Chapter II (7)

ONE of the brightest men in America passed away on Monday. Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_, Georgia’s leading paper, and which has come to be regarded by many as the ablest paper in the South, had within a very brief period impressed his personality upon the current history of the nation. Five years ago he was little more than locally known. Being a guest at a dinner of the New England Society at Boston, he made a speech which was the happiest inspiration and effort of his life. It was the right word spoken at the right time. It lifted him at once to the dignity of a national figure. It was the greeting of the New South to the new order of things. It touched the great heart of the North by its warm tribute to the patriotism and faithfulness of the martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, being the first Southern utterance which did full justice to the memory of that great man. It was not a sycophantic nor an apologetic speech, but the voice of one who accepts accomplished results in their fullness, recognizes all the merits of his opponent, and bravely faces the future without heart-burnings or vain regrets. Mr. Grady’s speech was published in almost every paper in the land, in whole or in part, and, to borrow an old phrase, “he woke up one morning and found himself famous.” Since then all that he has written, said or done has been in the same line of patriotic duty. He has been no apologist for anything done by the South during the war. He never cringed. He was willing that he and his should bear all the responsibility of their course. But he loved the whole reunited country, and all that he spoke or wrote was intended to advance good feeling between the sections and the common benefit of all.

Mr. Grady was a partisan, but in the higher sense. He never descended to the lower levels of controversy. His weapon was argument, not abuse. And he was capable of rising above his party’s platform. He could not be shackled by committees or conventions. He nervily and consistently proclaimed his adhesion to the doctrine of protection to American industry, although it placed him out of line with his party associates.

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THE SOUTH’S NOBLE SON.

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_From the “Rockland, Me., Opinion.”_

THE whole country is deeply grieved and shocked by the announcement of the death of Mr. Henry W. Grady of Atlanta, Georgia, which occurred last Monday morning. The land was yet ringing with the matchless eloquence of his magnificent speech at the merchants’ dinner in Boston, when the news of his illness came, closely followed by that of his death. The press of the country was yet teeming with the applause of its best representatives, when the voice that evoked it is stilled in death, and one of the most brilliant careers of this generation is suddenly and prematurely closed. Mr. Grady caught a severe cold during his visit to Boston, and grew ill rapidly during his return journey. On his arrival home, he was found to be seriously ill of pneumonia, and the dread disease took a rapid course to a fatal termination. Mr. Grady was one of the most popular men in the South. He was an eloquent orator and brilliant writer. He was born in 1851 in Georgia, graduated at the State University and also took a course at the University of Virginia. On coming out of college, Mr. Grady embarked in journalism and devoted a comfortable fortune to gaining the experience of a successful newspaper man. Under his management the _Constitution_ of Atlanta, Ga., has gained a very large circulation. Mr. Grady has persistently refused to accept office. He won National fame as an orator by his speech at the Pilgrims’ dinner in Brooklyn, two years ago, and has been in great demand at banquets and similar occasions ever since. His eloquence was of the warm, moving sort that appeals to the emotions, his logic was sound and careful and all his utterances were marked by sincerity and candor. He has also no doubt done more than any one man to remove the prejudices and misunderstandings that have embittered the people of the North and South against each other politically, and to raise the great race problems of the day from the ruck of sectionalism and partisanship upon the high plane of national statesmanship. The South has lost a brave, noble and brilliant son, who served her as effectively as devotedly; but his work was needed as much and quite as useful at the North, and his death is indeed a national misfortune.

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BRILLIANT AND GIFTED.

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_Dr. H. M. Field in “New York Evangelist.”_

IT is with a grief that we cannot express, that we write the above name, and add that he who bore it is no longer among the living. The most brilliant and gifted man in all the South—the one who, though still young, had acquired immense popularity and influence, which made him useful alike to the South and to the whole country—has gone to his grave. He has died in his prime, at the early age of thirty-eight, in the maturity of his powers, with the rich promise of life all before him.

Our acquaintance with Mr. Grady began nine years ago, when we saw him for the first time in the office of a brother of ours, who was able to give him the help which he needed to purchase a quarter of the Atlanta _Constitution_. This at once made his position, as it gave him a point of vantage from which to exercise his wonderful gifts. From that moment his career was open before him; his genius would do the rest. This kindness he never forgot, and it led to his personal relations with us, which afterwards became those of intimacy and friendship.

When we first saw him, his face was almost boyish, round and ruddy with health, his eyes sparkling with intelligence, as well as with the wit and humor which he perhaps inherited from some ancestor of Irish blood. His face, like his character, matured with years; yet it always had a youthful appearance, which was the outward token of the immense vitality within him. We have seldom known a man who was so intensely alive—alive to the very tips of his fingers. As a writer, he was one of the very best for the variety of work required in the office of a great journal. His style was animated and picturesque, and he had an infinite versatility; turning his pen now to this subject and now to that; throwing off here a sharp paragraph, and there a vigorous editorial; but never in either writing a dull line. The same freshness and alertness of mind he showed in conversation, where he was as brilliant as with his pen. He would tell a story with all the animation and mimicry of an actor, alternating with touches of humor and pathos that were quite inimitable. It was the chief pleasure of our visit to Atlanta to renew this delightful acquaintance—a pleasure which we had twice last winter in going to, and returning from, Florida. Never shall we forget the last time that we sat before his fire, with his charming family and several clergymen of Atlanta, and listened to the endless variety of his marvelous talk.

Nor was his power confined to this limited circle. He was not only a brilliant conversationalist and writer, but a genuine orator. No man could take an audience from the first sentence, and hold it to the last, more perfectly than he. His speech before the New England Society in this city three years ago gave him at once a national reputation. It came to us when abroad, and even so far away, on the shores of the Mediterranean, at Palermo, in Sicily, we were thrilled by its fervid eloquence. A second speech, not less powerful, was delivered but two weeks since in Boston; and it was in coming on to this, and in a visit to Plymouth Rock, where he was called upon to make a speech in the open air, that he took the cold which developed into pneumonia, and caused his death.

But Mr. Grady’s chief claim to grateful remembrance by the whole country is that he was a pacificator between the North and the South. Born in the South, he loved it intensely. His own family had suffered in the war an irreparable loss. He once said to us as we came from his house, where we had been to call upon his mother, whose gentle face was saddened by a great sorrow that had cast a shadow over her life, “You know my father was killed at Petersburg.” But in spite of these sad memories, he cherished no hatred, nor bitterness, but felt that the prosperity of millions depended on a complete reconciliation of the two sections, so that North and South should once more be one country. This aim he kept constantly in view, both in his speeches and in his writings, wherein there were some things in which we did not agree, as our readers may see in the letter published this very week on our first page. But we always recognized his sincerity and manliness, and his ardent love for the land of his birth, for all which we admired him and loved him—and love him still—and on this Christmas day approach with the great crowd of mourners, and cast this flower upon his new-made grave.

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THE DEATH OF HENRY W. GRADY.

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_John Boyle O’Reilly, in the “Boston Pilot.”_

“THE South is in tears!” said the sorrowful dispatch from Atlanta on Monday last; and the grief and the sympathy of the North went freely southward in response. Next to his own city, indeed, this death strikes Boston most deeply, for here with us, only a few days ago, he poured forth the noblest stream of eloquence that ever flowed from his gifted tongue. It matters not now that many New Englanders, the _Pilot_ included, dissented from his Southern view of the colored question. We disagreed with the word, but we honored the silver tongue and the heart of gold beneath it. “He was the most eloquent man,” said the Hon. P. A. Collins, one who knows what eloquence consists of, “that I ever heard speak in Boston.”

Since the olden times there has been no more striking illustration of the power of oratory to appeal to the nation and to make a man famous among his people than is found in the career of Mr. Grady. Within ten years he leaped from the position of a modest Georgian editor to that of the best-known and the greatest orator on this continent. So potent is the true gift of eloquence when the substructure is recognized as solid in character and profoundly earnest in purpose.

To Irish-Americans, as to the State that has lost him, the death of Mr. Grady is a special affliction. He represented in a fine type the patriotism and the manly quality of a citizen that every Irish-American ought to keep in spiritual sight. He was a man to be trusted and loved. He was a proud Georgian and a patriotic American, though his father had died for “the Lost Cause.” He was, while in Boston, introduced to the great audience by Colonel Charles H. Taylor as “the matchless orator of Georgia.” Playfully, and yet half seriously, he accounted for himself thus: “My father was an Irishman—and my mother was a woman. I come naturally by my eloquence.”

North or South, it matters not the section—all men must honor such a character. His brief life reached a high achievement. He was a type of American to be hailed with delight—courageous, ready of hand and voice, proudly sentimental yet widely reserved, devoted to his State and loyal to the Republic, public-spirited as a statesman, and industrious and frugal as a townsman, and the head of a happy family. His devotion to his parents and to his wife and children was the last lesson of his life. In his Boston speech he drew tears from thousands by the unnamed picture of his father’s death for the bleeding South; from Boston he went South, insisting on being taken to his home when they told him in New York that he was dangerously ill. He died surrounded by his own—mother, wife, and children. Almost his last words to his mother were: “Father died fighting for the South, and I am happy to die talking for her.”

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TRIBUTES

OF THE

SOUTHERN PRESS.

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A NOBLE DEATH.

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_From the “Jacksonville, Fla., Times-Union.”_

ALAS, that the hero of the New South should follow, and in so short a time, the typical hero and representative of the Old! With hearts still bowed beneath the shadow of the flags at half-mast all over the South for Jefferson Davis, comes the sad and sudden message announcing the death of Henry W. Grady.

Poor Grady! Dead in the very summer time and blossom and golden fruitage of a brilliant life! Fallen, while yet so young and in the arms of his first overwhelming victory. Fallen on the topmost crest of a grand achievement—on the shining heights he had just so bravely won! Hapless fate, that he could not survive to realize the full fruition of his sublime endeavor! He went North only a few days ago on a mission of love and reconciliation, his great heart bearing the sorrows of the South, his big brain pulsing with patriotic purpose. Of a nervous, sensitive nature, his physical system, in sympathy with his intellectual triumph, both strained to the utmost tension, rendered him susceptible to the sudden change of climate, and he contracted a severe cold which soon developed into pneumonia, attended by a burning fever. Returning home he was met at the depot by what had been arranged for a grand ovation and a banquet at the Chamber of Commerce, by the people of Atlanta, but instead of being carried on the strong shoulders of the thousands who loved and honored him, he was received into the gentle arms of his family and physicians and borne tenderly home, to linger yet for a little while with the fond circle whose love, deep, strong, and tender as it was, appealed in vain against the hard decree of the great conqueror.

As Mr. Grady so eloquently expressed in his last hours: “Tell mother I died for the South, the land I love so well!” And this was as true as it could be of any patriot who falls on the field of battle.

’Twas his own genius gave the final blow,
And helped to plant the wound that laid him low.

* * * * *

Yes, she too much indulged the fond pursuit;
She sowed the seed, but death has reaped the fruit!

But has death, indeed, reaped the fruit? May not the very sacrifice, in itself, consecrate his last eloquent and inspired words till they sink deeper into the hearts of the North and South alike, thus linked with a more sacred memory and a sublimer sorrow? If so, we shall find a larger recompense even in the bitter bereavement.

As far as his personal history is concerned, Henry Grady could not have died a nobler death. The Greek philosopher said: “Esteem no man happy while he lives.” He who falls victorious, the citadel won, in a blaze of glory, is safe; safe from all the vicissitudes of fortune; safe from any act that might otherwise tarnish an illustrious name. It descends a rich heritage to after time. During the presidential campaign of 1844 the wonderful orator, Sargent S. Prentiss, delivered at Nashville, to an immense audience, the greatest campaign speech, perhaps, that was ever heard in the United States. After speaking for several hours, and just as he was closing an eloquent burst of oratory, he fell fainting in the arms of several of the bystanders. At once there was a rush to resuscitate him, but Governor Jones, thoroughly inspired by the speech and occasion, sprang from his seat, in a stentorian voice shouting: “Die! Prentiss; _die_! You’ll never have a better time!”

The _Times-Union_ has heretofore commented on Mr. Grady’s magnificent oration at Boston. It not only captured New England and the South, but the entire country. Nothing like it since the war has been uttered. In force, power, eloquence, it has been but rarely excelled in any time. Major Audley Maxwell, a leading Boston lawyer, describes it in a letter to a friend in this city as “a cannon-ball in full flight, fringed with flowers.” The occasion, the audience, the surroundings, were all inspiring. He was pleading for the South—for the people he loved—and to say that he reached the topmost height of the great argument, is comment and compliment enough. The closing paragraphs are republished this morning, and no man ever uttered a sublimer peroration. He spoke as one might have spoken standing consciously within the circling wings of death, when the mind is expanded by the rapid crowding of great events and the lips are touched with prophetic fire.

The death of Henry Grady was a public calamity. He had the ear of the North as no other Southern man had, or has. He was old enough to have served in the Confederate armies, yet young enough, at the surrender, while cherishing the traditions of the past, to still lay firm hold on the future in earnest sympathy for a restored and reconciled Union. In this work he was the South’s most conspicuous leader.

But his life-work is finished. Let the people of the South re-form their broken ranks and move forward to the completion of the work which his genius made more easy of accomplishment and which his death has sanctified. In the words he himself would have spoken, the words employed by another brilliant leader on undertaking a great campaign, each of the soldiers enlisted for the South’s continued progress will cry: “Spurn me if I flee; support me if I fall, but let us move on! In God’s name, let us move on!”

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THERE WAS NONE GREATER.

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_From the “Birmingham, Mo., Chronicle.”_

THE CHRONICLE confesses to being a hero-worshiper. There is no trait in the human heart more noble than that which applauds and commemorates the feats of brains or arms done by our fellow-man. We confess the almost holy veneration we feel for the heroes of song and story from the beginning of tradition. Nimrod to Joseph and Moses to the Maccabees, from Alexander to Cæsar, taking in the heroes of all nations from Cheops to Napoleon and Wellington, Putnam, Sam Houston and Lee and Grant and Lincoln, we do honor to them all.

So too do we worship the sages and orators. Whatever man the people worship is worthy of a place in our Pantheon. The people are the best judges of a man, and when the common people pay tribute to the worth of any man well known to them, we are ready to lift our hats and acknowledge his title to greatness. Any man who has the enthusiastic admiration of his own people is worthy of any honor.

The South has many brilliant writers, but none of them have ever made the columns of a newspaper glisten and glow and hold in magnetic enchantment the mind of the reader as Henry Grady did. In his life-work he was great, and there is none greater. His writings are worthy of a place beside those of Greeley and Watterson, and Grady was still a young man.

In the days gone by the South has sent many orators North to present Southern thought to Northern hearers. Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs and William L. Yancey all went before Grady was invited to speak up there. There were never four greater orators in the world’s history, and the story of their speeches has come down to us like music. Yet in this latter day when oratory does not appeal to people as it used to, when the busy world does not stop to read speeches, Grady went North to speak. He was known to the North and had done nothing to challenge the attention of the nation, yet his first speech at the North did catch public attention most pleasantly. His second speech, delivered but a few days ago, was the greatest effort of his life, and all the nations listened to it and all the newspapers commented upon his utterances. His speech was the equal of any oration ever delivered in America, and had as much effect on public thought. No effort of Toombs or Yancey, even in the days of public excitement, surpassed this last speech of Grady.

He deserves a place among the great men of America, and the South must hold his memory in reverence. A broken shaft must be his monument, for as sure as life had been spared him new honors were in store for this young man. He had made his place in the world, and he was equal to any call made upon him, and the people were learning to look to him as a leader. Few such men are born, and too much honor cannot be done them.

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A GREAT LEADER HAS FALLEN.

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_From the “Raleigh, N.C., State-Chronicle.”_

Good mother, weep, Cornelia of the South,
For thou indeed has lost a jewel son;
The Gracchi great were not so much beloved,
Nor with more worthy deeds their honors won.
Thy stalwart son deserves a Roman’s fame,
For Cato was not more supremely just;
Augustus was not greater in the State,
Nor Brutus truer to the public trust.

IN the death of Mr. Henry W. Grady the South loses its brightest and most useful man. He was the only Southern man who really had the ear of the people of the whole country, and he had just reached the position where he could be useful in the largest sphere. It is inexplicable why so young and robust a man—(he was not over thirty-nine years of age)—a man so brilliant and so able, should be taken just as he was entering upon the plane of wider influence and greater usefulness. To the South it is the greatest loss that it has sustained by death in a quarter of a century. To the whole people of the country, which he loved with his great-hearted devotion, it is nothing short of a National calamity.

Mr. Grady had the ear and heart of the South because he loved its history and its very soil, and because he was the leading exponent of the idea that is working to build up a prosperous manufacturing New South. He had the ear of the North because, while he had no apologies to make for Southern actions and was proud of Southern achievements, he had turned his eyes to the morning and lived in the busy world of to-day. He recognized changed conditions and did not bemoan fate. He stood up in his manliness and his faith and went to work to bring prosperity where poverty cast its blight. He inspired others in the South with faith in the future of his section, and invited Northern men of money, brains, and brawn to come South and make a fortune; and when they accepted his invitation, as not a few did, he gave them a brotherly welcome and made them feel that they were at home. In this he showed practical patriotism. Under no temptation—even when speaking in Boston—did he ever so far forget his manhood as to

Crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where thrift may follow fawning.

The people of the North also heard him because of his candor. He never deceived them about the race problem or the difficulties in the way of the South’s future. He admitted their gravity, and sought a peaceful solution in a just, fair, and honest way. His speech in Boston was a lamentation and an earnest appeal. He cried aloud for sympathetic help, and his cry, sealed with his life, we must believe, will not be heard in vain. God grant that his prayer for Peace and Union may be answered!

Mr. Grady’s most attractive quality was his warm great heartedness. He was generous to a fault. No tale of suffering or poverty was unheeded by him. He had a buoyant spirit and a light heart and deep affections. He was reverent in speech and with pen. He believed in God, had learned the truth of the gospel at his mother’s knee, “The truest altar I have yet found,” he said in his last speech. He was a member of the Methodist church. He had profound convictions, and his eloquent speeches in favor of Prohibition in Atlanta will not be forgotten. No man ever spoke more earnest words for what he conceived to be the safety of the homes of Atlanta than he. They will long be treasured up with fondness by those who mourn that he was cut down in the zenith of what promised the most brilliant career that lay out before any man in America.

Henry W. Grady was a grandson of North Carolina. His father was a native of Macon county, but early in life emigrated to Rome, Georgia, to make his fortune, and he made it. He was one of those men who succeed in every undertaking. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. He prospered and made a large estate. When the war came on he had a presentiment that he would be killed. But notwithstanding that idea took possession of him, he raised and equipped _at his own expense_ a regiment of cavalry, and hastened to the front as its captain. His company was attached as company G to the 25th N.C. Regiment, commanded by Col. Thos. L. Clingman. Eventually Capt. Grady was promoted to be major of the regiment. In the first battle he fell mortally wounded, showing how true was his presentiment of death. He was surrounded by his men, some of them brave, sturdy North Carolinians. He left a legacy of honor to his son, who always called North Carolina his grandmother and had a deep affection for its sons.

Mr. Grady graduated with high honors at the University of Georgia in Athens. Then he spent two years at the University of Virginia, where he devoted himself rather to the study of literature and to the work of the societies than to the regular college course. He won high honors there as an orator and as a debater. He was as well equipped and as ready and as effective as a debater as he became later on as an orator and editor. He was regarded there as a universal genius and the most charming of men. Leaving college he established a paper at Rome. Later in connection with Mr. Alston (North Carolina stock) he established the Atlanta _Herald_. It was a brilliant paper but was not a financial success. Our readers will remember that Mr. Alston was shot in the Capitol by State Treasurer Cox. Upon the failure of the _Herald_, Mr. Grady went to New York. He was without money and went there looking for something to do. He went into the office of the New York _Herald_ and asked for a position.

“What can you do?” asked the managing editor, when Mr. Grady asked for a position. “Anything,” was the reply of the young Georgian, conscious of his powers and conscious of ability to do any kind of work that was to be done in a great newspaper office. The editor asked him where he was from, and learning that he was from Georgia, said: “Do you know anything about Georgia politics?” Now if there was any subject which he knew all about it was Georgia politics, and he said so. “Then sit down,” said the managing editor, “and write me an article on Georgia politics.” He sat down and dashed off an article of the brightest matter showing thorough insight into the situation in Georgia and thorough knowledge of the leaders in that State. He was always a facile writer, and all his articles were printed without erasing or re-writing. The article was put into the pigeon-hole, and Mr. Grady took his departure. He left the office, so he said, very despondent, thinking the article might be published after several weeks, but fearing that it would never see the light. What was his surprise and joy to see it in the _Herald_ the next morning. He went down to the office and was engaged as correspondent for Georgia and the South. In this capacity he wrote letters upon Southern topics of such brilliancy as have never been surpassed, if equaled, in the history of American journalism. They gained for him a wide reputation, and made him a great favorite in Georgia. The public men of that State recognized his ability, and saw how much he might do to develop the resources and advance the prosperity and fame of Georgia if at the head of a great State paper. The late Alexander H. Stephens interested himself in Mr. Grady and assisted to get him on the staff of the _Constitution_. From the day he went to Atlanta on the staff of the _Constitution_ until his death his best energies and his great abilities were directed toward making it a great paper, and a powerful factor in developing the resources of Georgia. It became the most successful of Southern newspapers, and is to-day a competitor with the great papers of the North. To have achieved this unprecedented success in journalism were honor enough to win in a life-time. He was confessedly the Gamaliel of Southern journalism, and the best of it all was that he was, as was said of Horace Greeley after his death, “a journalist because he had something to say which he believed mankind would be the better for knowing; not because he wanted something for himself which journalism might secure for him.”

He was a Saul, and stood head and shoulders above all his fellows as an orator as well as an editor. We cannot dwell upon his reputation as an orator, or recount the scenes of his successes. We had heard him only in impromptu efforts and in short introductory speeches, where he easily surpassed any man whom we ever heard. He had a fine physique, a big, round, open, manly face, was thick-set, was pleasing in style, and had a winning and captivating voice. He could rival Senator Vance in telling an anecdote. He could equal Senator Ransom in a polished, graceful oration. He could put Governor Fowle to his best in his classical illustrations. He could equal Waddell in his eloquent flights. In a word he had more talent as a public speaker than any man we ever knew; and added to that he had _heart_, _soul_, _fire_—the essentials of true oratory. We recall four speeches which gave him greatest reputation. One was in Texas at a college commencement, we think; another at the New York banquet on “The New South”; the third at the University of Virginia; and the last—(alas! his last words)—at the Boston banquet just two weeks ago. These speeches, as well as others he has made, deserve to live. The last one—published in last week’s _Chronicle_—is emphasized by his untimely death. In it he had so ably and eloquently defended the South and so convincingly plead for a united country based upon mutual confidence and sympathy that, in view of his death, his words seem to have been touched by a patriotism and a devoutness akin to inspiration. His broad catholicity and his great patriotism bridged all sectional lines, and he stood before the country the most eloquent advocate of “a Union of Hearts” as well as a “Union of Hands.” As the coming greatest leader of the South, he sounded the key-note of sublimest patriotism. Less profound than Daniel Webster, his burning words for the perpetuity of the Union, with mutual trust and no sectional antagonism, were not less thrilling nor impressive. The Southern people ought to read and re-read this great speech, which, doubtless, cost him his life, and make it the lamp to their feet. If we heed his words and bury sectionalism, it will be written of him that “though dead, he yet speaketh.”

Star of the South!
To thee all eyes and hearts were turned,
As round thy path, from plain to sea,
The glory of thy greatness burned.

Millions were drawn to thee and bound
By mind’s high mastery, millions hailed
In thee a guide-star—and ne’er found
A ray in thee, that waned or failed.

No night’s embrace for thee! nor pall,
But such as mortal hand hath wrought,
Thou livest still in mind—in all
That breathes, or speaks, or lives in thought.

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HENRY W. GRADY.

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_From the “New Orleans Times-Democrat.”_

HENRY W. GRADY, editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_, died yesterday, after a short illness, from typhoid pneumonia, at the early age of thirty-six. Perhaps no man in the South has been more often mentioned in the last few years or attracted more attention than he. His famous speech before the New England Society had the effect of bringing him before the country as the representative of that New South which is building up into prosperity and greatness.

Mr. Grady was a native of Georgia. His father was Colonel of a Confederate regiment during the late war, and to that father he paid the highest tribute a son could pay in several of his speeches. He had a hard struggle at first, like nearly every Southern boy, but he fought his way up to the top by pluck, energy and determination.

Mr. Grady’s first journalistic venture was, we believe, in his native town. He ran a small paper there, moved thence to Atlanta, carrying on another newspaper venture in the Georgia capital. In the course of events this paper was swallowed up by the _Constitution_, then pushing itself to the front of the Georgia press, and Mr. Grady was selected as co-editor of the latter.

Under him that paper became one of the leading exponents of Southern opinion, a representative of the progressive South, not lingering over dead memories, but living in the light of the present and laboring to build up this section.

Mr. Grady and his paper were always the defenders of the South, yet not afraid to expose and condemn its errors and mistakes. He had the courage to speak out whenever this was necessary, and when, some few months ago, regulators attempted to introduce into Georgia, in the immediate vicinity of Atlanta, the same practices as in Lafayette parish in this State, Mr. Grady, through the _Constitution_, denounced it vigorously. There were threats, but it did not affect the _Constitution_, which insisted that the New South must be a South of peace, law and order.

We cannot at this time review Mr. Grady’s entire journalistic career. It is sufficient to say that with his colleagues he built up his paper to be a power in Georgia and the South. His ability was recognized throughout this section, but it was not until his famous speech at the New England dinner that his reputation became national.

When at that dinner, speaking for the New South he so well represented, he pledged his brethren of the North the patriotic devotion of the Southern people, he created a sensation. Some of the most famous orators of the country were present, but without a dissenting voice it was declared that Mr. Grady’s speech was the event of the day. It sent a thrill throughout the Union. The Southern people rose to declare that Mr. Grady had fully explained their views and ideas, and before his eloquent words the prejudice which had lingered since the war in many portions of the North disappeared. Perhaps no single event tended more to bring the sections closer together than that speech, which so eloquently voiced the true sentiments of the Southern people. A wave of fraternal feeling swept through the country, and although the Republican politicians managed to counteract some of the good accomplished, much of it remained. Mr. Grady deserves remembrance, for in a few words, burning with eloquence, he swept away the prejudices of years.

The country discovered that it contained an orator of whom it had known but little, a statesman who helped to remove the sectional hatred which had so long retarded its progress. Mr. Grady became at once one of the best-known men in the Union. He was spoken of for United States Senator, he was mentioned as Vice-President, and it looked as though he could be elevated to any position to which he aspired; but he wisely clung to his journalistic career, satisfied that he could thereby best benefit his State and section.

Mr. Grady was not a one-speech man. He has made many addresses since then, and while it is true that his other speeches did not create the same sensation as his first, they were all eloquent, able and patriotic.

His career so auspiciously begun, which promised so much to himself and the country, has been brought suddenly and prematurely to a close. Mr. Grady was a young man, and we had every reason to believe that he would play a leading part in the South and in the country. Although his career is thus cut short, he had accomplished much, and the New South for which he spoke will carry on the good work he began of uniting the entire country on one broad and patriotic platform.

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SECOND TO NONE.

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_From the “Louisville Courier-Journal.”_

HENRY W. GRADY died at his home in Atlanta yesterday. There is that in the very announcement which is heart-breaking. He was the rose and expectancy of the young South, the one publicist of the New South, who, inheriting the spirit of the old, yet had realized the present, and looked into the future, with the eyes of a statesman and the heart of a patriot. His own future was fully assured. He had made his place; had won his spurs; and he possessed the gifts, not merely to hold them, but greatly to magnify their importance. That he should be cut down upon the threshold of a career, for whose brilliant development and broad usefulness all was prepared, is almost as much a public calamity as it is a private grief. We tender to his family, and to Georgia, whom he loved with the adoration of a true son for a mother, the homage of our respectful and profound sympathy.

Mr. Grady became a writer for the _Courier-Journal_ when but little more than a boy and during the darkest days of the Reconstruction period. There was in those days but a single political issue for the South. Our hand was in the lion’s mouth, and we could do nothing, hope for nothing, until we got it out. The young Georgian was ardent, impetuous, the son of a father slain in battle, the offspring of a section, the child of a province; yet he rose to the situation with uncommon faculties of courage and perception; caught the spirit of the struggle against reaction with perfect reach; and threw himself into the liberal and progressive movements of the time with the genius of a man born for both oratory and affairs. He was not long with us. He wished a wider field of duty, and went East, carrying letters in which he was commended in terms which might have seemed extravagant then, but which he more than vindicated. His final settlement in the capital of his native State and in a position where he could speak directly and responsibly, gave him the opportunity he had sought to make a fame for himself, and an audience of his own. Here he carried the policy with which, in the columns of the _Courier-Journal_, he had early identified himself, to its finest conclusions; coming at once to the front as a champion of a free South and a united country, second to none in efficiency, equaled by none in eloquence.

He was eager and aspiring, and, in the heedlessness of youth, with its aggressive ambitions, may not have been at all times discriminating and considerate in the objects of his attacks; but he was generous to a fault, and, as he advanced upon the highway, he broadened with it and to it, and, if he had lived, would have realized the fullest measure of his own promise and the hopes of his friends. The scales of error, when error he felt he had committed, were fast falling from his eyes, and he was frank to own his changed, or changing view. The vista of the way ahead was opening before him with its far perspective clear to his mental sight. He had just delivered an utterance of exceeding weight and value, at once rhetorically fine and rarely solid, and was coming home to be welcomed by his people with open arms, when the Messenger of Death summoned him to his last account. The tidings of the fatal termination of his disorder are startling in their suddenness and unexpectedness, and will be received North and South with sorrow deep and sincere, and far beyond the bounds compassed by his personality.

The _Courier-Journal_ was always proud of him, hailed him as a young disciple who had surpassed his elders in learning and power, recognized in him a master voice and soul, followed his career with admiring interest, and recorded his triumphs with ever-increasing sympathy and appreciation. It is with poignant regret that we record his death. Such spirits are not of a generation, but of an epoch; and it will be long before the South will find one to take the place made conspicuously vacant by his absence.

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A LOSS TO THE SOUTH.

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_From the “Louisville Post.”_

THE death of Henry W. Grady, of Atlanta, after so brief an illness and in the very prime of a vigorous young manhood, will startle the whole country and will be an especial affliction to the South. Mr. Grady was a brilliant journalist, a man of brain and heart, and by his sensible and enthusiastic policy has identified himself with the interests of the New South. In fact, few men have been more largely instrumental in bringing about that salutary sentiment, now prevailing, that it is best for the South to look with hope and courage to the future, rather than to live in sad inactivity amid the ruins of the past. Mr. Grady was a warm and confident advocate of industrial advancement in the land of his birth. He wanted to see the South interlaced with railroads, her rich mineral deposits opened to development, her cities teeming with factories, her people busy, contented and prosperous. This was his mission as a man and as a journalist, and his influence has been widespread. Just at this time his loss will be doubly severe.

One morning Henry Grady, who had possessed little more than a sectional reputation, woke up to find himself famous throughout the nation. By his speech at a New York banquet he sounded the key-note of fraternal Union between North and South, and his appeal for mutual trust and confidence, with commerce and industry to cement more strongly than ever the two great sections of the country, met with a response from both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line more hearty than ever before. Many another man from the South felt the same sentiments and would have expressed them gladly. Many a man in the North felt that in the South those sentiments were sincerely held. But Grady had a peculiar opportunity, and right well did he improve it. He expressed eloquently and forcibly the feelings, the purposes, the very spirit of the New South, and in that very moment he made a reputation that is national. It was his good fortune to express to the business men as well as to the politicians of the nation the idea of an indivisible union of interests, of sentiments and of purposes, as well as of territory.

In Mr. Grady’s own State his death will be most felt. What he has done for Georgia can only be appreciated by those who compare its present activity and prosperity with the apathy and discontent which existed there a few years ago. The dead man will be sincerely mourned, but the idea which he made the fundamental one of his brief career will continue to work out the welfare of the New South.

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THE DEATH OF HENRY W. GRADY.

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THE most brilliant journalist of the South is no more. When the news was sent over the country yesterday morning that Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta _Constitution_, was dead, there were sighs of regret which, if they could have been gathered together into one mass, would have been heard across the Atlantic. He was peculiarly gifted. With an imagery and wealth of language that enabled him to clothe the most uninteresting subject in a pleasing garb, he had at the same time the genius of common sense more fully developed than most men now prominently before the public. He was born in 1851 in the town of Athens, Georgia, and was therefore less than forty years of age. At college he was remarkable among his fellows for those gifts of speech and pen which made him famous. To his eternal honor, it can be said that in neither the sanctum or the forum were his powers used in a way to add to any one’s sorrow or distress. His writings were clean and pure and in every line gave token of the kind heart that beat in his bosom. Mr. Grady was a lovable man. Those who knew him well entertained for him the deepest affection. His face was itself a fair type of his nature, which was essentially of the sunshine character.

He was restlessly energetic and always agitating matters that he believed would be promotive of the public good. The Cotton States’ Exposition and the Piedmont Exposition, both held in Atlanta, were literally the creations of his energy and enthusiasm and pluck. It will no doubt be readily admitted by his associates of the _Constitution_ that he was its moving spirit, and by his powers largely made it the grand and magnificent success that it undeniably is.

The Young Men’s Christian Association building, costing $100,000, arose as by magic under the persuasive powers of his tongue and pen. The list of his works of a practical kind that now add to Atlanta’s character and position could be indefinitely extended. When he appealed to Atlanta he never spoke in vain, for in addition to brains and energy he had those rare qualities of personal magnetism, which made his originality and zeal wonderfully effective. He entered into everything his big head conceived with his whole heart and soul.

He was loyal to his city and State, and never missed an opportunity for aiding in their advancement. He was sought out by the young and the old, and enjoyed the full confidence of all who knew him.

His name and fame, however, were not confined to Georgia. In the Lone Star State, thousands flocked to the city of Dallas to hear his great speech at the Texas State Fair. His New York speech, a year or two ago, fairly thrilled the country and caused the enactment of scenes never before witnessed on similar occasions. No orator had ever received such an ovation in that great city, and none such has been since extended to any speaker. His recent speech at Boston was calculated to do more good for the entire country than anything that has fallen from the lips of any man in the last decade. It will be a monument to his memory more enduring than brass. It made a profound impression on those who heard it. The sentiments and truths he so boldly uttered are echoing and re-echoing among the hills of New England and over the prairies of the great West, and they will bear rich fruit in the near future. They were things known to us all here, but those who did not know and did not care have been set to thinking by his eloquent presentation of the Southern situation. That speech, perhaps, cost him his life; but if it produces the effect on the Northern mind and heart which it deserves, the great sacrifice will not have been in vain. His death will cause a more earnest attention to the great truths he uttered, and result in an emphasis of them that could not have been attained otherwise, sad as that emphasis may be. The death of such a man is a national calamity. He had entered upon a career that would have grown more brilliant each year of his life. His like will not soon be seen and heard again.

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UNIVERSAL SORROW.

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_From the “Nashville American.”_

THE news of Mr. Grady’s death is received with universal sorrow. No man of his age in the South or in the Union has achieved such prominence or given promise of greater usefulness or higher honors. His reputation as a journalist was deservedly high; but he won greater distinction, perhaps, by his public speeches. He was intensely, almost devoutly Southern, but he had always the respectful attention of the North when he spoke for the land of his nativity. There was the ring of sincerity in his fervid utterances, and his audiences, whether in the North or in the South, felt that every word came hot from the heart. He has done as much as any man to put the South right before the world; and few have done more to promote its progress and prosperity. He was a man of tremendous energy, bodily and mental, and always worked at high tension. Whatever subject interested him took his mind and body captive, and into whatever cause he enlisted he threw all the powers of his intellect and all the force of a nature ardent, passionate, and enthusiastic in the extreme. It is probable that the disease which laid hold of him found him an easier prey because of the restless energy which had pushed his physical powers beyond their capacity. His nervous and impetuous temperament showed no mercy to the physical man and made it impossible for him to exercise a prudent self-restraint even when the danger of a serious illness was present with him.

Mr. Grady’s personal traits were such as won the love of all who knew him. All knew the brilliant intellect; but few knew the warm, unselfish heart. The place which he held in public esteem was but one side of his character; the place which he held in the hearts of his friends was the other.

The South has other men of genius and of promise; but none who combine the rare and peculiar qualities which made Henry W. Grady, at the age of thirty-eight, one of the most conspicuous men of his generation.

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THE HIGHEST PLACE.

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_From the “Charleston News and Courier.”_

THE death of Henry W. Grady has removed from earth the most prominent figure among the younger generation of public men in America. He held unquestionably the highest place in the admiration and regard of the people of the South that was accorded to any man of his years, and had won, indeed, by his own efforts and attainments a place among the older and the most honored representatives of the people of the whole country. It was said of him by a Northern writer, a few days before his death, that no other Southern man could command so large a share of the attention of the Northern people, and his death was the result of a visit to New England, whither he went in response to an earnest invitation to speak to the people of that section upon a question of the gravest national concern.

The people of Georgia both honored and loved Henry Grady, and would have elected him to any office within their gift. It is probable that, had he lived but a little while longer, he would have been made Governor of the State, or commissioned to represent it in the Senate of the United States. He would have filled either of these positions acceptably and with credit to himself; and perhaps even higher honors awaited him. When his name was mentioned a few months ago in connection with the nomination for the second highest office in the gift of the people of the whole country, the feeling was general and sincere that he was fully worthy, at least, of the great dignity which it was proposed to confer upon him. Certainly no other evidence is required to prove that the brave and brilliant young Georgian was a marked man, and that he had already made a deep impression on the events and the men of his time when he was so suddenly stricken down in the flower of useful and glorious manhood.