connecticut, and New York, New York; letters from the brothers and sisters of Henry Watson, Jr., in Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio; letters from William P. Eaton, head of the Female Department of the Cahaba (Alabama) Male and Female Academy; letter of Henry Watson to an editor on the subject of fertilizers; several letters from Confederate soldiers imprisoned at Johnson's Island, Ohio; contracts of Watson with freedmen; a bulletin of the Irving Institute, Tarrytown, New York; tax lists for Greene County, Alabama; printed extracts from the diary of William Watson; bulletin of the Berlin American Female Institute; catalogs of the Cumberland University Law School, Lebanon, Tennessee, 1851-1852, and of the Greensboro (Alabama) Female Academy, 1858; letters, biographical sketch, and list of the writings of Asa Gray; biographical sketch, certificates of membership in various learned societies, and three articles of Sereno Watson (b. 1826), brother of Henry Watson, Jr., botanist, and associate editor of the Journal of Education; and letters of Henry Barnard [partially published: Bayrd Still (ed.), "Observations of Henry Barnard on the West and South of the 1840's," Journal of Southern History, VIII (May, 1942), 247-258]. A large portion of the papers are bills, receipts, and prices current. Volumes include plantation and household accounts, 1834-1866, record of Negroes, 1843-1866, bill book of the Planters' Insurance Company, 1854-1863, summaries of magazine articles and account book, 1832-1848, and diaries, 1830-1833 and 1850-1854, of Henry Watson, Jr.; and diaries, 1849-1863, and genealogical notes and records of Sereno Watson.