“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.”
TRIBUTES
OF THE
SOUTHERN PRESS.