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.
SECOND TO NONE.
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.