HE resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South—the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in four years of the fiercest war—realize, as you cannot, what this race problem means—what they owe to this kindly and dependent race. Nor are they wholly to blame for the presence of slavery. The slave-ships sailed from your ports—the slaves once worked in your fields, and you sold them to the South. Neither of us now defends the traffic, nor the institution.
The love the whites of the South feel for the negro race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling into sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak, and I catch a vision of an old Southern home, with its lofty pillars, and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands—now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man—as they lay a mother’s blessing there while at her knees—the truest altar I yet have found—I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin or guard at her chamber door, puts a black man’s loyalty between her and danger.
I catch another vision. The crisis of battle—a soldier struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling death—bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life in his master’s stead. I see him by the weary bedside, ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and in honor to still the soldier’s agony and seal the soldier’s life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice saying, “Follow him! Put your arms about him in his need, even as he put his about me. Be his friend as he was mine.” And out into this new world—strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both—I follow! And may God forget my people—when they forget these.
APPEAL FOR TEMPERANCE.[¹]
(In no cause in which his sympathies were enlisted was Mr. Grady more active and earnest than in that of temperance. The following extract is from one of his speeches delivered during the exciting local campaign in Georgia in 1887.)
[¹] Copyright, C. H. Hudgins & Co.
Y friends, hesitate before you vote liquor back into Atlanta, now that it is shut out. Don’t trust it. It is powerful, aggressive and universal in its attacks. To-night it enters an humble home to strike the roses from a woman’s cheek, and to-morrow it challenges this Republic in the halls of Congress. To-day it strikes a crust from the lips of a starving child, and to-morrow levies tribute from the government itself. There is no cottage in this city humble enough to escape it—no palace strong enough to shut it out. It defies the law when it cannot coerce suffrage. It is flexible to cajole, but merciless in victory. It is the mortal enemy of peace and order. The despoiler of men, the terror of women, the cloud that shadows the face of children, the demon that has dug more graves and sent more souls unshrived to judgment, than all the pestilences that have wasted life since God sent the plagues to Egypt, and all the wars since Joshua stood beyond Jericho. O my countrymen! loving God and humanity, do not bring this grand old city again under the dominion of that power. It can profit no man by its return. It can uplift no industry, revive no interest, remedy no wrong. You know that it cannot. It comes to turn, and it shall profit mainly by the ruin of your sons and mine. It comes to mislead human souls and crush human hearts under its rumbling wheels. It comes to bring gray-haired mothers down in shame and sorrow to their graves. It comes to turn the wife’s love into despair and her pride into shame. It comes to still the laughter on the lips of little children. It comes to stifle all the music of the home and fill it with silence and desolation. It comes to ruin your body and mind, to wreck your home, and it knows that it must measure its prosperity by the swiftness and certainty with which it wreaks this work.