HENRY W. GRADY

ENGRAVED FROM PHOTOGRAPH BY C. W. MOTES.
H. W. Grady.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS’
LIFE OF
HENRY W. GRADY
INCLUDING HIS
WRITINGS AND SPEECHES.

A Memorial Volume

COMPILED BY MR. HENRY W. GRADY’S CO-WORKERS ON

“THE CONSTITUTION,”

AND EDITED BY

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS

(UNCLE REMUS).

THIS MEMORIAL VOLUME IS SOLD ONLY BY SUBSCRIPTION, AND IN THE INTERESTS OF THE FAMILY AND MOTHER OF MR. GRADY.

NEW YORK:

CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY,

104 & 106 Fourth Avenue.

Copyright,

1890,

By MRS. HENRY W. GRADY.

All rights reserved.

Press W. L. Mershon & Co.,

Rahway, N. J.

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE REALIZATION OF THE LOFTY PURPOSE THAT GUIDED OUR

MESSENGER OF PEACE,

AND TO THE SPLENDID CLIMAX OF HIS HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS,

THIS MEMORIAL VOLUME

OF THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF

Henry Woodfin Grady,

IS DEDICATED TO THE

PEACE, UNITY AND FRATERNITY

OF THE

NORTH AND SOUTH, AND TO THE PROGRESS AND PROSPERITY OF

A RE-UNITED COUNTRY WITH ONE FLAG AND ONE DESTINY.

CONTENTS.

SPEECHES.

WRITINGS.

POEMS BY VARIOUS HANDS.

MEMORIAL MEETINGS.

PERSONAL TRIBUTES.

TRIBUTES OF THE NORTHERN PRESS.

TRIBUTES OF THE SOUTHERN PRESS.

LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS FROM DISTINGUISHED PERSONS.

IN MEMORIAM.

IT is within the bounds of entire accuracy to say that the death of no man ever created a deeper and more universal sorrow than that which responded to the announcement that Henry Woodfin Grady had paid his final debt of nature, and was gone to his last account. The sense of grief and regret attained the dignity of a national bereavement, and was at one and the same time both public and personal. The young and gifted Georgian had made a great impression upon his country and his time; blending an individuality, picturesque, strong and attractive, and an eloquence as rarely solid as it was rhetorically fine, into a character of the first order of eminence and brilliancy. In every section of the Union, the people felt that a noble nature and a splendid intellect had been subtracted from the nation’s stock of wisdom and virtue. This feeling was intensified the nearer it approached the region where he was best known and honored: but it reached the farthest limits of the land, and was expressed by all classes and parties with an homage equally ungrudging and sincere.

In Georgia, and throughout the Southern States, it rose to a lamentation. He was, indeed, the hope 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 qualities, 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 magnificent development and broad usefulness all was prepared, seemed a cruel dispensation of Providence and aroused a heart-breaking sentiment far beyond the bounds compassed by Mr. Grady’s personality.

Of the details of his life, and of his life-work, others have spoken in the amplest terms. I shall, in this place, content myself with placing on the record my own remembrance and estimate of the man as he was known to me. Mr. Grady became a writer for the press 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. At first, his sphere of work was confined to the newspapers of the South. But, not unreasonably or unnaturally, 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 name and fame for himself, and an audience of his own. Here he carried the policy with which 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, winning universal applause, and was coming home to be welcomed by his people with open arms, when the Messenger of Death summoned him to his God. The tidings of the fatal termination of his disorder, so startling in their suddenness and unexpectedness, added to the last scene of all a feature of dramatic interest.

For my own part, I can truly say that I was from the first and 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. We had broken a lance or two between us; but there had been no lick below the belt, and no hurt which was other than skin-deep, and during considerably more than a year before his death a most cordial and unreserved correspondence had passed between us. The telegram which brought the fatal news was a grievous shock to me, for it told me that I had lost a good friend, and the cause of truth a great advocate. It is with a melancholy satisfaction that I indite these lines, thankful for the opportunity afforded me to do so by the kindness of his associates and family. 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.

Henry Watterson.

Louisville, February 9, 1890.

THE HOME OF GRADY’S BOYHOOD, ATHENS.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
OF
HENRY W. GRADY.

By Joel Chandler Harris.

ORDINARILY, it is not a difficult matter to write a biographical sketch. Here are the dates, one in faded ink in an old Bible, the other glistening under the morning sun, or the evening stars, on the cold gravestone. Here is the business, the occupation, the profession, success or failure—a little scrap of paper here and there, and beyond and above everything, the fact of death; of death that, in a pitiful way, becomes as perfunctory as any other fact or event. Ordinarily, there is no difficulty in grouping these things, throwing in a word of eulogy here and there, and sympathizing in a formal way with the friends and relatives and the community in general.

But to give adequate shape to even the slightest sketch of the unique personality and the phenomenal career of Henry Woodfin Grady, who died, as it were, but yesterday, is well-nigh impossible; for here was a life that has no parallel in our history, productive as our institutions have been of individuality. A great many Americans have achieved fame in their chosen professions,—have won distinction and commanded the popular approval, but here is a career which is so unusual as to have no precedent. In recalling to mind the names of those who have been most conspicuously successful in touching the popular heart, one fact invariably presents itself—the fact of office. It is not, perhaps, an American fact peculiarly, but it seems to be so, since the proud and the humble, the great and the small, all seem willing to surrender to its influence. It is the natural order of things that an American who is ambitious—who is willing, as the phrase goes, to serve the people (and it is a pretty as well as a popular phrase)—should have an eye on some official position, more or less important, which he would be willing to accept even at a sacrifice if necessary. This is the American plan, and it has been so sanctified by history and custom that the modern reformers, who propose to apply a test of fitness to the office-seekers, are hooted at as Pharisees. After our long and promiscuous career of office-seeking and office-holding, a test of fitness seems to be a monarchical invention which has for its purpose the destruction of our republican institutions.

It is true that some of the purest and best men in our history have held office, and have sought it, and this fact gives additional emphasis to one feature of Henry Grady’s career. He never sought office, and he was prompt to refuse it whenever it was brought within his reach. On one occasion a tremendous effort was made to induce him to become a candidate for Congress in the Atlanta district. The most prominent people in the district urged him, his friends implored him, and a petition largely signed was presented to him. Never before in Georgia has a citizen been formally petitioned by so large a number of his fellow-citizens to accept so important an office. Mr. Grady regarded the petition with great curiosity. He turned it over in his mind and played with it in a certain boyish and impulsive way that belonged to everything he did and that was one of the most charming elements of his character. His response to the petition is worth giving here. He was, as he said, strongly tempted to improve a most flattering opportunity. He then goes on to read a lesson to the young men of the South that is still timely, though it was written in 1882. He says:

When I was eighteen years of age, I adopted journalism as my profession. After thirteen years of service, in which I have had various fortunes, I can say that I have never seen a day when I regretted my choice. On the contrary, I have seen the field of journalism so enlarged, its possibilities so widened, and its influence so extended, that I have come to believe earnestly that no man, no matter what his calling, his elevation, or his opportunity, can equal in dignity, honor and usefulness the journalist who comprehends his position, fairly measures his duties, and gives himself entirely and unselfishly to his work. But journalism is a jealous profession, and demands the fullest allegiance of those who seek its honors or emoluments. Least of all things can it be made the aid of the demagogue, or the handmaid of the politician. The man who uses his journal to subserve his political ambition, or writes with a sinister or personal purpose, soon loses his power, and had best abandon a profession he has betrayed. Within my memory there are frequent and striking examples of men who have sacrificed the one profession, only to be sacrificed in the other. History has not recorded the name of a single man who has been great enough to succeed in both. Therefore, devoted as I am to my profession, believing as I do that there is more of honor and usefulness for me along its way than in another path, and that my duty is clear and unmistakable, I am constrained to reaffirm in my own mind and to declare to you the resolution I made when I entered journalism, namely, that as long as I remain in its ranks I will never become a candidate for any political office, or draw a dollar from any public treasury. This rule I have never broken, and I hope I never shall. As a matter of course, every young man of health and spirit must have ambition, I think it has been the curse of the South that our young men have considered little else than political preferment worthy of an ambitious thought. There is a fascination about the applause of the hustings that is hard to withstand. Really, there is no career that brings so much of unhappiness and discontent—so much of subservience, sacrifice, and uncertainty as that of the politician. Never did the South offer so little to her young men in the direction of politics as she does at present. Never did she offer so much in other directions. As for me, my ambition is a simple one. I shall be satisfied with the labors of my life if, when those labors are over, my son, looking abroad upon a better and grander Georgia—a Georgia that has filled the destiny God intended her for—when her towns and cities are hives of industry, and her country-side the exhaustless fields from which their stores are drawn—when every stream dances on its way to the music of spindles, and every forest echoes back the roar of the passing train—when her valleys smile with abundant harvests, and from her hillsides come the tinkling of bells as her herds and flocks go forth from their folds—when more than two million people proclaim her perfect independence, and bless her with their love—I shall be more than content, I say, if my son, looking upon such scenes as these, can stand up and say:

“My father bore a part in this work, and his name lives in the memory of this people.”

While I am forced, therefore, to decline to allow the use of my name as you request, I cannot dismiss your testimonial, unprecedented, I believe, in its character and compass, without renewing my thanks for the generous motives that inspired it. Life can bring me no sweeter satisfaction than comes from this expression of confidence and esteem from the people with whom I live, and among whom I expect to die. You have been pleased to commend the work I may have done for the old State we love so well. Rest assured that you have to-day repaid me amply for the past, and have strengthened me for whatever duty may lie ahead.

Brief as it is, this is a complete summary of Mr. Grady’s purpose so far as politics were concerned. It is the key-note of his career. He was ambitious—he was fired with that “noble discontent,” born of genius, that spurs men to action, but he lacked the selfishness that leads to office-seeking. It is not to be supposed, however, that he scorned politics. He had unbounded faith in the end and aim of certain principles of government, and he had unlimited confidence in the honesty and justice of the people and in the destiny of the American Union—in the future of the Republic.

What was the secret of his popularity? By what methods did he win the affections of people who never saw his face or heard his voice? His aversion to office was not generally known—indeed, men who regarded him in the light of rivalry, and who had access to publications neither friendly nor appreciative, had advertised to the contrary. By them it was hinted that he was continually seeking office and employing for that purpose all the secret arts of the demagogue. Yet, in the face of these sinister intimations, he died the best beloved and the most deeply lamented man that Georgia has ever produced, and, to crown it all, he died a private citizen, sacrificing his life in behalf of a purpose that was neither personal nor sectional, but grandly national in its aims.

In the last intimate conversation he had with the writer of this, Mr. Grady regretted that there were people in Georgia who misunderstood his motives and intentions. We were on the train going from Macon to Eatonton, where he was to speak.

“I am going to Eatonton solely because you seem to have your heart set on it,” he said. “There are people who will say that I am making a campaign in my own behalf, and you will hear it hinted that I am going about the State drumming up popularity for the purpose of running for some office.”

The idea seemed to oppress him, and though he never bore malice against a human being, he was keenly hurt at any interpretation of his motives that included selfishness or self-seeking among them. In this way, he was often deeply wounded by men who ought to have held up his hands.

When he died, those who had wronged him, perhaps unintentionally, by attributing to him a selfish ambition that he never had, were among the first to do justice to his motives. Their haste in this matter (there are two instances in my mind) has led me to believe that their instinct at the last was superior to their judgment. I have recently read again nearly all the political editorials contributed to the Constitution by Mr. Grady during the last half-dozen years. Taken together, they make a remarkable showing. They manifest an extraordinary growth, not in style or expression—for all the graces of composition were fully developed in Mr. Grady’s earliest writings—but in lofty aim, in the high and patriotic purpose that is to be found at its culmination in his Boston speech. I mention the Boston speech because it is the last serious effort he made. Reference might just as well have been made to the New England speech, or to the Elberton speech, or to the little speech he delivered at Eatonton, and which was never reported. In each and all of these there is to be found the qualities that are greater than literary nimbleness or rhetorical fluency—the qualities that kindle the fires of patriotism and revive and restore the love of country.

In his Eatonton speech, Mr. Grady was particularly happy in his references to a restored Union and a common country, and his earnestness and his eloquence were as conscientious there as if he were speaking to the largest and most distinguished audience in the world, and as if his address were to be printed in all the newspapers of the land. I am dwelling on these things in order to show that there was nothing affected or perfunctory in Mr. Grady’s attitude. He had political enemies in the State—men who, at some turn in their career, had felt the touch and influence of his hand, or thought they did—and these men were always ready, through their small organs and mouthpieces, to belittle his efforts and to dash their stale small beer across the path of this prophet of the New South, who strove to impress his people with his own brightness and to lead them into the sunshine that warmed his own life and made it beautiful. Perhaps these things should not be mentioned in a sketch that can only be general in its nature; and yet they afford a key to Mr. Grady’s character; they supply the means of getting an intimate glimpse of his motives. That the thoughtless and ill-tempered criticisms of his contemporaries wounded him is beyond question. They troubled him greatly, and he used to talk about them to his co-workers with the utmost freedom. But they never made him malicious. He always had some excuse to offer for those who misinterpreted him, and no attack, however bitter, was ever made on his motives, that he could not find a reasonable excuse for in some genial and graceful way.

The great point about this man was that he never bore malice. His heart was too tender and his nature too generous. The small jealousies, and rivalries, and envies that appertain to life, and, indeed, are a definite part of it, never touched him in the slightest degree. He was conscious of the growth of his powers, and he watched their development with the curiosity and enthusiasm of a boy, but the egotism that is based on arrogance or self-esteem he had no knowledge of. The consciousness of the purity of his motives gave him strength and power in a direction where most other public men are weak. This same consciousness gave a breadth, an ardor, and an impulsiveness to his actions and utterances that seem to be wholly lacking in the lives of other public men who have won the applause of the public. The secret of this it would be difficult to define. When his companions in the office insisted that it was his duty to prepare at least an outline of his speeches so that the newspapers could have the benefit of such a basis, the suggestion fretted him. His speech at the annual banquet of the New England Society, which created such a tremendous sensation, was an impromptu effort from beginning to end. It was the creature of the occasion. Fortunately, a reporter of the New York Tribune was present, and he has preserved for us something of the flavor and finish of the words which the young Southerner uttered on his first introduction to a Northern audience. The tremendous impression that he made, however, has never been recorded. There was a faint echo of it in the newspapers, a buzz and a stir in the hotel lobbies, but all that was said was inadequate to explain why these sons of New England, accustomed as they were to eloquence of the rarer kind, as the volumes of their proceedings show, rose to their feet and shouted themselves hoarse over the simple and impromptu effort of this young Georgian.

Mr. Grady attended the New England banquet for the purpose of making a mere formal response to the toast of “The South,” but, as he said afterwards, there was something in the scene that was inspiring. Near him sat General Tecumseh Sherman, who marched through Georgia with fire and sword, and all around him were the fat and jocund sons of New England who had prospered by the results of the war while his own people had had the direst poverty for their portion. “When I found myself on my feet,” he said, describing the scene on his return, “every nerve in my body was strung as tight as a fiddle-string, and all tingling. I knew then that I had a message for that assemblage, and as soon as I opened my mouth it came rushing out.”

That speech, as we all know, was an achievement in its way. It stirred the whole country from one end to the other, and made Mr. Grady famous. Invitations to speak poured in upon him from all quarters, and he at last decided to deliver an address at Dallas, Texas. His friends advised him to prepare the speech in advance, especially as many of the newspapers of the country would be glad to have proofs of it to be used when it was delivered. He saw how essential this would be, but the preparation of a speech in cold blood (as he phrased it) was irksome to him, and failed to meet the approval of his methods, which were as responsive to the occasion as the report of the thunder-clap is to the lightning’s flash. He knew that he could depend on these methods in all emergencies and under all circumstances, and he felt that only by depending on them could he do himself justice before an audience. The one characteristic of all his speeches, as natural to his mind as it was surprising to the minds of others, was the ease and felicity with which he seized on suggestions born of the moment and growing out of his immediate surroundings. It might be some incident occurring to the audience, some failure in the programme, some remark of the speaker introducing him, or some unlooked-for event; but, whatever it was, he seized it and compelled it to do duty in pointing a beautiful moral, or he made it the basis of that swift and genial humor that was a feature not only of his speeches, but of his daily life.

He was prevailed on, however, to prepare his Dallas speech in advance. It was put in type in the Constitution office, carefully revised, and proof slips sent out to a number of newspapers. Mr. Grady’s journey from Atlanta to Dallas, which was undertaken in a special car, was in the nature of an ovation. He was met at every station by large crowds, and his appearance created an enthusiasm that is indescribable. No such tribute as this has ever before been paid, under any circumstances, to any private American citizen, and it is to be doubted whether even any public official, no matter how exalted his station, has ever been greeted with such hearty and spontaneous enthusiasm. His reception in Dallas was the culmination of the series of ovations through which he had passed. Some sort of programme had been arranged by a committee, but the crowds trampled on this, and the affair took the shape of an American hullaballoo, so to speak, and, as such, it was greatly enjoyed by Mr. Grady.

Meanwhile, the programme that had been arranged for the speech-making was fully carried out. The young editor completely captured the vast crowd that had assembled to hear him. This information had been promptly carried to the Constitution office by private telegrams, and everything was made ready for giving the speech to the public the next morning; but during the afternoon this telegram came:

“Suppress speech: It has been entirely changed. Notify other papers.”

At the last moment, his mind full of the suggestions of his surroundings, he felt that the prepared speech could not be depended on, and he threw it away. It was a great relief to him, he told me afterward, to be able to do this. Whatever in the prepared speech seemed to be timely he used, but he departed entirely from the line of it at every point, and the address that the Texans heard was mainly an impromptu one. It created immense enthusiasm, and confirmed the promise of the speech before the New England Society.

The speech before the University of Virginia was also prepared beforehand, but Mr. Grady made a plaything of the preparation before his audience. “I was never so thoroughly convinced of Mr. Grady’s power,” said the Hon. Guyton McLendon, of Thomasville, to the writer, “as when I heard him deliver this speech.” Mr. McLendon had accompanied him on his journey to Charlottesville. “We spent a day in Washington,” said Mr. McLendon, recalling the incidents of the trip. “The rest of the party rode around the capital looking at the sights, but Mr. Grady, myself, and one or two others remained in the car. While we were waiting there, Mr. Grady read me the printed slips of his speech, and I remember that it made a great impression on me. I thought it was good enough for any occasion, but Mr. Grady seemed to have his doubts about it. He examined it critically two or three times, and made some alterations. Finally he laid it away. When he did come to deliver the speech, I was perhaps the most astonished person you ever saw. I expected to hear again the speech that had been read to me in the Pullman coach, but I heard a vastly different and a vastly better one. He used the old speech only where it was most timely and most convenient. The incident of delivering the prize to a young student who had won it on a literary exercise of some sort, started Mr. Grady off in a new vein and on a new line, and after that he used the printed speech merely to fill out with here and there. It was wonderful how he could break away from it and come back to it, fitting the old with the new in a beautiful and harmonious mosaic. If anybody had told me that the human mind was capable of such a performance as this on the wing and in the air, so to speak, I shouldn’t have believed it. To me it was a wonderful manifestation of genius, and I knew then, for the first time, that there was no limit to Mr. Grady’s power and versatility as a speaker.”

In his speeches in the country towns of Georgia and before the farmers, Mr. Grady made no pretense of preparation. His private secretary, Mr. James R. Holliday, caught and wrote out the pregnant paragraphs that go to make up his Elberton speech, which was the skeleton and outline on which he based his speeches to the farmers. Each speech, as might be supposed, was a beautiful variation of this rural theme to which he was wedded, but the essential part of the Elberton speech was the bone and marrow of all. I think there is no passage in our modern literature equal in its effectiveness and pathos to his picture of a Southern farmer’s home. It was a matter on which his mind dwelt. There was that in his nature to which both sun and soil appealed. The rain falling on a fallow field, the sun shining on the bristling and waving corn, and the gentle winds of heaven blowing over all—he was never tired of talking of these, and his talk always took the shape of a series of picturesque descriptions. He appreciated their spiritual essence as well as their material meaning, and he surrendered himself entirely to all the wholesome suggestions that spring from the contemplation of rural scenes.

I suppose it is true that all men—except those who are brought in daily contact with the practical and prosy side of it—have a longing for a country life. Mr. Grady’s longing in that direction took the shape of a passion that was none the less serious and earnest because he knew it was altogether romantic. In the Spring of 1889, the matter engaged his attention to such an extent, that he commissioned a compositor in the Constitution office to purchase a suburban farm. He planned it all out beforehand, and knew just where the profits were to come in. His descriptions of his imaginary farm were inimitable, and the details, as he gave them out, were marked by the rare humor with which he treated the most serious matters. There was to be an old-fashioned spring in a clump of large oak-trees on the place, meadows of orchard grass and clover, through which mild-eyed Jerseys were to wander at will, and in front of the house there was to be a barley patch gloriously green, and a colt frolicking and capering in it. The farm was of course a dream, but it was a very beautiful one while it lasted, and he dwelt on it with an earnestness that was quite engaging to those who enjoyed his companionship. The farm was a dream, but he no doubt got more enjoyment and profit out of it than a great many prosy people get out of the farms that are real. Insubstantial as it was, Mr. Grady’s farm served to relieve the tension of a mind that was always busy with the larger affairs of this busy and stirring age, and many a time when he grew tired of the incessant demands made on his time and patience he would close the door of his room with a bang and instruct the office-boy to tell all callers that he had “gone to his farm.” The fat cows that grazed there lowed their welcome, the chickens cackled to see him come, and the colt capered nimbly in the green expanse of barley—children of his dreams all, but all grateful and restful to a busy mind.

II.

In this hurriedly written sketch, which is thrown together to meet the modern exigencies of publishing, the round, and full, and complete biography cannot be looked for. There is no time here for the selection and arrangement in an orderly way of the details of this busy and brilliant life. Under the circumstances, even the hand of affection can only touch it here and there so swiftly and so lightly that the random result must be inartistic and unsatisfactory. It was at such moments as these—moments of hurry and high-pressure—that Mr. Grady was at his best. His hand was never surer,—the machinery of his mind was never more responsive to the tremendous demands he made on it,—than when the huge press of the Constitution was waiting his orders; when the forms were waiting to be closed, when the compositors were fretting and fuming for copy, and when, perhaps, an express train was waiting ten minutes over its time to carry the Constitution to its subscribers. All his faculties were trained to meet emergencies; and he was never happier than when meeting them, whether in a political campaign, in conventions, in local issues, or in the newspaper business as correspondent or managing editor. Pressed by the emergency of his death, which to me was paralyzing, and by the necessity of haste, which, at this juncture, is confusing, these reminiscences have taken on a disjointed shape sadly at variance with the demands of literary art. Let me, therefore, somewhere in the middle, begin at the beginning.

Henry Woodfin Grady was born in Athens, Georgia, on the 24th of April, 1850. As a little boy he was the leader of all the little boys of his acquaintance—full of that moral audacity that takes the lead in all innocent and healthy sports. An old gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, came into the Constitution editorial rooms shortly after Mr. Grady delivered the New England banquet speech, to say that he knew Henry when a boy. I listened with interest, but the memory of what he said is vague. I remember that his reminiscences had a touch of enthusiasm, going to show that the little boy was attractive enough to make a deep impression on his elders. He had, even when a child, all those qualities that draw attention and win approval. It is easy to believe that he was a somewhat boisterous boy. Even after he had a family of his own, and when he was supposed (as the phrase is) to have settled down, he still remained a boy to all intents and purposes. His vitality was inexhaustible, and his flow of animal spirits unceasing. In all athletic sports and out-door exercises he excelled while at school and college, and it is probable that his record as a boxer, wrestler, sprinter, and an all-around athlete is more voluminous than his record for scholarship. To the very last, his enthusiasm for these sports was, to his intimate friends, one of the most interesting characteristics of this many-sided man.

One of his characteristics as a boy, and it was a characteristic that clung to him through all his life, was his love and sympathy for the poor and lowly, for the destitute and the forlorn. This was one of the problems of life that he could never understand,—why, in the economy of Providence, some human beings should be rich and happy, and others poor and friendless. When a very little child he began to try to solve the problem in his own way. It was a small way, indeed, but if all who are fortunately situated should make the same effort charity would cause the whole world to smile, and Heaven could not possibly withhold the rich promise of its blessings. From his earliest childhood, Mr. Grady had a fondness for the negro race. He was fond of the negroes because they were dependent, his heart went out to them because he understood and appreciated their position. When he was two years old, he had a little negro boy named Isaac to wait on him. He always called this negro “Brother Isaac,” and he would cry bitterly, if any one told him that Isaac was not his brother. As he grew older his interest in the negroes and his fondness for them increased. Until he was eight or nine years old he always called his mother “Dear mother,” and when the weather was very cold, he had a habit of waking in the night and saying: “Dear mother, do you think the servants have enough cover? It’s so cold, and I want them to be warm.” His first thought was always for the destitute and the lowly—for those who were dependent on him or on others. At home he always shared his lunch with the negro children, and after the slaves were freed, and were in such a destitute condition, scarcely a week passed that some forlorn-looking negro boy did not bring his mother a note something like this: “Dear Mother: Please give this child something to eat. He looks so hungry. H. W. G.” It need not be said that no one bearing credentials signed by this thoughtful and unselfish boy was ever turned away hungry from the Grady door. It may be said, too, that his love and sympathy for the negroes was fully appreciated by that race. His mother says that she never had a servant during all his life that was not devoted to him, and never knew one to be angry or impatient with him. He could never bear to see any one angry or unhappy about him. As a child he sought to heal the wounds of the sorrowing, and to the last, though he was worried by the vast responsibilities he had taken on his shoulders and disturbed by the thoughtless demands made on his time and patience, he suffered more from the sorrows of others than from any troubles of his own. When he went to school, he carried the same qualities of sympathy and unselfishness that had made him charming as a child. If, among his school-mates, there was to be found a poor or a delicate child, he took that child under his especial care, and no one was allowed to trouble it in any way.

Shortly after he graduated at the State University, an event occurred that probably decided Mr. Grady’s future career. In an accidental way he went on one of the annual excursions of the Georgia Press Association as the correspondent of the Constitution. His letters describing the incidents of the trip were written over the signature of “King Hans.”

They were full of that racy humor that has since become identified with a large part of Mr. Grady’s journalistic work. They had a flavor of audacity about them, and that sparkling suggestiveness that goes first by one name and then another, but is chiefly known as individuality. The letters created a sensation among the editors. There was not much that was original or interesting in Georgia journalism in that day and time. The State was in the hands of the carpet-baggers, and the newspapers reflected in a very large degree the gloom and the hopelessness of that direful period. The editors abused the Republicans in their editorial columns day after day, and made no effort to enlarge their news service, or to increase the scope of their duties or their influence. Journalism in Georgia, in short, was in a rut, and there it was content to jog.

Though the “King Hans” letters were the production of a boy, their humor, their aptness, their illuminating power (so to say), their light touch, and their suggestiveness, showed that a new star had arisen. They created a lively diversion among the gloomy-minded editors for a while, and then the procession moved sadly forward in the old ruts. But the brief, fleeting, and humorous experience that Mr. Grady had as the casual correspondent of the Constitution decided him. Perhaps this was his bent after all, and that what might be called a happy accident was merely a fortunate incident that fate had arranged, for to this beautiful and buoyant nature fate seemed to be always kind. Into his short life it crowded its best and dearest gifts. All manner of happiness was his—the happiness of loving and of being beloved—the happiness of doing good in directions that only the Recording Angel could follow—and before he died Fame came and laid a wreath of flowers at his feet. Fate or circumstance carried him into journalism. His “King Hans” letters had attracted attention to him, and it seemed natural that he should follow this humorous experiment into a more serious field.

He went to Rome not long afterwards, and became editor of the Rome Courier. The Courier was the oldest paper in the city, and therefore the most substantial. It was, in fact, a fine piece of property. But the town was a growing town, and the Courier had rivals, the Rome Daily, if my memory serves me, and the Rome Commercial. Just how long Mr. Grady edited the Courier, I have no record of; but one fine morning, he thought he discovered a “ring” of some sort in the village. I do not know whether it was a political or a financial ring. We have had so many of these rings in one shape or another that I will not trust my memory to describe it; but it was a ring, and probably one of the first that dared to engage in business. Mr. Grady wrote a fine editorial denouncing it, but when the article was submitted to the proprietor, he made some objection. He probably thought that some of his patrons would take offense at the strong language Mr. Grady had used. After some conversation on the subject, the proprietor of the Courier flatly objected to the appearance of the editorial in his paper. Mr. Grady was about eighteen years old then, with views and a little money of his own. In the course of a few hours he had bought out the two opposing papers, consolidated them, and his editorial attack on the ring appeared the next morning in the Rome Daily Commercial. It happened on the same morning that the two papers, the Courier and the Daily Commercial, both appeared with the name of Henry W. Grady as editor. The ring, or whatever it was, was smashed. Nobody heard anything more of it, and the Commercial was greeted by its esteemed contemporaries as a most welcome addition to Georgia journalism. It was bright and lively, and gave Rome a new vision of herself.

It was left to the Commercial to discover that Rome was a city set on the hills, and that she ought to have an advertising torch in her hands. The Commercial, however, was only an experiment. It was run, as Mr. Grady told me long afterwards, as an amateur casual. He had money to spend on it, and he gave it a long string to go on. Occasionally he would fill it up with his bright fancies, and then he would neglect it for days at a time, and it would then be edited by the foreman. It was about this time that I met Mr. Grady. We had had some correspondence. He was appreciative, and whatever struck his fancy he had a quick response for. Some foolish paragraph of mine had appealed to his sense of humor, and he pursued the matter with a sympathetic letter that made a lasting impression. The result of that letter was that I went to Rome, pulled him from his flying ponies, and had a most enjoyable visit. From Rome we went to Lookout Mountain, and it is needless to say that he was the life of the party. He was its body, its spirit, and its essence. We found, in our journey, a dissipated person who could play on the zither. Just how important that person became, those who remember Mr. Grady’s pranks can imagine. The man with the zither took the shape of a minstrel, and in that guise he went with us, always prepared to make music, which he had often to do in response to Mr. Grady’s demands.

Rome, however, soon ceased to be large enough for the young editor. Atlanta seemed to offer the widest field, and he came here, and entered into partnership with Colonel Robert A. Alston and Alex St. Clair-Abrams. It was a queer partnership, but there was much that was congenial about it. Colonel Alston was a typical South Carolinian, and Abrams was a Creole. It would be difficult to get together three more impulsive and enterprising partners. Little attention was paid to the business office. The principal idea was to print the best newspaper in the South, and for a time this scheme was carried out in a magnificent way that could not last. Mr. Grady never bothered himself about the finances, and the other editors were not familiar with the details of business. The paper they published attracted more attention from newspaper men than it did from the public, and it was finally compelled to suspend. Its good will—and it had more good will than capital—was sold to the Constitution, which had been managed in a more conservative style. It is an interesting fact, however, that Mr. Grady’s experiments in the Herald, which were failures, were successful when tried on the Constitution, whose staff he joined when Captain Evan P. Howell secured a controlling interest. And yet Mr. Grady’s development as a newspaper man was not as rapid as might be supposed. He was employed by the Constitution as a reporter, and his work was intermittent.

One fact was fully developed by Mr. Grady’s early work on the Constitution,—namely, that he was not fitted for the routine work of a reporter. One day he would fill several columns of the paper with his bright things, and then for several days he would stand around in the sunshine talking to his friends, and entertaining them with his racy sayings. I have seen it stated in various shapes in books and magazines that the art of conversation is dead. If it was dead before Mr. Grady was born, it was left to him to resurrect it. Charming as his pen was, it could bear no reasonable comparison with his tongue. I am not alluding here to his eloquence, but to his ordinary conversation. When he had the incentive of sympathetic friends and surroundings, he was the most fascinating talker I have ever heard. General Toombs had large gifts in that direction, but he bore no comparison in any respect to Mr. Grady, whose mind was responsive to all suggestions and to all subjects. The men who have made large reputations as talkers have had the habit of selecting their own subjects and treating them dogmatically. We read of Coleridge buttonholing an acquaintance and talking him to death on the street, and of Carlyle compelling himself to be heard by sheer vociferousness. Mr. Grady could have made the monologue as interesting as he did his orations, but this was not his way. What he did was to take up whatever commonplace subject was suggested, and so charge it with his nimble wit and brilliant imagination as to give it a new importance.

It was natural, under the circumstances, that his home in Atlanta should be the center of the social life of the city. He kept open house, and, aided by his lovely wife and two beautiful children, dispensed the most charming hospitality. There was nothing more delightful than his home-life. Whatever air or attitude he had to assume in business, at home he was a rollicking and romping boy. He put aside all dignity there, and his most distinguished guest was never distinguished enough to put on the airs of formality that are commonly supposed to be a part of social life. His home was a typical one,—the center of his affections and the fountain of all his joys—and he managed to make all his friends feel what a sacred place it was. It was the headquarters of all that is best and brightest in the social and intellectual life of Atlanta, and many of the most distinguished men of the country have enjoyed the dispensation of his hospitality, which was simple and homelike, having about it something of the flavor and ripeness of the old Southern life.

In writing of the life and career of a man as busy in so many directions as Mr. Grady, one finds it difficult to pursue the ordinary methods of biographical writing. One finds it necessary, in order to give a clear idea of his methods, which were his own in all respects, to be continually harking back to some earlier period of his career. I have alluded to his distaste for the routine of reportorial work. The daily grind—the treadmill of trivial affairs—was not attractive to him; but when there was a sensation in the air—when something of unusual importance was happening or about to happen—he was in his element. His energy at such times was phenomenal. He had the faculty of grasping all the details of an event, and the imagination to group them properly so as to give them their full force and effect. The result of this is shown very clearly in his telegrams to the New York Herald and the Constitution from Florida during the disputed count going on there in 1876 and the early part of 1877. Mr. Tilden selected Senator Joseph E. Brown, among other prominent Democrats, to proceed to Florida, and look after the Democratic case there. Mr. Grady went as the special correspondent of the New York Herald and the Atlanta Constitution, and though he had for his competitors some of the most famous special writers of the country, he easily led them all in the brilliancy of his style, in the character of his work, and in his knack of grouping together gossip and fact. He was always proud of his work there; he was on his mettle, as the saying is, and I think there is no question that, from a journalist’s point of view, his letters and telegrams, covering the history of what is known politically as the Florida fraud, have no equal in the newspaper literature of the day. There is no phase of that important case that his reports do not cover, and they represent a vast amount of rapid and accurate work—work in which the individuality of the man is as prominent as his accuracy and impartiality. One of the results of Mr. Grady’s visit to Florida, and his association with the prominent politicians gathered there, was to develop a confidence in his own powers and resources that was exceedingly valuable to him when he came afterwards to the management of the leading daily paper in the South. He discovered that the men who had been successful in business and in politics had no advantage over him in any of the mental qualities and attributes that appertain to success, and this discovery gave purpose and determination to his ambition.

Another fruitful fact in his career, which he used to dwell on with great pleasure, was his association while in Florida with Senator Brown—an association that amounted to intimacy. Mr. Grady always had a very great admiration for Senator Brown, but in Florida he had the opportunity of working side by side with the Senator and of studying the methods by which he managed men and brought them within the circle of his powerful influence. Mr. Grady often said that it was one of the most instructive lessons of his life to observe the influence which Senator Brown, feeble as he was in body, exerted on men who were almost total strangers. The contest between the politicians for the electoral vote of Florida was in the nature of a still hunt, where prudence, judgment, skill, and large knowledge of human nature were absolutely essential. In such a contest as this, Senator Brown was absolutely master of the situation, and Mr. Grady took great delight in studying his methods, and in describing them afterwards.

Busy as Mr. Grady was in Florida with the politicians and with his newspaper correspondence, he nevertheless found time to make an exhaustive study of the material resources of the State, and the result of this appeared in the columns of the Constitution at a later date in the shape of a series of letters that attracted unusual attention throughout the country. This subject, the material resources of the South, and the development of the section, was always a favorite one with Mr. Grady. He touched it freely from every side and point of view, and made a feature of it in his newspaper work. To his mind there was something more practical in this direction than in the heat and fury of partisan politics. Whatever would aid the South in a material way, develop her resources and add to her capital, population, and industries, found in him not only a ready, but an enthusiastic and a tireless champion. He took great interest in politics, too, and often made his genius for the management of men and issues felt in the affairs of the State; but the routine of politics—the discussion that goes on, like Tennyson’s brook, forever and forever—were of far less importance in his mind than the practical development of the South. This seemed to be the burthen of his speeches, as it was of all his later writings. He never tired of this subject, and he discussed it with a brilliancy, a fervor, a versatility, and a fluency marvelous enough to have made the reputation of half a dozen men. Out of his contemplation of it grew the lofty and patriotic purpose which drew attention to his wonderful eloquence, and made him famous throughout the country—the purpose to draw the two sections together in closer bonds of union, fraternity, harmony, and good-will. The real strength and symmetry of his career can only be properly appreciated by those who take into consideration the unselfishness with which he devoted himself to this patriotic purpose. Instinctively the country seemed to understand something of this, and it was this instinctive understanding that caused him to be regarded with affectionate interest and appreciation from one end of the country to the other by people of all parties, classes, and interests. It was this instinctive understanding that made him at the close of his brief career one of the most conspicuous Americans of modern times, and threw the whole country into mourning at his death.

III.

When in 1880 Mr. Grady bought a fourth interest in the Constitution, he gave up, for the most part, all outside newspaper work, and proceeded to devote his time and attention to his duties as managing editor, for which he was peculiarly well fitted. His methods were entirely his own. He borrowed from no one. Every movement he made in the field of journalism was stamped with the seal of his genius. He followed no precedent. He provided for every emergency as it arose, and some of his strokes of enterprise were as bold as they were startling. He had a rapid faculty of organization. This was shown on one occasion when he determined to print official reports of the returns of the congressional election in the seventh Georgia district. Great interest was felt in the result all over the State. An independent candidate was running against the Democratic nominee, and the campaign was one of the liveliest ever had in Georgia. Yet it is a district that lies in the mountains and winds around and over them. Ordinarily, it was sometimes a fortnight and frequently a month before the waiting newspapers and the public knew the official returns. Mr. Grady arranged for couriers with relays of horses at all the remote precincts, and the majority of them are remote from the lines of communication, and his orders to these were to spare neither horse-flesh nor money in getting the returns to the telegraph stations. At important points, he had placed members of the Constitution’s editorial and reportorial staff, who were to give the night couriers the assistance and directions which their interest and training would suggest. It was a tough piece of work, but all the details and plans had been so perfectly arranged that there was no miscarriage anywhere. One of the couriers rode forty miles over the mountains, fording rushing streams and galloping wildly over the rough roads. It was a rough job, but he had been selected by Mr. Grady especially for this piece of work; he was a tough man and he had tough horses under him, and he reached the telegraph station on time. This sort of thing was going on all over the district, and the next morning the whole State had the official returns. Other feats of modern newspaper enterprise have been more costly and as successful, but there is none that I can recall to mind showing a more comprehensive grasp of the situation or betraying a more daring spirit. It was a feat that appealed to the imagination, and therefore on the Napoleonic order.

And yet it is a singular fact that all his early journalistic ventures were in the nature of failures. The Rome Commercial, which he edited before he had attained his majority, was a bright paper, but not financially successful. Mr. Grady did some remarkably bold and brilliant work on the Atlanta Daily Herald, but it was expensive work, too, and the Herald died for lack of funds. Mr. Marion J. Verdery, in his admirable memorial of Mr. Grady, prepared for the Southern Society of New York (which I have taken the liberty of embodying in this volume) alludes to these failures of Mr. Grady, and a great many of his admirers have been mystified by them. I think the explanation is very simple. Mr. Grady was a new and a surprising element in the field of journalism, and his methods were beyond the comprehension of those who had grown gray watching the dull and commonplace politicians wielding their heavy pens as editors, and getting the news accidentally, if at all. There are a great many people in this world of ours—let us say the average people, in order to be mathematically exact—who have to be educated up to an appreciation of what is bright and beautiful, or bold and interesting. Some of Mr. Grady’s methods were new even in American journalism, and it is no wonder that his dashing experiments with the Daily Herald were failures, or that commonplace people regarded them as crude and reckless manifestations of a purpose and a desire to create a sensation. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that when the Daily Herald was running its special locomotives up and down the railroads of the State, the field of journalism in Atlanta was exceedingly narrow and provincial. The town had been rescued from the village shape, but neither its population nor its progress warranted the experiments on the Herald. They were mistakes of time and place, but they were not mistakes of conception and execution. They helped to educate and enlighten the public, and to give that dull, clumsy, and slow-moving body a taste of the spirit and purpose of modern journalism. The public liked the taste that it got, and smacked its lips over it and remembered it, and was always ready after that to respond promptly to the efforts of Mr. Grady to give it the work of his head and hands.

Bright and buoyant as he was, his early failures in journalism dazed and mortified him, but they did not leave him depressed. If he had his hours of depression and gloom he reserved them for himself. Even when all his resources had been exhausted, he was the same genial, witty, and appreciative companion, the center of attraction wherever he went. The year 1876 was the turning-point in his career in more ways than one. In the fall of that year, Captain Evan P. Howell bought a controlling interest in the Constitution. The day after the purchase was made, Captain Howell met Mr. Grady, who was on his way to the passenger station.

“I was just hunting for you,” said Captain Howell. “I want to have a talk with you.”

“Well, you’ll have to talk mighty fast,” said Mr. Grady. “Atlanta’s either too big for me, or I am too big for Atlanta.”

It turned out that the young editor, discomfited in Atlanta, but not discouraged, was on his way to Augusta to take charge of the Constitutionalist of that city. Captain Howell offered him a position at once, which was promptly accepted. There was no higgling or bargaining; the two men were intimate friends; there was something congenial in their humor, in their temperaments, and in a certain fine audacity in political affairs that made the two men invincible in Georgia politics from the day they began working together. Before the train that was to bear Mr. Grady to Augusta had steamed out of the station, he was on his way to the Constitution office to enter on his duties, and then and there practically began between the two men a partnership as intimate in its relations of both friendship and business as it was important on its bearings on the wonderful success of the Constitution and on the local history and politics of Georgia. It was an ideal partnership in many respects, and covered almost every movement, with one exception, that the two friends made. That exception was the prohibition campaign in Atlanta, that attracted such widespread attention throughout the country. Mr. Grady represented the prohibitionists and Captain Howell the anti-prohibitionists, and it was one of the most vigorous and amusing campaigns the town has ever witnessed. Each partner was the chief speaker of the side he represented, and neither lost an opportunity to tell a good-humored joke at the other’s expense. Thus, while the campaign was an earnest one in every respect, and even embittered to some small extent by the thoughtless utterances of those who seem to believe that moral issues can best be settled by a display of fanaticism, the tension was greatly relieved by the wit, the humor, the good nature and the good sense which the two leaders injected into the canvas.

The sentimental side of Mr. Grady’s character was more largely and more practically developed than that of any other person I have ever seen. In the great majority of cases sentiment develops into a sentimentality that is sometimes maudlin, sometimes officious, and frequently offensive. In most people it develops as the weakest and least attractive side of their character. It was the stronghold of Mr. Grady’s nature. It enveloped his whole career, to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, in sweetness and light, and made his life a real dispensation in behalf of the lives of others. Wherever he found suffering and sorrow, no matter how humble—wherever he found misery, no matter how coarse and degraded, he struck hands with them then and there, and wrapped them about and strengthened them with his abundant sympathy. Until he could give them relief in some shape, he became their partner, and a very active and energetic partner he was. I have often thought that his words of courage and cheer, always given with a light and humorous touch to hide his own feelings, was worth more than the rich man’s grudging gift. It was this side of Mr. Grady’s nature that caused him to turn with such readiness to the festivities of Christmas. He was a great admirer of Charles Dickens, especially of that writer’s Christmas literature. It was an ideal season with Mr. Grady, and it presented itself to his mind less as a holiday time than as an opportunity to make others happy—the rich as well as the poor. He had a theory that the rich who have become poor by accident or misfortune suffer the stings of poverty more keenly than the poor who have always been poor, for the reason that they are not qualified to fight against conditions that are at once strange and crushing. Several Christmases ago, I had the pleasure of witnessing a little episode in which he illustrated his theory to his own satisfaction as well as to mine.

On that particular Christmas eve, there was living in Atlanta an old gentleman who had at one time been one of the leading citizens of the town. He had in fact been a powerful influence in the politics of the State, but the war swept away his possessions, and along with them all the conditions and surroundings that had enabled him to maintain himself comfortably. His misfortunes came on him when he was too old to begin the struggle with life anew with any reasonable hope of success. He gave way to a disposition that had been only convivial in his better days when he had hope and pride to sustain him, and he sank lower until he had nearly reached the gutter.

I joined Mr. Grady as he left the office, and we walked slowly down the street enjoying the kaleidoscopic view of the ever-shifting, ever hurrying crowd as it swept along the pavements. In all that restless and hastening throng there seemed to be but one man bent on no message of enjoyment or pleasure, and he was old and seedy-looking. He was gazing about him in an absent-minded way. The weather was not cold, but a disagreeable drizzle was falling.

“Yonder is the Judge,” said Mr. Grady, pointing to the seedy-looking old man. “Let’s go and see what he is going to have for Christmas.”

I found out long afterwards that the old man had long been a pensioner on Mr. Grady’s bounty, but there was nothing to suggest this in the way in which the young editor approached the Judge. His manner was the very perfection of cordiality and consideration, though there was just a touch of gentle humor in his bright eyes.

“It isn’t too early to wish you a merry Christmas, I hope,” said Mr. Grady, shaking hands with the old man.

“No, no,” replied the Judge, straightening himself up with dignity; “not at all. The same to you, my boy.”

“Well,” remarked Mr. Grady lightly, “you ought to be fixing up for it. I’m not as old as you are, and I’ve got lots of stirring around and shopping to do if I have any fun at home.”

The eyes of the Judge sought the ground. “No. I was—ah—just considering.” Then he looked up into the laughing but sympathetic eyes of the boyish young fellow, and his dignity sensibly relaxed. “I was only—ah—Grady, let me see you a moment.”

The two walked to the edge of the pavement, and talked together some little time. I did not overhear the conversation, but learned afterwards that the Judge told Mr. Grady that he had no provisions at home, and no money to buy them with, and asked for a small loan.

“I’ll do better than that,” said Mr. Grady. “I’ll go with you and buy them myself. Come with us,” he remarked to me with a quizzical smile. “The Judge here has found a family in distress, and we are going to send them something substantial for Christmas.”

We went to a grocery store near at hand, and I saw, as we entered, that the Judge had not only recovered his native dignity, but had added a little to suit the occasion. I observed that his bearing was even haughty. Mr. Grady had observed it, too, and the humor of the situation so delighted him that he could hardly control the laughter in his voice.

“Now, Judge,” said Mr. Grady, as we approached the counter, “we must be discreet as well as liberal. We must get what you think this suffering family most needs. You call off the articles, the clerk here will check them off, and I will have them sent to the house.”

The Judge leaned against the counter with a careless dignity quite inimitable, and glanced at the well-filled shelves.

“Well,” said he, thrumming on a paper-box, and smacking his lips thoughtfully, “we will put down first a bottle of chow-chow pickles.”

“Why, of course,” exclaimed Mr. Grady, his face radiant with mirth; “it is the very thing. What next?”

“Let me see,” said the Judge, closing his eyes reflectively—“two tumblers of strawberry jelly, three pounds of mince-meat, and two pounds of dates, if you have real good ones, and—yes—two cans of deviled ham.”

Every article the Judge ordered was something he had been used to in his happier days. The whole episode was like a scene from one of Dickens’s novels, and I have never seen Mr. Grady more delighted. He was delighted with the humor of it, and appreciated in his own quaint and charming way and to the fullest extent the pathos of it. He dwelt on it then and afterwards, and often said that he envied the broken-down old man the enjoyment of the luxuries of which he had so long been deprived.

On a memorable Christmas day not many years after, Mr. Grady stirred Atlanta to its very depths by his eloquent pen, and brought the whole community to the heights of charity and unselfishness on which he always stood. He wrought the most unique manifestation of prompt and thoughtful benevolence that is to be found recorded in modern times. The day before Christmas was bitter cold, and the night fell still colder, giving promise of the coldest weather that had been felt in Georgia for many years. The thermometer fell to zero, and it was difficult for comfortably clad people to keep warm even by the fires that plenty had provided, and it was certain that there would be terrible suffering among the poor of the city. The situation was one that appealed in the strongest manner to Mr. Grady’s sympathies. It appealed, no doubt, to the sympathies of all charitably-disposed people; but the shame of modern charity is its lack of activity. People are horrified when starving people are found near their doors, when a poor woman wanders about the streets until death comes to her relief; they seem to forget that it is the duty of charity to act as well as to give. Mr. Grady was a man of action. He did not wait for the organization of a relief committee, and the meeting of prominent citizens to devise ways and means for dispensing alms. He was his own committee. His plans were instantly formed and promptly carried out. The organization was complete the moment he determined that the poor of Atlanta should not suffer for lack of food, clothing, or fuel. He sent his reporters out into the highways and byways, and into every nook and corner of the city. He took one assignment for himself, and went about through the cold from house to house. He had a consultation with the Mayor at midnight, and cases of actual suffering were relieved then and there. The next morning, which was Sunday, the columns of the Constitution teemed with the results of the investigation which Mr. Grady and his reporters had made. A stirring appeal was made in the editorial columns for aid for the poor—such an appeal as only Mr. Grady could make. The plan of relief was carefully made out. The Constitution was prepared to take charge of whatever the charitably disposed might feel inclined to send to its office—and whatever was sent should be sent early.

The effect of this appeal was astonishing—magical, in fact. It seemed impossible to believe that any human agency could bring about such a result. By eight o’clock on Christmas morning—the day being Sunday—the street in front of the Constitution office was jammed with wagons, drays, and vehicles of all kinds, and the office itself was transformed into a vast depot of supplies. The merchants and business men had opened their stores as well as their hearts, and the coal and wood dealers had given the keys of their establishments into the gentle hands of charity. Men who were not in business subscribed money, and this rose into a considerable sum. When Mr. Grady arrived on the scene, he gave a shout of delight, and cut up antics as joyous as those of a schoolboy. Then he proceeded to business. He had everything in his head, and he organized his relief trains and put them in motion more rapidly than any general ever did. By noon, there was not a man, woman, or child, white or black, in the city of Atlanta that lacked any of the necessaries of life, and to such an extent had the hearts of the people been stirred that a large reserve of stores was left over after everybody had been supplied. It was the happiest Christmas day the poor of Atlanta ever saw, and the happiest person of all was Henry Grady.

It is appropriate to his enjoyment of Christmas to give here a beautiful editorial he wrote on Christmas day a year before he was buried. It is a little prose poem that attracted attention all over the country. Mr. Grady called it

A PERFECT CHRISTMAS DAY.

No man or woman now living will see again such a Christmas day as the one which closed yesterday, when the dying sun piled the western skies with gold and purple.

A winter day it was, shot to the core with sunshine. It was enchanting to walk abroad in its prodigal beauty, to breathe its elixir, to reach out the hands and plunge them open-fingered through its pulsing waves of warmth and freshness. It was June and November welded and fused into a perfect glory that held the sunshine and snow beneath tender and splendid skies. To have winnowed such a day from the teeming winter was to have found an odorous peach on a bough whipped in the storms of winter. One caught the musk of yellow grain, the flavor of ripening nuts, the fragrance of strawberries, the exquisite odor of violets, the aroma of all seasons in the wonderful day. The hum of bees underrode the whistling wings of wild geese flying southward. The fires slept in drowsing grates, while the people, marveling outdoors, watched the soft winds woo the roses and the lilies.

Truly it was a day of days. Amid its riotous luxury surely life was worth living to hold up the head and breathe it in as thirsting men drink water; to put every sense on its gracious excellence; to throw the hands wide apart and hug whole armfuls of the day close to the heart, till the heart itself is enraptured and illumined. God’s benediction came down with the day, slow dropping from the skies. God’s smile was its light, and all through and through its supernal beauty and stillness, unspoken but appealing to every heart and sanctifying every soul, was His invocation and promise, “Peace on earth, good will to men.”

IV.

Mr. Grady took great interest in children and young people. It pleased him beyond measure to be able to contribute to their happiness. He knew all the boys in the Constitution office, and there is quite a little army of them employed there in one way and another; knew all about their conditions, their hopes and their aspirations, and knew their histories. He had favorites among them, but his heart went out to all. He interested himself in them in a thousand little ways that no one else would have thought of. He was never too busy to concern himself with their affairs. A year or two before he died he organized a dinner for the newsboys and carriers. It was at first intended that the dinner should be given by the Constitution, but some of the prominent people heard of it, and insisted in making contributions. Then it was decided to accept contributions from all who might desire to send anything, and the result of it was a dinner of magnificent proportions. The tables were presided over by prominent society ladies, and the occasion was a very happy one in all respects.

This is only one of a thousand instances in which Mr. Grady interested himself in behalf of young people. Wherever he could find boys who were struggling to make a living, with the expectation of making something of themselves; wherever he could find boys who were giving their earnings to widowed mothers—and he found hundreds of them—he went to their aid as promptly and as effectually as he carried out all his schemes, whether great or small. It was his delight to give pleasure to all the children that he knew, and even those he didn’t know. He had the spirit and the manner of a boy, when not engrossed in work, and he enjoyed life with the zest and enthusiasm of a lad of twelve. He was in his element when a circus was in town, and it was a familiar and an entertaining sight to see him heading a procession of children—sometimes fifty in line—going to the big tents to see the animals and witness the antics of the clowns. At such times, he considered himself on a frolic, and laid his dignity on the shelf. His interest in the young, however, took a more serious shape, as I have said. When Mr. Clark Howell, the son of Captain Evan Howell, attained his majority, Mr. Grady wrote him a letter, which I give here as one of the keys to the character of this many-sided man. Apart from this, it is worth putting in print for the wholesome advice it contains. The young man to whom it was written has succeeded Mr. Grady as managing editor of the Constitution. The letter is as follows:

Atlanta, Ga., Sept. 20, 1884.

My Dear Clark:—I suppose that just about the time I write this to you—a little after midnight—you are twenty-one years old. If you were born a little later than this hour it is your mother’s fault (or your father’s), and I am not to blame for it. I assume, therefore, that this is your birthday, and I send you a small remembrance. I send you a pen (that you may wear as a cravat-pin) for several reasons. In the first place, I have no money, my dear boy, with which to buy you something new. In the next place, it is the symbol of the profession to which we both belong, in which each has done some good work, and will, God being willing, do much more. Take the pen, wear it, and let it stand as a sign of the affection I have for you.

Somehow or other (as the present is a right neat one I have the right to bore you a little) I look upon you as my own boy. My son will be just about your age when you are about mine, and he will enter the paper when you are about where I am. I have got to looking at you as a sort of prefiguring of what my son may be, and of looking over you, and rejoicing in your success, as I shall want you to feel toward him. Let me write to you what I would be willing for you to write to him.

Never Gamble. Of all the vices that enthrall men, this is the worst, the strongest, and the most insidious. Outside of the morality of it, it is the poorest investment, the poorest business, and the poorest fun. No man is safe who plays at all. It is easiest never to play. I never knew a man, a gentleman and man of business, who did not regret the time and money he had wasted in it. A man who plays poker is unfit for every other business on earth.

Never Drink. I love liquor and I love the fellowship involved in drinking. My safety has been that I never drink at all. It is much easier not to drink at all than to drink a little. If I had to attribute what I have done in life to any one thing, I should attribute it to the fact that I am a teetotaler. As sure as you are born, it is the pleasantest, the easiest, and the safest way.

Marry Early. There is nothing that steadies a young fellow like marrying a good girl and raising a family. By marrying young your children grow up when they are a pleasure to you. You feel the responsibility of life, the sweetness of life, and you avoid bad habits.

If you never drink, never gamble, and marry early, there is no limit to the useful and distinguished life you may live. You will be the pride of your father’s heart, and the joy of your mother’s.

I don’t know that there is any happiness on earth worth having outside of the happiness of knowing that you have done your duty and that you have tried to do good. You try to build up,—there are always plenty others who will do all the tearing down that is necessary. You try to live in the sunshine,—men who stay in the shade always get mildewed.

I will not tell you how much I think of you or how proud I am of you. We will let that develop gradually. There is only one thing I am a little disappointed in. You don’t seem to care quite enough about base-ball and other sports. Don’t make the mistake of standing aloof from these things and trying to get old too soon. Don’t underrate out-door athletic sports as an element of American civilization and American journalism. I am afraid you inherit this disposition from your father, who has never been quite right on this subject, but who is getting better, and will soon be all right, I think.

Well, I will quit. May God bless you, my boy, and keep you happy and wholesome at heart, and in health. If He does this, we’ll try and do the rest.

Your friend, H. W. Grady.

Mr. Grady’s own boyishness led him to sympathize with everything that appertains to boyhood. His love for his own children led him to take an interest in other children. He wanted to see them enjoy themselves in a boisterous, hearty, health-giving way. The sports that men forget or forego possessed a freshness for him that he never tried to conceal. His remarks, in the letter just quoted, in regard to out-door sports, are thoroughly characteristic. In all contests of muscle, strength, endurance and skill he took a continual and an absorbing interest. At school he excelled in all athletic sports and out-door games. He had a gymnasium of his own, which was thrown open to his school-mates, and there he used to practice for hours at a time. His tastes in this direction led a great many people, all his friends, to shake their heads a little, especially as he was not greatly distinguished for scholarship, either at school or college. They wondered, too, how, after neglecting the text-books, he could stand so near the head of his classes. He did not neglect his books. During the short time he devoted to them each day, his prodigious memory and his wonderful powers of assimilation enabled him to master their contents as thoroughly as boys that had spent half the night in study. Even his family were astonished at his standing in school, knowing how little time he devoted to his text-books. He found time, however, in spite of his devotion to out-door sports and athletic exercises, to read every book in Athens, and in those days every family in town had a library of more or less value.

He had a large library of his own, and, by exchanging his books with other boys and borrowing, he managed to get at the pith and marrow of all the English literature to be found in the university town. Not content with this, he became, during one of his vacation periods, a clerk in the only bookstore in Athens. The only compensation that he asked was the privilege of reading when there were no customers to be waited on. This was during his eleventh year, and by the time he was twelve he was by far the best-read boy that Athens had ever known. This habit of reading he kept up to the day of his death. He read all the new books as they came out, and nothing pleased him better than to discuss them with some congenial friend. He had no need to re-read his old favorites—the books he loved as boy and man—for these he could remember almost chapter by chapter. He read with amazing rapidity; it might be said that he literally absorbed whatever interested him, and his sympathies were so wide and his taste so catholic that it was a poor writer indeed in whom he could not find something to commend. He was fond of light literature, but the average modern novel made no impression on him. He enjoyed it to some extent, and was amazed as well as amused at the immense amount of labor expended on the trivial affairs of life by the writers who call themselves realists. He was somewhat interested in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” mainly, I suspect, because it so cleverly hits off the character of the modern female newspaper correspondent in the person of Miss Henrietta Stackpole. Yet there was much in the book that interested him—the dreariness of parts of it was relieved by Mrs. Touchett. “Dear old Mrs. Touchett!” he used to say. “Such immense cleverness as hers does credit to Mr. James. She refuses to associate with any of the other characters in the book. I should like to meet her, and shake hands with her, and talk the whole matter over.”

When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his way, young Grady was found one day reading Blackstone. His brother asked him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence. He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.

He was fond, as I have said, of Dickens, but his favorite novel, above all others, was Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” His own daring imagination fitted somewhat into the colossal methods of Hugo, and his sympathies enabled him to see in the character of Jean Valjean a type of the pathetic struggle for life and justice that is going on around us every day. Mr. Grady read between the lines and saw beneath the surface, and he was profoundly impressed with the strong and vital purpose of Hugo’s book. Its almost ferocious protest against injustice, and its indignant arraignment of the inhumanity of society, stirred him deeply. Not only the character of Jean Valjean, but the whole book appealed to his sense of the picturesque and artistic. The large lines on which the book is cast, the stupendous nature of the problem it presents, the philanthropy, the tenderness—all these moved him as no other work of fiction ever did. Mr. Grady’s pen was too busy to concern itself with matters merely literary. He rarely undertook to write what might be termed a literary essay; the affairs of life—the demands of the hour—the pressure of events—precluded this; but all through his lectures and occasional speeches (that were never reported), there are allusions to Jean Valjean, and to Victor Hugo. I have before me the rough notes of some of his lectures, and in these appear more than once picturesque allusions to Hugo’s hero struggling against fate and circumstance.

V.

The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son, and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history. To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his boyhood bright and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the Constitution office he told the story of his visit, and what he said has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial staff.

“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his office one morning after New Year’s.

“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until I went to sleep.’

“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why, what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of feeling!’

“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home, and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own, that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”

From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to the Constitution, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how near to the brink of poverty.

One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole. It is unfinished, but the following has something of the flavor of the lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though that is not his name:

Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth, beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.

In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name (Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live, and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself off.

Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces, through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew, and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending, bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its wretchedness and ward off the storms.

During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter, and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.

And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.

One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart, and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved, his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.

Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer of the two.

I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a dream. Be this as it may, our hero, crushed into the very mud by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future, and set his soul upon a home.

This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows closely after the foregoing:

After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr. Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside, began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.

There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board. Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle could have kept him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put together in a face, would not have been odder than was this house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion, justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style was the best.”

Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.

The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation, and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that, planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.

To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes, of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and when a stroller eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners solemnly as if testing its muscular development.

Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs through it all:

One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting, turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was, time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in all the long years when he was not hungry.

Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper food—the blood running slower and slower through their veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic, exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.

But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity. His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty? From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?

After he had been turned out of his home, the tailor was taken sick. His little song gave way to a hectic cough. His place at the work-room was vacant, and a scanty bed in wretched lodgings held his frail and fevered frame. The thin fingers clutched the cover uneasily, as if they were restless of being idle while the little ones were crying for bread. The tired man tossed to and fro, racked by pain,—but still his face was full of content, and no word of bitterness escaped him. And the little song, though the poor lungs could not carry it to the lips, and the trembling lips could not syllable its music, still lived in his heart and shone through his happy eyes. “I will be happy soon,” he said in a faltering way; “I will be better soon—strong enough to go to work like a man again, for Bessie and the babies.” And he did get better—better until his face had worn so thin that you could count his heart-beats by the flush of blood that came and died in his cheeks—better until his face had sharpened and his smiles had worn their deep lines about his mouth—better until the poor fingers lay helpless at his side, and his eyes had lost their brightness. And one day, as his wife sat by his side, and the sun streamed in the windows, and the air was full of the fragrance of spring—he turned his face toward her and said: “I am better now, my dear.” And, noting a rapturous smile playing about his mouth, and a strange light kindling in his eyes, she bended her head forward to lay her wifely kiss upon his face. Ah! a last kiss, good wife, for thy husband! Thy kiss caught his soul as it fluttered from his pale lips, and the flickering pulse had died in his patient wrist, and the little song had faded from his heart and gone to swell a divine chorus,—and at last, after years of waiting, the old man was well!

There was nothing strained or artificial in the sentiment that led him to dwell so constantly on the theme of home and home happiness. The extracts I have given are merely the rough lecture notes which he wrote down in order to confirm and congeal his ideas. On the platform, while following the current of these notes, he injected into them the quality of his rare and inimitable humor, the contrast serving to give greater strength and coherence to the pathos that underlay it all. I do not know that I have dwelt with sufficient emphasis on his humor. He could be witty enough on occasion, but the sting of it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. The quality of his humor was not greatly different from that of Charles Lamb. It was gentle and perennial—a perpetual wonder and delight to his friends—irrepressible and unbounded—as antic and as tricksy as that of a boy, as genial and as sweet as the smile of a beautiful woman. Mr. Grady depended less on anecdote than any of our great talkers and speakers, though the anecdote, apt, pat, and pointed, was always ready at the proper moment. He depended rather on the originality of his own point of view—on the results of his own individuality. The charm of his personal presence was indescribable. In every crowd and on every occasion he was a marked man. Quite independently of his own intentions, he made his presence and his influence felt. What he said, no matter how light and frivolous, no matter how trivial, never failed to attract attention. He warmed the hearts of the old and fired the minds of the young. He managed, in some way, to impart something of the charm of his personality to his written words, so that he carried light, and hope, and courage to many hearts, and when he passed away, people who had never seen him fell to weeping when they heard of his untimely death.

VI.

There are many features and incidents in Mr. Grady’s life that cannot be properly treated in this hurriedly written and altogether inadequate sketch. His versatility was such that it would be difficult, even in a deliberately written biography, to deal with its manifestations and results as they deserve to be dealt with. At the North, the cry is, who shall take his place as a peacemaker? At the South, who shall take his place as a leader, as an orator, and as a peacemaker? In Atlanta, who shall take his place as all of these, and as a builder-up of our interests, our enterprises, and our industries! Who is to make for us the happy and timely suggestion? Who is to speak the right word at the right time! The loss the country has sustained in Mr. Grady’s death can only be measurably estimated when we examine one by one the manifold relations he bore to the people.

I have spoken of the power of organization that he possessed. There is hardly a public enterprise in Georgia or in Atlanta—begun and completed since 1880—that does not bear witness to his ability, his energy, and his unselfishness. His busy brain and prompt hand were behind the great cotton exposition held in Atlanta in 1881. Late in the spring of 1887, one of the editorial writers of the Constitution remarked that the next fair held in Atlanta should be called the Piedmont Exposition. “That shall be its name,” said Mr. Grady, “and it will be held this fall.” That was the origin of the Piedmont Exposition. Within a month the exposition company had been organized, the land bought, and work on the grounds begun. It seemed to be a hopeless undertaking—there was so much to be done, and so little time to do it in. But Mr, Grady was equal to the emergency. He so infused the town with his own energy and enthusiasm that every citizen came to regard the exposition as a personal matter, and the Constitution hammered away at it with characteristic iteration. There was not a detail of the great show from beginning to end that was not of Mr. Grady’s suggestion. When it seemed to him that he was taking too prominent a part in the management, he would send for other members of the fair committee, pour his suggestions into their ears, and thus evade the notoriety of introducing them himself and prevent the possible friction that might be caused if he made himself too prominent. He understood human nature perfectly, and knew how to manage men.

The exposition was organized and the grounds made ready in an incredibly short time, and the fair was the most successful in every respect that has ever been held in the South. Its attractions, which were all suggested by Mr. Grady, appealed either to the interest or the curiosity of the people, and the result was something wonderful. It is to be very much doubted whether any one in this country, in time of peace, has seen an assemblage of such vast and overwhelming proportions as that which gathered in Atlanta on the principal day of the fair. Two years later, the Piedmont Exposition was reorganized, and Mr. Grady once more had practical charge of all the details. The result was an exhibition quite as attractive as the first, to which the people responded as promptly as before. The Exposition Company cleared something over $20,000, a result unprecedented in the history of Southern fairs.

In the interval of the two fairs, Mr. Grady organized the Piedmont Chautauqua at a little station on the Georgia Pacific road, twenty miles from Atlanta. Beautiful grounds were laid out and commodious buildings put up. In all this work Mr. Grady took the most profound interest. The intellectual and educational features of such an institution appealed strongly to his tastes and sympathies, and to that active missionary spirit which impelled him to be continually on the alert in behalf of humanity. He expended a good deal of energy on the Chautauqua and on the programme of exercises, but the people did not respond heartily, and the session was not a financial success. And yet there never was a Chautauqua assembly that had a richer and a more popular programme of exercises. The conception was a success intellectually, and it will finally grow into a success in other directions. Mr. Grady, with his usual unselfishness, insisted on bearing the expenses of the lecturers and others, though it crippled him financially to do so. He desired to protect the capitalists who went into the enterprise on his account, and, as is usual in such cases, the capitalists were perfectly willing to be protected. Mr. Grady was of the opinion that his experience with the Chautauqua business gave him a deeper and a richer knowledge of human nature than he had ever had before.

One morning Mr. Grady saw in a New York newspaper that a gentleman from Texas was in that city making a somewhat unsuccessful effort to raise funds for a Confederate veterans’ home. The comments of the newspaper were not wholly unfriendly, but something in their tone stirred Mr. Grady’s blood. “I will show them,” he said, “what can be done in Georgia,” and with that he turned to his stenographer and dictated a double-leaded editorial that stirred the State from one end to the other. He followed it up the next day, and immediately subscriptions began to flow in. He never suffered interest in the project to flag until sufficient funds for a comfortable home for the Confederate veterans had been raised.

Previously, he had organized a movement for putting up a building for the Young Men’s Christian Association, and that building now stands a monument to his earnestness and unselfishness. Years ago, shortly after he came to Atlanta, he took hold of the Young Men’s Library, which was in a languishing condition, and put it on its feet. It was hard work, for he was comparatively unknown then. Among other things, he organized a lecture course for the benefit of the library, and he brought some distinguished lecturers to Atlanta—among others the late S. S. Cox. Mr. Cox telegraphed from New York that he would come to Atlanta, and also the subject of the lecture, so that it could be properly advertised. The telegram said that the title of the lecture was “Just Human,” and large posters, bearing that title, were placed on the bill-boards and distributed around town. As Mr. Grady said, “the town broke into a profuse perspiration of placards bearing the strange device, while wrinkles gathered on the brow of the public intellect and knotted themselves hopelessly as it pondered over what might be the elucidation of such a strangely-named subject. At last,” Mr. Grady goes on to say, “the lecturer came, and a pleasant little gentleman he was, who beguiled the walk to the hotel with the airiest of jokes and the brightest of comment. At length, when he had registered his name in the untutored chirography of the great, he took me to one side, and asked in an undertone what those placards meant.”

“That,” I replied, looking at him in astonishment, “is the subject of your lecture.”

“‘My lecture!’ he shrieked, ‘whose lecture? What lecture? My subject! Whose subject? Why, sir,’ said he, trying to control himself, ‘my subject is ‘Irish Humor,’ while this is ‘Just Human,’ and he put on his spectacles and glared into space as if he were determined to wring from that source some solution of this cruel joke.”

By an error of transmission, “Irish Humor” had become “Just Human.” Mr. Grady does not relate the sequel, but what followed was as characteristic of him as anything in his unique career.

“Well,” said he, turning to Mr. Cox, his bright eyes full of laughter, “you stick to your subject, and I’ll take this ready-made one; you lecture on ‘Irish Humor’ and I’ll lecture on ‘Just Human.’”

And he did. He took the telegraphic error for a subject, and delivered in Atlanta one of the most beautiful lectures ever heard here. There was humor in it and laughter, but he handled his theme with such grace and tenderness that the vast audience that sat entranced under his magnetic oratory went home in tears.

The lecture course that Mr. Grady instituted was never followed up, although it was a successful one. It was his way, when he had organized an enterprise and placed it on its feet, to turn his attention to something else. Sometimes his successors were equal to the emergency, and sometimes they were not. The Young Men’s Library has been in good hands, and it is what may be termed a successful institution, but it is not what it was when Mr. Grady was booming the town in its behalf. When he put his hand to any enterprise or to any movement the effect seemed to be magical. It was not his personal influence, for there were some enterprises beyond the range of that, that responded promptly to his touch. It was not his enthusiasm, for there have been thousands of men quite as enthusiastic. Was it his methods? Perhaps the secret lies hidden there; but I have often thought, while witnessing the results he brought about, that he had at his command some new element, or quality, or gift not vouchsafed to other men. Whatever it was, he employed it only for the good of his city, his State, his section, and his country. His patriotism was as prominent and as permanent as his unselfishness. His public spirit was unbounded, and, above all things, restless and eager.

I have mentioned only a few of the more important enterprises in Atlanta that owe their success to Mr. Grady. He was identified with every public movement that took shape in Atlanta, and the people were always sure that his interest and his influence were on the side of honesty and justice. But his energies took a wider range. He was the very embodiment of the spirit that he aptly named “the New South,”—the New South that, reverently remembering and emulating the virtues of the old, and striving to forget the bitterness of the past, turns its face to the future and seeks to adapt itself to the conditions with which an unsuccessful struggle has environed it, and to turn them to its profit. Of the New South Mr. Grady was the prophet, if not the pioneer. He was never tired of preaching about the rehabilitation of his section. Much of the marvelous development that has taken place in the South during the past ten years has been due to his eager and persistent efforts to call the attention of the world to her vast resources. In his newspaper, in his speeches, in his contributions to Northern periodicals, this was his theme. No industry was too small to command his attention and his aid, and none were larger than his expectations. His was the pen that first drew attention to the iron fields of Alabama, and to the wonderful marble beds and mineral wealth of Georgia. Other writers had preceded him, perhaps, but it is due to his unique methods of advertising that the material resources of the two States are in their present stage of development. He had no individual interest in the development of the material wealth of the South. During the past ten years there was not a day when he was alive that he could not have made thousands of dollars by placing his pen at the disposal of men interested in speculative schemes. He had hundreds of opportunities to write himself rich, but he never fell below the high level of unselfishness that marked his career as boy and man.

There was no limit to his interest in Southern development. The development of the hidden wealth of the hills and valleys, while it appealed strongly to an imagination that had its practical and common-sense side, but not more strongly than the desperate struggle of the farmers of the South in their efforts to recover from the disastrous results of the war while facing new problems of labor and conditions wholly strange. Mr. Grady gave them the encouragement of his voice and pen, striving to teach them the lessons of hope and patience. He was something more than an optimist. He was the embodiment, the very essence, as it seemed—of that smiling faith in the future that brings happiness and contentment, and he had the faculty of imparting his faith to other people. For him the sun was always shining, and he tried to make it shine for other men. At one period, when the farmers of Georgia seemed to be in despair, and while there was a notable movement from this State to Georgia, Mr. Grady caused the correspondents of the Constitution to make an investigation into the agricultural situation in Georgia. The result was highly gratifying in every respect. The correspondents did their work well, as, indeed, they could hardly fail to do under the instructions of Mr. Grady. The farmers who had been despondent took heart, and from that time to the present there has been a steady improvement in the status of agriculture in Georgia.

It would be difficult to describe or to give an adequate idea of the work—remarkable in its extent as well as in its character—that Mr. Grady did for Georgia and for the South. It was his keen and hopeful eyes that first saw the fortunes that were to be made in Florida oranges. He wrote for the Constitution in 1877 a series of glowing letters that were full of predictions and figures based on them. The matter was so new at that time, and Mr. Grady’s predictions and estimates seemed to be so extravagant, that some of the editors, irritated by his optimism, as well as by his success as a journalist, alluded to his figures as “Grady’s facts,” and this expression had quite a vogue, even among those who were not unfriendly.

Nevertheless there is not a prediction to be found in Mr. Grady’s Florida letters that has not been fulfilled, and his figures appear to be tame enough when compared with the real results that have been brought about by the orange-growers. Long afterwards he alluded publicly to “Grady’s facts,” accepted its application, and said he was proud that his facts always turned out to be facts.

It would be impossible to enumerate the practical subjects with which Mr. Grady dealt in the Constitution. In the editorial rooms he was continually suggesting the exhaustive treatment of some matter of real public interest, and in the majority of instances, after making the suggestion to one of his writers, he would treat the subject himself in his own inimitable style. His pleasure trips were often itineraries in behalf of the section he was visiting. He went on a pleasure trip to Southern Georgia on one occasion, and here are the headlines of a few of the letters he sent back: “Berries and Politics,” “The Savings of the Georgia Farmers,” “The Largest Strawberry Farm in the State,” “A Wandering Bee, and How it Made the LeConte Pear,” “The Turpentine Industries.” All these are suggestive. Each letter bore some definite relation to the development of the resources of the State.

To Mr. Grady, more than to any other man, is due the development of the truck gardens and watermelon farms of southern and southwest Georgia. When he advised in the Constitution the planting of watermelons for shipment to the North, the proposition was hooted at by some of the rival editors, but he “boomed” the business, as the phrase is, and to-day the watermelon business is an established industry, and thousands of farmers are making money during what would otherwise be a dull season of the year. And so with hundreds of other things. His suggestions were always practicable, though they were sometimes so unique as to invite the criticism of the thoughtless, and they were always for the benefit of others—for the benefit of the people. How few men, even though they live to a ripe old age, leave behind them such a record of usefulness and unselfish devotion as that of this man, who died before his prime!

VII.

Mr. Grady’s editorial methods were as unique as all his other methods. They can be described, but they cannot be explained. He had an instinctive knowledge of news in its embryonic state; he seemed to know just where and when a sensation or a startling piece of information would develop itself, and he was always ready for it. Sometimes it seemed to grow and develop under his hands, and his insight and information were such that what appeared to be an ordinary news item would suddenly become, under his manipulation and interpretation, of the first importance. It was this faculty that enabled him to make the Constitution one of the leading journals of the country in its method of gathering and treating the news.

Mr. Grady was not as fond of the editorial page as might be supposed. Editorials were very well in their way—capital in an emergency—admirable when a nail was to be clinched, so to speak—but most important of all to his mind was the news and the treatment of it. The whirl of events was never too rapid for him. The most startling developments, the most unexpected happenings, always found him ready to deal with them instantly and in just the right way.

He magnified the office of reporting, and he had a great fancy for it himself. There are hundreds of instances where he voluntarily assumed the duties of a reporter after he became managing editor. A case in point is the work he did on the occasion of the Charleston earthquake. The morning after that catastrophe he was on his way to Charleston. He took a reporter with him, but he preferred to do most of the work. His graphic descriptions of the disaster in all its phases—his picturesque grouping of all the details—were the perfection of reporting, and were copied all over the country. The reporter who accompanied Mr. Grady had a wonderful tale to tell on his return. To the people of that desolate town, the young Georgian seemed to carry light and hope. Hundreds of citizens were encamped on the streets. Mr. Grady visited these camps, and his sympathetic humor brought a smile to many a sad face. He went from house to house, and from encampment to encampment, wrote two or three columns of telegraphic matter on his knee, went to his room in the hotel in the early hours of morning, fell on the bed with his clothes on, and in a moment was sound asleep. The reporter never knew the amount of work Mr. Grady had done until he saw it spread out in the columns of the Constitution. Working at high-pressure there was hardly a limit to the amount of copy Mr. Grady could produce in a given time, and it sometimes happened that he dictated an editorial to his stenographer while writing a news article.

He did a good deal of his more leisurely newspaper work at home, with his wife and children around him. He never wrote on a table or desk, but used a lapboard or a pad, leaning back in his chair with his feet as high as his head. His house was always a centre of attraction, and when visitors came in Mrs. Grady used to tell them that they needn’t mind Henry. The only thing that disturbed him on such occasions was when the people in the room conversed in a tone so low that he failed to hear what they were saying. When this happened he would look up from his writing with a quick “What’s that?” This often happened in the editorial rooms, and he would frequently write while taking part in a conversation, never losing the thread of his article or of the talk.

As I have said, he reserved his editorials for occasions or emergencies, and it was then that his luminous style showed at its best. He employed always the apt phrase; he was, in fact a phrase-builder. His gift of expression was something marvelous, and there was something melodious and fluent about his more deliberate editorials that suggested the movement of verse. I was reading awhile ago his editorial appealing to the people of Atlanta on the cold Christmas morning which has already been alluded to in this sketch. It is short—not longer than the pencil with which he wrote it, but there is that about it calculated to stir the blood, even now. Above any other man I have ever known Mr. Grady possessed the faculty of imparting his personal magnetism to cold type; and even such a statement as this is an inadequate explanation of the swift and powerful effect that his writings had on the public mind.

He had a keen eye for what, in a general way, may be called climaxes. Thus he was content to see the daily Constitution run soberly and sedately along during the week if it developed into a great paper on Sunday. He did more editorial work for the Sunday paper than for any other issue, and bent all his energies toward making an impression on that day. There was nothing about the details of the paper that he did not thoroughly understand. He knew more about the effects of type combinations than the printers did; he knew as much about the business department as the business manager; and he could secure more advertisements in three hours than his advertising clerks could solicit in a week. It used to be said of him that he lacked the business faculty. I suppose the remark was based on the fact that, in the midst of all the tremendous booms he stirred up, and the enterprises he fostered, he remained comparatively poor. I think he purposely neglected the opportunities for private gain that were offered him. There can be no more doubt of his business qualification than there can be of the fact that he neglected opportunities for private gain; but his business faculties were given to the service of the public—witness his faultless management of two of the greatest expositions ever held in the South. Had he served his own interests one-half as earnestly as he served those of the people, he would have been a millionaire. As it was, he died comparatively poor.

Mr. Grady took great pride in the Weekly Constitution, and that paper stands to-day a monument to his business faculty and to his wonderful methods of management. When Mr. Grady took hold of the weekly edition, it had about seven thousand subscribers, and his partners thought that the field would be covered when the list reached ten thousand. To-day the list of subscribers is not far below two hundred thousand, and is larger than that of the weekly edition of any other American newspaper. Just how this result has been brought about it is impossible to say. His methods were not mysterious, perhaps, but they did not lie on the surface. The weekly editions of newspapers that have reached large circulations depend on some specialty—as, for instance, the Detroit Free Press with the popular sketches of M. Quad, and the Toledo Blade, with the rancorous, but still popular, letters of Petroleum V. Nasby. The Weekly Constitution has never depended on such things. It has had, and still has, the letters of Bill Arp, of Sarge Wier, and of Betsey Hamilton, homely humorists all, but Mr. Grady took great pains never to magnify these things into specialties. Contributions that his assistants thought would do for the weekly, Mr. Grady would cut out relentlessly.

It sometimes happened that subscribers would begin to fall off. Then Mr. Grady would send for the manager of the weekly department, and proceed to caucus with him, as the young men around the office termed the conference. During the next few days there would be a great stir in the weekly department, and in the course of a fortnight the list of subscribers would begin to grow again. Once, when talking about the weekly, Mr. Grady remarked in a jocular way that when subscriptions began to flow in at the rate of two thousand a day, he wanted to die. Singularly enough, when he was returning from Boston, having been seized with the sickness that was so soon to carry him off, the business manager telegraphed him that more than two thousand subscribers had been received the day before.

In the midst of the manifold duties and responsibilities that he had cheerfully taken on his shoulders, there came to Mr. Grady an ardent desire to aid in the reconciliation of the North and South, and to bring about a better understanding between them. This desire rapidly grew into a fixed and solemn purpose. His first opportunity was an invitation to the banquet of the New England Society, which he accepted with great hesitation. The wonderful effect of his speech at that banquet, and the tremendous response of applause and approval that came to him from all parts of the country, assured him that he had touched the key-note of the situation, and he knew then that his real mission was that of Pacificator. There was a change in him from that time forth, though it was a change visible only to friendly and watchful eyes. He put away something of his boyishness, and became, as it seemed, a trifle more thoughtful. His purpose developed into a mission, and grew in his mind, and shone in his eyes, and remained with him day and night. He made many speeches after that, frequently in little out-of-the-way country places, but all of them had a national significance and national bearing. He was preaching the sentiments of harmony, fraternity, and good will to the South as well as to the North.

He prepared his Boston speech with great care, not merely to perfect its form, but to make it worthy of the great cause he had at heart, and in its preparation he departed widely from his usual methods of composition. He sent his servants away, locked himself in Mrs. Grady’s room, and would not tolerate interruptions from any source. His memory was so prodigious that whatever he wrote was fixed in his mind, so that when he had once written out a speech, he needed the manuscript no more. Those who were with him say that he did not confine himself to the printed text of the Boston speech, but made little excursions suggested by his surroundings. Nevertheless, that speech, as it stands, reaches the high-water mark of modern oratory. It was his last, as it was his best, contribution to the higher politics of the country—the politics that are above partisanry and self-seeking.

VIII.

From Boston Mr. Grady came home to die. It was known that he was critically ill, but his own life had been so hopeful and so bright, that when the announcement of his death was made the people of Atlanta were paralyzed, and the whole country shocked. It was a catastrophe so sudden and so far-reaching that even sorrow stood dumb for a while. The effects of such a calamity were greater than sorrow could conceive or affection contemplate. Men who had only a passing acquaintance with him wept when they heard of his death. Laboring men spoke of him with trembling lips and tearful eyes, and working-women went to their tasks in the morning crying bitterly. Never again will there come to Atlanta a calamity that shall so profoundly touch the hearts of the people—that shall so encompass the town with the spirit of mourning.

I feel that I have been unable, in this hastily written sketch, to do justice to the memory of this remarkable man. I have found it impossible to describe his marvelous gifts, his wonderful versatility, or the genius that set him apart from other men. The new generations that arise will bring with them men who will be fitted to meet the emergencies that may arise, men fitted to rule and capable of touching the popular heart; but no generation will ever produce a genius so versatile, a nature so rare and so sweet, a character so perfect and beautiful, a heart so unselfish, and a mind of such power and vigor, as those that combined to form the unique personality of Henry W. Grady. Never again, it is to be feared, will the South have such a wise and devoted leader, or sectional unity so brilliant a champion, or the country so ardent a lover, or humanity so unselfish a friend, or the cause of the people so eloquent an advocate.

MEMORIAL OF HENRY W. GRADY.

Prepared by Marion J. Verdery, at the Request of the New York Southern Society.

HENRY WOODFIN GRADY was born in Athens, Georgia, May 17, 1851, and died in Atlanta, Georgia, December 23, 1889.

His father, William S. Grady, was a native of North Carolina, and lived in that State until about the year 1846, when he moved to Athens, Georgia. He was a man of vigorous energy, sterling integrity, and great independence of character. He was not literary by profession, but devoted himself to mercantile pursuits, and accumulated what was in those days considered a handsome fortune. Soon after moving to Georgia to live, he married Miss Gartrell, a woman of rare strength of character and deep religious nature. Their married life was sanctified by love of God, and made happy by a consistent devotion to each other.

They had three children, Henry Woodfin, William S., Jr., and Martha. Henry Grady’s father was an early volunteer in the Confederate Army. He organized and equipped a company, of which he was unanimously elected captain, and went at once to Virginia, where he continued in active service until he lost his life in one of the battles before Petersburg. During his career as a soldier he bore himself with such conspicuous valor, that he was accorded the rare distinction of promotion on the field for gallantry.

He fought in defense of his convictions, and fell “a martyr for conscience’ sake.”

His widow, bereft of her helpmate, faced alone the grave responsibility of rearing her three young children.

She led them in the ways of righteousness and truth, and always sweetened their lives with the tenderness of indulgence, and the beauty of devotion. Two of them still live to call her blessed.

If memorials were meant only for the day and generation in which they are written, who would venture upon the task of preparing one to Henry W. Grady? His death occasioned such wide grief, and induced such unprecedented demonstrations of sorrow, that nothing can be commensurate with those impressive evidences of the unrivaled place he held in the homage of his countrymen.

No written memorial can indicate the strong hold he had upon the Southern people, nor portray that peerless personality which gave him his marvelous power among men. He had a matchless grace of soul that made him an unfailing winner of hearts. His translucent mind pulsated with the light of truth and beautified all thought. He grew flowers in the garden of his heart and sweetened the world with the perfume of his spirit. His endowments were so superior, and his purposes so unselfish, that he seemed to combine all the best elements of genius, and live under the influence of Divine inspiration.

As both a writer and a speaker, he was phenomenally gifted. There was no limit, either to the power or witchery of his pen. In his masterful hand, it was as he chose, either the mighty instrument which Richelieu described, or the light wand of a poet striking off the melody of song, though not to the music of rhyme. In writing a political editorial, or an article on the industrial development of the South, or anything else to which he was moved by an inspiring sense of patriotism or conviction of duty, he was logical, aggressive, and unanswerable. When building an air-castle over the framework of his fancy, or when pouring out his soul in some romantic dream, or when sounding the depth of human feeling by an appeal for Charity’s sake, his command of language was as boundless as the realm of thought, his ideas as beautiful as pictures in the sky, and his pathos as deep as the well of tears. As an orator, he had no equal in the South. He literally mastered his audience regardless of their character, chaining them to the train of his thought and carrying them captive to conviction. He moved upon their souls like the Divine Spirit upon the waters, either lashing them into storms of enthusiasm, or stilling them into the restful quiet of sympathy. He was like no other man—he was a veritable magician. He could invest the most trifling thing with proportions of importance not at all its own. He could transform a homely thought into an expression of beauty beneath his wondrous touch. From earliest childhood he possessed that indefinable quality which compels hero-worship.

In the untimely ending of his brilliant and useful career—an ending too sudden to be called less than tragic—there came an affliction as broad as the land he loved, and a grief well-nigh universal. Atlanta lamented her foremost citizen; Georgia mourned her peerless son; the New South agonized over the fall of her intrepid leader; and the heart of the nation was athrob with sorrow when the announcement went forth—“Henry W. Grady is dead.”

The power of his personality, the vital force of his energy, and the scope of his genius, had always precluded the thought that death could touch him, and hence, when he fell a victim to the dread destroyer, there was a terrible shock felt, and sorrow rolled like a tempest over the souls of the Southern people.

The swift race he ran, and the lofty heights he attained, harmonized well with God’s munificent endowment of him. In every field that he labored, his achievements were so wonderful, that a faithful account of his career sounds more like the extravagance of eulogy, than like a record of truth. Of his very early boyhood no account is essential to the purposes of this sketch. It is unnecessary to give any details of him prior to the time when he was a student in the University of Georgia, at Athens. From that institution he was graduated in 1868.

During his college days, he was a boy of bounding spirit, who, by an inexplicable power over his associates, made for himself an unchallenged leadership in all things with which he concerned himself. He was not a close student. He never studied his text-books more than was necessary to guarantee his rising from class to class, and to finally secure his diploma. He had no fondness for any department of learning except belles-lettres. In that branch of study he stood well, simply because it was to his liking. The sciences, especially mathematics, were really distasteful to him. He was an omnivorous reader. Every character of Dickens was as familiar to him as a personal friend. That great novelist was his favorite author. He read widely of history, and had a great memory for dates and events. He reveled in poetry as a pastime, but never found anything that delighted him more than “Lucile.” He learned that love-song literally by heart.

While at college his best intellectual efforts were made in his literary and debating society. He aspired to be anniversarian of his society, and his election seemed a foregone conclusion. He was, however, over-confident of success in the last days of the canvass, and when the election came off was beaten by one vote. This was his first disappointment, and went hard with him. He could not bring himself to understand how anything toward the accomplishment of which he had bent his energy could fail. His defeat proved a blessing in disguise, for the following year a place of higher honor, namely that of “commencement orator” was instituted at the University, and to that he was elected by acclamation. This was the year of his graduation, and the speech he made was the sensation of commencement. His subject was “Castles in Air,” and in the treatment of his poetic theme he reveled in that wonderful power of word painting for which he afterwards became so famous. Even in those early days, he wrote and spoke with a fluency of expression, and brilliancy of fancy, that were incomparable.

In all the relations of college life he was universally popular. He had a real genius for putting himself en rapport with all sorts and conditions of men. His sympathy was quick-flowing and kind. Any sight or story of suffering would touch his heart and make the tears come. His generosity, like a great river, ran in ceaseless flow and broadening course toward the wide ocean of humanity. He lived in the realization of its being “more blessed to give than to receive.” He never stopped to consider the worthiness of an object, but insisted that a man was entitled to some form of selfishness, and said his was the self-indulgence which he experienced in giving.

There was an old woman in Athens, who was a typical professional beggar. She wore out everybody’s charity except Grady’s. He never tired helping her. One day he said, just after giving her some money, “I do hope old Jane will not die as long as I live in Athens. If she does, my most unfailing privilege of charity will be cut off.” A princely liberality marked everything he did. His name never reduced the average of a subscription list, but eight times out of ten it was down for the largest amount.

By his marked individuality of character, and evidences of genius, even as a boy he impressed himself upon all those with whom he came in contact.

Immediately after his graduation at Athens, he went to the University of Virginia, not so much with a determination to broaden his scholastic attainments, as with the idea that in that famous institution he would be inspired to a higher cultivation of his inborn eloquence. From the day he entered the University of Virginia, he had only one ambition, and that was to be “society orator.” He made such a profound impression in the Washington Society that his right to the honor he craved was scarcely disputed. In the public debates, he swept all competitors before him. About two weeks before the Society’s election of its orator, he had routed every other aspirant from the field, and it seemed he would be unanimously chosen. However, when election day came, that same over-confidence which cost him defeat at Athens lost him victory at Charlottesville. This disappointment nearly broke his heart. He came back home crestfallen and dispirited, and but for the wonderful buoyancy of his nature, he might have succumbed permanently to the severe blow which had been struck at his youthful aspirations and hopes.

It was not long after his return to Georgia before he determined to make journalism his life-work. At once he began writing newspaper letters on all sorts of subjects, trusting to his genius to give interest to purely fanciful topics, which had not the slightest flavor of news. Having thus felt his way out into the field of his adoption, he soon went regularly into newspaper business.

Just about this time, and before he had attained his majority, he married Miss Julia King, of Athens. She was the first sweetheart of his boyhood, and kept that hallowed place always. Her beauty and grace of person, united to her charms of character, made her the queen of his life and the idol of his love. She, with two children (a boy and girl), survive him.

In his domestic life he was tender and indulgent to his family, and generously hospitable to his friends. The very best side of him was always turned toward his hearthstone, and there he dispensed the richest treasures of his soul. His home was his castle, and in it his friends were always made happy by the benediction of his welcome.

Soon after marriage he moved to Rome, Georgia, and established himself in the joint ownership, and editorial management of the Rome Commercial, which paper, instead of prospering, was soon enveloped in bankruptcy, costing Mr. Grady many thousands of dollars. Shortly after this he moved to Atlanta, and formed a partnership with Col. Robert Alliston in founding the Atlanta Herald. The conduct of that paper was a revelation in Georgia journalism. Grady and Alliston combined probably more genius than any two men who have ever owned a paper together in that State. They made the columns of the Herald luminous. They also put into it more push and enterprise than had ever been known in that section. They sacrificed everything to daily triumph, regardless of cost or consequences. They went so far as to charter an engine in order that they might put their morning edition in Macon, Georgia, by breakfast time. This was a feat never before dreamed of in Georgia. They accomplished the unprecedented undertaking, but in doing that, and other things of unwarranted extravagance, it was not long before the Atlanta Herald went “lock, stock and barrel,” into the wide-open arms of the Sheriff. In this venture Mr. Grady not only sunk all of his personal fortune which remained after the Rome wreck, but involved himself considerably in debt. Thus at twenty-three years of age, he was a victim to disappointment in the only two pronounced ambitions he had ever had, and was depressed by the utter failure of the only two business enterprises in which he had ever engaged.

He made another effort, and started a weekly paper called the Atlanta Capital. This, however, soon went the sorrowing way of his other hopes.

While those failures and disappointments seemed cruel set-backs in that day, looked at now they may be counted to have been no more than healthful discipline to him. They served to stir his spirit the deeper, and fill him with nobler resolve. Bravely he trampled misfortune under his feet, and climbed to the high place of honor and usefulness for which he was destined.

In the day of his extreme poverty, instead of despairing he took on new strength and courage that equipped him well for future triumphs. When it is remembered that his vast accomplishments and national reputation were compassed within the next fourteen years, the record is simply amazing.

Fourteen years ago, Henry W. Grady stood in Atlanta, Georgia, bankrupt and almost broken-hearted. Everything behind him was blotted by failure, and nothing ahead of him was lighted with promise. In that trying day he borrowed fifty dollars, and giving twenty of it to his faithful wife, took the balance and determined to invest it in traveling as far as it would carry him from the scene of his discouragements. He had one offer then open to him, namely, the editorial management of the Wilmington (North Carolina) Star, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. It was the only thing that seemed a guarantee against actual want, and he had about determined to accept it, when yielding to the influence of pure presentiment, instead of buying a ticket to Wilmington with his thirty dollars, he bought one to New York City.

He landed here with three dollars and seventy-five cents, and registered at the Astor House in order to be in easy reach of Newspaper Row.

He used to tell the story of his experience on that occasion in this way: “After forcing down my unrelished breakfast on the morning of my arrival in New York, I went out on the sidewalk in front of the Astor House, and gave a bootblack twenty-five cents, one-fifth of which was to pay for shining my shoes, and the balance was a fee for the privilege of talking to him. I felt that I would die if I did not talk to somebody. Having stimulated myself at that doubtful fountain of sympathy, I went across to the Herald office, and the managing editor was good enough to admit me to his sanctum. It happened that just at that time several of the Southern States were holding constitutional conventions. The Herald manager asked me if I knew anything about politics, I replied that I knew very little about anything else. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘sit at this desk and write me an article on State conventions in the South.’ With these words he tossed me a pad and left me alone in the room. When my task-master returned, I had finished the article and was leaning back in the chair with my feet up on the desk. ‘Why, Mr. Grady, what is the matter?’ asked the managing editor. ‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘except that I am through.’ ‘Very well, leave your copy on the desk, and if it amounts to anything I will let you hear from me. Where are you stopping?’ ‘I am at the Astor House.’ Early the next morning before getting out of bed, I rang for a hall-boy and ordered the Herald. I actually had not strength to get up and dress myself, until I could see whether or not my article had been used. I opened the Herald with a trembling hand, and when I saw that ‘State Conventions in the South’ was on the editorial page, I fell back on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and cried like a child. When I went back to the Herald office that day the managing editor received me cordially and said, ‘You can go back to Georgia, Mr. Grady, and consider yourself in the employ of the Herald.’”

Almost immediately after his return to Atlanta, he was tendered, and gladly accepted, a position on the editorial staff of the Atlanta Constitution. He worked vigorously for the New York Herald for five years as its Southern correspondent, and in that time did some of the most brilliant work that has ever been done for that excellent journal.

Notable among his achievements were the graphic reports he made of the South Carolina riots in 1876. But the special work which gave him greatest fame was his exposure of the election frauds in Florida that same year. He secured the memorable confession of Dennis and his associates, and his report of it to the Herald was exclusive. For that piece of work alone, Mr. Bennett paid him a thousand dollars. His attachment to the editorial staff of the Atlanta Constitution gave him an opportunity to impress himself upon the people of Georgia, which he did with great rapidity and power.

In 1879, he came to New York, partly for recreation and partly for the purpose of writing a series of topical letters from Gotham. While here he was introduced by Governor John B. Gordon to Cyrus W. Field. Mr. Field was instantly impressed by him, and liked him so much that he loaned him twenty thousand dollars with which to buy one-fourth interest in the Atlanta Constitution. He made the purchase promptly, and that for which he paid twenty thousand dollars in 1880, was at the time of his death in 1889 worth at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The enormous increase in the value of the Constitution during his identification with it shows nothing more plainly than the value of his marvelous work in its service.

Securing an interest in the Atlanta Constitution may be said to have fixed his noble destiny. It emancipated his genius from the bondage of poverty, quickened his sensitive spirit with a new consciousness of power for good, and inspired him to untiring service in the widest fields of usefulness. He saw the hand of God in the favor that had blessed him, and in acknowledgment of the Divine providence dedicated his life to the cause of truth, and the uplifting of humanity. Atlanta was his home altar, and there he poured out the best libations of his heart. That thriving city to-day has no municipal advantage, no public improvement, no educational institution, no industrial enterprise which does not either owe its beginning to his readiness of suggestion, or its mature development to his sustaining influence. Its streets are paved with his energy and devotion, its houses are built in the comeliness and fashion that he inspired, and its vast business interests are established in the prosperity and strength that he foretold.

Georgia was the pride of his life, and for the increase of her peace and prosperity, the deepening brotherhood of her people, the development of her vast mineral resources, and the enrichment of her varied harvests, he wrote, and talked, and prayed.

The whole South was to him sacred ground, made so both by the heroic death of his father and the precious birth of his children. By the former, he felt all the memories and traditions of the Old South to have been sanctified, and by the latter he felt all the hopes and aspirations of the New South to have been beautified. And thus with a personality altogether unique, and a genius thoroughly rare, he stood like a magical link between the past and the future. Turning toward the days that were gone, he sealed them with a holy kiss; and then looking toward the time that had not yet come, he conjured it with a voice of prophecy.

In politics he was an undeniable leader, and yet never held office. High places were pressed for his acceptance times without number, but he always resolutely put them away from him, insisting that office had no charm for him. He could have gone to Congress, as representative from the State at large, if he would only have consented to serve. His name was repeatedly suggested for the governorship of Georgia, but he invariably suppressed the idea promptly, urging his friends to leave him at peace in his private station.

In spite of his indifference to all political preferment, it is universally believed in Georgia, that had he lived, he would have soon been sent to the United States Senate. Although he had no love of office for himself, he was the incomparable Warwick of his day. He was almost an absolute dictator in Georgia politics. No man cared to stand for election to any place, high or low, unless he felt Grady was with him. He certainly was the most powerful factor in the election of two Governors, and practically gave more than one United States Senator his seat. His power extended all over the State.

Such a man could not be held within the narrow limits of local reputation. It mattered not how far he traveled from home, he made himself quickly known by the power of his impressive individuality, or by some splendid exhibition of his genius.

By two speeches, one made at a banquet of the New England Society in New York City, and the other at a State fair at Dallas, Texas, he achieved for himself a reputation which spanned the continent. The most magnificent effort of eloquence which he ever made was the soul-stirring speech delivered in Boston on “The Race Problem,” just ten days before he died. These three speeches were enough to confirm and perpetuate his fame as a surpassing orator.

It is impossible to give any adequate idea of Henry Grady’s largeness of heart, nobility of soul, and brilliancy of mind. Those three elements combined in royal abundance to make his princely nature.

When Georgia’s great triumvirate died, their spirits seemed to linger on earth in the being of Henry W. Grady. While he lived he perpetuated the political sagacity of Alexander H. Stephens, the consummate genius of Robert Toombs, and the impassioned eloquence of Benjamin H. Hill.

True greatness is immortal. Real patriotic purposes are never swallowed up in death. Good works well begun live long after their praiseworthy originators have ascended in glory. If there is any truth in these reflections, they are precious and priceless to all who mourn the untimely taking off of Henry Woodfin Grady.

His sudden death struck grief to all true-hearted American citizens. In him was combined such breadth of usefulness and brilliancy of genius, that he illumined the critical period of American history in which he lived, and set the firmament of our national glory with many a new and shining star of promise. This century, though old in its last quarter, has given birth to but one Henry Woodfin Grady, and it will close its eyes long before his second self is seen.

A hundred years hence, when sweet charity is stemming the tides of suffering in the world, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This blessed work is an echo from Henry Grady’s life on earth. A hundred years hence, when friendship is building high her altars of self-sacrifice in the name of love and loyalty, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This beautiful service is going on as a perpetual memorial to Henry Grady’s life on earth. A hundred years hence, when all the South shall have been enriched by the development of her vast natural resources, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the legitimate fruit of Henry Grady’s labor of love while he lived on earth. A hundred years hence, when patriotism shall have beaten down all sectional and partisan prejudice, and the burning problems that press upon our national heart to-day shall have been “solved in patience and fairness,” if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the glorious verification of Henry Grady’s prophetic utterances while on earth. And when in God’s own appointed time this nation shall lead all other nations of the earth in the triumphal march of prosperous peoples under perfect governments, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the free, full and complete answer to Henry Grady’s impassioned prayer while on earth.

SPEECHES.

THE NEW SOUTH.

ON the 21st of December, 1886, Mr. Grady, in response to an urgent invitation, delivered the following Address at the Banquet of the New England Club, New York:

“There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.” These words, delivered from the immortal lips of Benjamin H. Hill, at Tammany Hall, in 1866, true then and truer now, I shall make my text to-night.

Mr. President and Gentlemen: Let me express to you my appreciation of the kindness by which I am permitted to address you. I make this abrupt acknowledgment advisedly, for I feel that if, when I raise my provincial voice in this ancient and august presence, I could find courage for no more than the opening sentence, it would be well if in that sentence I had met in a rough sense my obligation as a guest, and had perished, so to speak, with courtesy on my lips and grace in my heart. Permitted, through your kindness, to catch my second wind, let me say that I appreciate the significance of being the first Southerner to speak at this board, which bears the substance, if it surpasses the semblance, of original New England hospitality—and honors the sentiment that in turn honors you, but in which my personality is lost, and the compliment to my people made plain.

I bespeak the utmost stretch of your courtesy to-night. I am not troubled about those from whom I come. You remember the man whose wife sent him to a neighbor with a pitcher of milk, and who, tripping on the top step, fell with such casual interruptions as the landings afforded into the basement, and, while picking himself up, had the pleasure of hearing his wife call out: “John, did you break the pitcher?”

“No, I didn’t,” said John, “but I’ll be dinged if I don’t.”

So, while those who call me from behind may inspire me with energy, if not with courage, I ask an indulgent hearing from you. I beg that you will bring your full faith in American fairness and frankness to judgment upon what I shall say. There was an old preacher once who told some boys of the Bible lesson he was going to read in the morning. The boys, finding the place, glued together the connecting pages. The next morning he read on the bottom of one page, “When Noah was one hundred and twenty years old he took unto himself a wife, who was”—then turning the page—“140 cubits long—40 cubits wide, built of gopher wood—and covered with pitch inside and out.” He was naturally puzzled at this. He read it again, verified it, and then said: “My friends, this is the first time I ever met this in the Bible, but I accept this as an evidence of the assertion that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.” If I could get you to hold such faith to-night I could proceed cheerfully to the task I otherwise approach with a sense of consecration.

Pardon me one word, Mr. President, spoken for the sole purpose of getting into the volumes that go out annually freighted with the rich eloquence of your speakers—the fact that the Cavalier as well as the Puritan was on the continent in its early days, and that he was “up and able to be about.” I have read your books carefully and I find no mention of that fact, which seems to me an important one for preserving a sort of historical equilibrium if for nothing else.

Let me remind you that the Virginia Cavalier first challenged France on the continent—that Cavalier, John Smith, gave New England its very name, and was so pleased with the job that he has been handing his own name around ever since—and that while Myles Standish was cutting off men’s ears for courting a girl without her parents’ consent, and forbade men to kiss their wives on Sunday, the Cavalier was courting everything in sight, and that the Almighty had vouchsafed great increase to the Cavalier colonies, the huts in the wilderness being as full as the nests in the woods.

But having incorporated the Cavalier as a fact in your charming little books, I shall let him work out his own salvation, as he has always done, with engaging gallantry, and we will hold no controversy as to his merits. Why should we? Neither Puritan nor Cavalier long survived as such. The virtues and good traditions of both happily still live for the inspiration of their sons and the saving of the old fashion. But both Puritan and Cavalier were lost in the storm of the first Revolution, and the American citizen, supplanting both and stronger than either, took possession of the republic bought by their common blood and fashioned to wisdom, and charged himself with teaching men government and establishing the voice of the people as the voice of God.

My friends, Dr. Talmage has told you that the typical American has yet to come. Let me tell you that he has already come. Great types, like valuable plants, are slow to flower and fruit. But from the union of these colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, slow perfecting through a century, came he who stands as the first typical American, the first who comprehended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of this republic—Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than Puritan, greater than Cavalier, in that he was American, and that in his honest form were first gathered the vast and thrilling forces of his ideal government—charging it with such tremendous meaning and elevating it above human suffering that martyrdom, though infamously aimed, came as a fitting crown to a life consecrated from the cradle to human liberty. Let us, each cherishing the traditions and honoring his fathers, build with reverent hands to the type of this simple but sublime life, in which all types are honored, and in our common glory as Americans there will be plenty and to spare for your forefathers and for mine.

Dr. Talmage has drawn for you, with a master’s hand, the picture of your returning armies. He has told you how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a nation’s eyes! Will you bear with me while I tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late war—an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory—in pathos and not in splendor, but in glory that equaled yours, and to hearts as loving as ever welcomed heroes home! Let me picture to you the footsore Confederate soldier, as buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds, having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey. What does he find—let me ask you who went to your homes eager to find, in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for four years’ sacrifice—what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone. Without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence—the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.

What does he do—this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June; women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a garment, gave their hands to work. There was little bitterness in all this. Cheerfulness and frankness prevailed. “Bill Arp” struck the key-note when he said: “Well, I killed as many of them as they did of me, and now I’m going to work.” Of the soldier returning home after defeat and roasting some corn on the roadside, who made the remark to his comrades: “You may leave the South if you want to, but I am going to Sandersville, kiss my wife and raise a crop, and if the Yankees fool with me any more, I’ll whip ’em again.” I want to say to General Sherman, who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire, that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.

But what is the sum of our work? We have found out that in the summing up the free negro counts more than he did as a slave. We have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories, and put business above politics. We have challenged your spinners in Massachusetts and your iron-makers in Pennsylvania. We have learned that the $400,000,000 annually received from our cotton crop will make us rich when the supplies that make it are home-raised. We have reduced the commercial rate of interest from 24 to 6 per cent., and are floating 4 per cent. bonds. We have learned that one northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners; and have smoothed the path to southward, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon’s line used to be, and hung out latchstring to you and yours. We have reached the point that marks perfect harmony in every household, when the husband confesses that the pies which his wife cooks are as good as those his mother used to bake; and we admit that the sun shines as brightly and the moon as softly as it did before the war. We have established thrift in city and country. We have fallen in love with work. We have restored comfort to homes from which culture and elegance never departed. We have let economy take root and spread among us as rank as the crabgrass which sprung from Sherman’s cavalry camps, until we are ready to lay odds on the Georgia Yankee as he manufactures relics of the battle-field in a one-story shanty and squeezes pure olive oil out of his cotton seed, against any down-easter that ever swapped wooden nutmegs for flannel sausage in the valleys of Vermont. Above all, we know that we have achieved in these “piping times of peace” a fuller independence for the South than that which our fathers sought to win in the forum by their eloquence or compel in the field by their swords.

It is a rare privilege, sir, to have had part, however humble, in this work. Never was nobler duty confided to human hands than the uplifting and upbuilding of the prostrate and bleeding South—misguided, perhaps, but beautiful in her suffering, and honest, brave and generous always. In the record of her social, industrial and political illustration we await with confidence the verdict of the world.

But what of the negro? Have we solved the problem he presents or progressed in honor and equity toward solution? Let the record speak to the point. No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the negroes of the South, none in fuller sympathy with the employing and land-owning class. He shares our school fund, has the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people. Self-interest, as well as honor, demand that he should have this. Our future, our very existence depend upon our working out this problem in full and exact justice. We understand that when Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, your victory was assured, for he then committed you to the cause of human liberty, against which the arms of man cannot prevail—while those of our statesmen who trusted to make slavery the corner-stone of the Confederacy doomed us to defeat as far as they could, committing us to a cause that reason could not defend or the sword maintain in sight of advancing civilization.

Had Mr. Toombs said, which he did not say, “that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill,” he would have been foolish, for he might have known that whenever slavery became entangled in war it must perish, and that the chattel in human flesh ended forever in New England when your fathers—not to be blamed for parting with what didn’t pay—sold their slaves to our fathers—not to be praised for knowing a paying thing when they saw it. The relations of the southern people with the negro are close and cordial. We remember with what fidelity for four years he guarded our defenseless women and children, whose husbands and fathers were fighting against his freedom. To his eternal credit be it said that whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges, and worthy to be taken in loving grasp by every man who honors loyalty and devotion. Ruffians have maltreated him, rascals have misled him, philanthropists established a bank for him, but the South, with the North, protests against injustice to this simple and sincere people. To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense. It must be left to those among whom his lot is cast, with whom he is indissolubly connected, and whose prosperity depends upon their possessing his intelligent sympathy and confidence. Faith has been kept with him, in spite of calumnious assertions to the contrary by those who assume to speak for us or by frank opponents. Faith will be kept with him in the future, if the South holds her reason and integrity.

But have we kept faith with you? In the fullest sense, yes. When Lee surrendered—I don’t say when Johnson surrendered, because I understand he still alludes to the time when he met General Sherman last as the time when he determined to abandon any further prosecution of the struggle—when Lee surrendered, I say, and Johnson quit, the South became, and has since been, loyal to this Union. We fought hard enough to know that we were whipped, and in perfect frankness accept as final the arbitrament of the sword to which we had appealed. The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat. The shackles that had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave were broken. Under the old régime the negroes were slaves to the South; the South was a slave to the system. The old plantation, with its simple police regulations and feudal habit, was the only type possible under slavery. Thus was gathered in the hands of a splendid and chivalric oligarchy the substance that should have been diffused among the people, as the rich blood, under certain artificial conditions, is gathered at the heart, filling that with affluent rapture but leaving the body chill and colorless.

The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement—a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core—a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace—and a diversified industry that meets the complex need of this complex age.

The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies were beaten.

This is said in no spirit of time-serving or apology. The South has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion; revolution and not conspiracy, and that her convictions were as honest as yours. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back. In my native town of Athens is a monument that crowns its central hill—a plain, white shaft. Deep cut into its shining side is a name dear to me above the names of men—that of a brave and simple man who died in brave and simple faith. Not for all the glories of New England, from Plymouth Rock all the way, would I exchange the heritage he left me in his soldier’s death. To the foot of that I shall send my children’s children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood. But, sir, speaking from the shadow of that memory which I honor as I do nothing else on earth, I say that the cause in which he suffered and for which he gave his life was adjudged by higher and fuller wisdom than his or mine, and I am glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil, the American Union was saved from the wreck of war.

This message, Mr. President, comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of soil about the city in which I live is as sacred as a battle-ground of the republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blow of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat—sacred soil to all of us—rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better—silent but staunch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms—speaking an eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people.

Now, what answer has New England to this message? Will she permit the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors, when it has died in the hearts of the conquered? Will she transmit this prejudice to the next generation, that in their hearts which never felt the generous ardor of conflict it may perpetuate itself? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which straight from his soldier’s heart Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox? Will she make the vision of a restored and happy people, which gathered above the couch of your dying captain, filling his heart with grace; touching his lips with praise, and glorifying his path to the grave—will she make this vision on which the last sigh of his expiring soul breathed a benediction, a cheat and delusion? If she does, the South, never abject in asking for comradeship, must accept with dignity its refusal; but if she does not refuse to accept in frankness and sincerity this message of good will and friendship, then will the prophecy of Webster, delivered in this very society forty years ago amid tremendous applause, become true, be verified in its fullest sense, when he said: “Standing hand to hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have been for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united, all united now and united forever.” There have been difficulties, contentions, and controversies, but I tell you that in my judgment,