Henry W. Grady was one of the foremost journalists of the day. He was still numbered among the young men of the Republic, yet his name and fame had already become a household possession in every part of the Union. Not only was he a writer of remarkable vigor, but he was also a finished orator and a skillful diplomat. As a writer he combined the finish of a Prentiss with the strength and vigor of a Greeley. Not so profuse, possibly, as Watterson, he was yet more solid and consistent. By force of genius he had trodden difficulty and failure under foot and had climbed to the highest rung of the ladder.
By his own people he was idolized—by those of other sections highly esteemed. Whenever he wrote all classes read. When he spoke, all people listened.
He was a genuine product of the South, yet he was thoroughly National in his views. The vision of his intelligence took in not only Georgia and Alabama, but all the States; for he believed in the Republic and was glad the South was a part of it.
His death is not only a loss to Atlanta and Georgia, to the South and the North, but a calamity to journalism.
EDITOR, ORATOR, STATESMAN, PATRIOT.
From the “Kansas City Globe.”
In the death of Henry W. Grady the South has lost one of its foremost and best men. He was pre-eminently the foremost man of the South, and to the credit of the section it can be said that he had not attained to such a position by services in the past, but by duty conceived and well discharged in the present. He was not a creature of the war, but was born of the events succeeding the war and which, in turn, he has helped to shape for the good of the South, in a way that has represented a sentiment which has induced immigration and the investment of capital, so that, short as has been the span of his life of usefulness, it has been long enough to see the realization of his greatest ambition and hopes—the South redeemed from the despair of defeat and made a prosperous part of a great nation and a factor in working out a glorious future for a reunited people.
Intensely Southern in his sentiments, devotedly attached to his section and as proud of it in poverty and defeat as in the day of its present prosperity, to which he much contributed, Henry W. Grady comprehended the situation as soon as man’s estate allowed him to begin the work of his life, and he set about making a New South, in no sense, as he claimed in his famous Boston speech, in disparagement of the Old South, but because new ideas had taken root, because of new conditions; and the new ideas he cultivated to a growth that opened a better sentiment throughout the South, produced a better appreciation of Southern sentiment in the North, and helped to harmonize the difference between the sections that war sought to divide, but which failing still left “a bloody chasm” to be spanned or filled up. That it is obliterated along with the ramparts of fortresses and the earthworks of the war, is as much due, or more, to Henry W. Grady than any man who has lived in the South, a survivor of the war, or brought out of its sequences into prominence.