Watson is mentioned in the fourth verse of the official state song "Maryland, My Maryland." The song was written in 1861, fifteen years later after Watson's death in Mexico, by James Ryder Randall while teaching in Louisiana, after hearing about the outbreak of rioting and loss of life as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania militia troops in Baltimore. The troops were marching between the President Street Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad west on Pratt Street to the Camden Street Station of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to get to Washington, D.C. in response to President Abraham Lincoln's request for 75,000 volunteers and proclamation of a state of rebellion after the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in South Carolina on April 14, 1861, at the beginnin