Then came Grady’s death. It shocked the country that a man so gifted and the only American capable of pronouncing an oration as faultless as the philippics of Demosthenes, or as the sturdy, resistless orations of Gladstone, could not live immortal as his prophetic sentences that still illumine the brain and electrify the heart of an entire people.
Grady’s two speeches in the East, if he had never written or spoken aught else, would be the Leuctra and Mantinea, immortal victories and only daughters of an Epaminondas. If there survived no other children of Henry Grady’s genius than these two, his renown would be as lasting as the glory and greatness and peace of the Republic which he gave his life to assure.
HENRY W. GRADY.
From the “Augusta Chronicle.”
Two weeks ago the people of the South were called upon to mourn the death of Jefferson Davis. An aged man was gathered to his home in the fullness of years, with his life-work done. He was the embodiment of a sacred past, and men turned with reverence to do him honor for the cause he had championed.
To-day the people again note the presence of the Great Reaper. This time a young man is cut down in the prime of life. His work lay bright before him. His face was toward the morning. The one represented all that the South had been: the other much that she hoped to be. He was the inspiration of a renewed and awakened South with a heart full of reverence and hope and buoyancy—bound to the past by tender memories, but confident of the future with all the heartiness of a sanguine nature. Possibly it was because of the progressive sentiments which he breathed that all sections and all people are to-day in grief over the gifted dead. There is mourning in every Georgia hamlet, such as there has been for no young man since Thomas R. R. Cobb was brought home a corpse from Fredericksburg. There are tributes of respect from Boston, where he stood last week, with his face aglow with the light of a newer life, to Texas, where last year he delivered a message of fiery eloquence to his people. It was the national feeling which Henry Grady had kindled in the South—a faith in our future, a devotion to the Union—a practical setting to our destiny—that now lament the loss of such a man, and which sends over the wires from every section of the country the words, “Untimely, how untimely!”
Henry W. Grady was born in Athens. He was but thirty-eight when he died. His father was a country merchant who kept his family in competency, and the house, where little Henry used to leave his romping playmates to read Dickens under the trees, now stands on Prince avenue, with its deep shades, its gleaming white pillars, its high fence and old-time appearance. When war came on the elder Grady went out with his company. His name now indents the marble side of the soldiers’ monument in Athens—erected to those who fell in battle. Educated at the State University, Henry Woodfin Grady graduated in 1868. In his class were Albert H. Cox, George T. Goetchius, P. W. Meldrin, Julius L. Brown, W. W. Thomas and J. H. Rucker—among the living—and Charles S. DuBose, Walter S. Gordon, Davenport Jackson, and F. Bowdre Phinizy among the dead. In college Henry Grady was more of a reader than a student. He knew every character in Dickens and could repeat the Christmas Stories by heart. He was a bright, companionable boy, full of frankness, brimming over with fun and kindness, and without a thought of the great career that lay before him. From Athens he went to Rome where he engaged in newspaper work. His letters to the Atlanta papers attracted the attention of Col. I. W. Avery, who gave him several odd jobs. There was a dash and creaminess in his sketch work which became popular at once. From Rome young Grady went to Atlanta, and with Col. Robert A. Alston started the Atlanta Herald.
From this time he has been a public figure in Georgia. The Herald was immensely popular. Its methods were all new. Grady widened its columns to make it look like Horace Greeley’s paper, and hired special engines in imitation of James Gordon Bennett. He made money but spent it lavishly for news. His editorial sketches were wonderfully clever. His “Last Man in the Procession,” “The Trained Journalist,” “Toombs and Brown,” attracted wide attention. But the Herald could not stand this high pressure. Under the cool, skilled management of the Constitution, Grady’s paper succumbed, and with it all of his private means were lost. The young man in 1876 was absolutely penniless. It was then his genius burst forth, however. The New York Herald ordered everything he could write. The Augusta Constitutionalist paid for his letters from Atlanta. He started a Sunday paper, which he afterwards gave up, and pretty soon he was regularly engaged by the Atlanta Constitution. During the electoral trouble in Florida, Grady kept the Northern papers full of luminous sketches about politics and fraud. Then he commenced to write up the orange interests in Florida, winning the attention of the North and attracting scores of visitors to the Land of Flowers. Next he took up bee culture and stock raising in Georgia. He made the sand pear of Thomasville famous. He revived the melon interest, and, in his wizard-like way, got the people to believe in diversified farming. There was a richness and lightness in his touch which added interest to the most practical subject. What he handled was adorned. He drew people to Atlanta by his pen-pictures of a growing town. In the Philadelphia Times of this period were fine letters about public men and battles of the war. He became a personality as well as a power in journalism. No man was better known in Georgia than Henry Grady.