HENRY WOODFIN GRADY

[1851-1889]

H

JAMES W. LEE

ENRY WOODFIN GRADY was born in Athens, Georgia, in 1851. During his boyhood he enjoyed the best educational advantages; after graduating at the State University he went to the University of Virginia, where he took a postgraduate course. He was during his term at each of these institutions the youngest student in his class. He studied diligently what suited his intellect best, and paid little attention to branches in which he felt no interest. History, belles-lettres, Anglo-Saxon, and Greek attracted him, and his standing was very high in all of these.

Henry W. Grady was an idealist. He lived close by the clime of eternal realities, and looked out upon the stars which never go down; he reveled in the light which comes from the sun which knows no sinking; he kept up constant commerce with the enchanted land of beauty. Was he less practical because of this? He was more. Was he farther from the real world of suffering and toil because of this? He was nearer to it. He was one of the first to call attention to the wealth of our mountains. In a speech delivered some years ago he told of a burial in Pickens County, Georgia. He said the grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone was from Vermont. That the burial was in a pine wilderness, but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. That an iron mountain overshadowed it, but the coffin nails and screws came from Pittsburg. That hard woods and metals abounded, but the corpse was hauled on a wagon which was made in South Bend, Indiana. That a hickory grove was near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. That the cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, and the shoes from Boston. That the folded hands were incased in white gloves which came from New York, and around the poor neck that had worn all its living days the bondage of lost opportunity was twisted a cheap cravat from Philadelphia. That the country so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral but the poor man's body and the grave in which it awaited the Judgment trump. And that the poor fellow lowered to his rest on coffin bands from Lowell carried nothing into the next world as a reminder of his home in this, save the halted blood in his veins, the chilled marrow

in his bones, and the echo of the dull clods that fell on his coffin lid. The attention of the people he thus directed to the marble in our mountains and lived to see $3,000,000 invested in marble quarries and machinery around that grave. He lived to see the largest marblecutting works in the world, twenty miles from that grave. He called attention to the iron in our mines, and helped to lift the iron industries of the South to rivalry with those in England and the North. He saw it advance from 212,000 tons in 1880 to the production of 845,000 in 1887. He called attention to the immense fund of heat God had stored away for us when he laid the foundations of the world. He helped to swell the mining industry from 3,000,000 tons of coal in 1870 to 6,000,000 in 1880, and nearly 15,000,000 tons in 1887.

He saw not only the coal and iron, but the uses coming together to which they might be turned. He saw their relation to human comfort and to civilization, and under the influence of his enthusiasm expressed in brilliant editorials through his pen, there were built some of the largest furnaces and foundries in the world. To bring this raw material of iron and wood a little way from the mountain and the forest did not satisfy him. He wished to see it carried through nail factories, shovel and pick factories, carriage and wagon factories, on the spot. He wished to see it made ready for use and started from our doors upon the rounds of trade. He urged the application of intelligence to raw material in bridge works, car works, chain works, nail works and hinge works.

He saw the possibilities of Southern soil. In the elements which compose it, the genial skies above it, and the dews which come out of the night upon it; he saw watermelons, strawberries, cherries, grapes, pears, peaches, and all fruits and foods. His editorials on truck farming were prose poems. They carried hope and courage to the Southern farmer. He idealized the Georgia watermelon: the blossom that bore it, the vine that nourished it, and the planter that protected it. In flavor, in beauty, in haste to get ripe, he helped it to the first place in the markets of the world. After reading one of his editorials on the watermelon, it could be seen lying green and dew-covered in the patch, with contents sweet enough for the taste of a king. He aided the Southern strawberry to herald first in Northern markets the coming spring. The Southern peach he made classic. He swelled its power to delight with its meat, and to suggest with its painted cheek the soft skies under which it grew. He made the Southern ground-pea a wanderer around the world and helped it to advertise our section from the peanut stands of all countries.

He loved the cotton plant. In no poet's esteem did ever rose or

hyacinth or violet stand higher. Its blossom opening its leaves of white to catch scarlet from the down-flowing light, revealed the birth of a king. It was interesting to him because of its relation to human comfort and use. He loved it because it caught so much of heaven's sunshine for man's use. It appropriated in the South every year from sky and rain enough cloth to protect with a suit of clothes every human being on earth. He saw more in it than its lint. He proved that though the South received $350,000,000 for its 7,000,000 bales of cotton, it would be a valuable plant though it gave no lint at all. That after the 3,000,000 pounds of lint was sold for the $350,000,Doo, there was left 3,750,000 tons of seed. That this would supply 150,000,000 gallons of oil, which, sold at forty cents a gallon, would bring $60,000,000. Or that it might be reduced to lard, when it would produce 1,125,000,000 pounds of edible fat, which would equal in pounds 5,625,000 hogs of 200 pounds each. Allowing 200 pounds of edible fat to each person per annum, he showed that this would keep in meat 5,625,000 citizens.

Whatever he wrote was colored and magnetized by the hue and subtle force of his own personality. He wrapped our mountains in the glow of his genius, and sent the light of his thought through the structure of our mineral formations, and invited millions of money to the establishment of mills and foundries to work them. He bathed our forests in the purple and pink and gold of his imagination and disclosed the value of our timber, and thus invited people to erect spoke and hub and ax-handle factories all through the Southern States. He laid the bars and lines of his exquisite imagery on the hills and valleys of our farms, and with graceful pencilings of light from the boundless resources of his mind worked traceries with the vines over the doors of our country homes and advertised the charm of rural dwelling places.

As an orator Mr. Grady sought, by spoken work and direct appeal, more immediately to accomplish what engaged his attention as an editor. To build up his section in wealth, to quicken its enterprise and widen its outlook, was ever his aim as editor or orator. As an orator he was without an equal among Southern men of the younger generation. On the rostrum he was a master. He had action, pathos, fervor. In gesture, in manner, he was grace itself. Never did the artist in him reveal itself more clearly than in one of his great speeches. He was the embodiment of strength, unity and beauty. The multitudes hung upon his lips entranced. A living man had come to talk upon living issues, in words exquisitely chosen, in sentences marvelously wrought, and out of a heart overflowing with sympathy and good will. His message was magnetized and baptized by a personality that conquered without effort. Straight to the heart it went,

mingling with the blood and assimilating the thought. It captured and held in the most magical way, imagination and reason and conviction. To hear his words as they fell from the chambers of his imagery, shot through with the colors of his own soul, and filled with the truth he had to utter, was absolutely delightful. They united hearts by a spell, and made them the speaker's own. Grady had a soul full of music. He used his power as an orator and an editor to play it to the people. He piped in strains high and accents low. He sent it from him in march and waltz, in plantation melody and cathedral hymn, in child's and battle-strain. He sought through his oration and editorial to strike all the notes of the orchestra. There was hidden in the life of Henry W. Grady the detentions and suggestions of a glad literature. It was an original quotation from an eternal source that managed to get itself into the syntax and prosody of orations and editorials, which kindled a new, wide and kindly light in twenty years of solemn time. Never did message from the illimitable sources of thought and life come to men at a more opportune moment. The section which gave Grady birth had been disorganized and dismantled by the conflicts of war. The Southern people were poor and down-hearted, oppressed by the burden of defeat and faced by the complications of untried problems. The sun of the Southern republic, which promised so much in its rising effulgence, had just gone down. The afterglow arising from the sense of honor unsullied, and from the assurance of duty faithfully performed, kept, it is true, the horizon of the sinking Confederacy red for a long time after the echo of the last gun had died away. But the brilliant display of pink bars of cloud, and orange flush of haze, shot into the western sky of the failing Southern republic from the heroism of Jackson and the courage of Lee, and the sacrifice of brave men and the devotion of tender women, could not keep the shadow lines from falling across the pageantry of glorious color.

Around the afterglow of vermilion and purple and green there was a fringe of night which threatened, inch by inch, to close in a curtain of darkness. At a time like this, Grady began to find in the folds of his glowing young life the alphabet of the doctrine of hope. Preliminary lessons from the literature of his mission he began to get. He was to call the attention of the Southern people from the afterglow of the sinking Confederacy, with its sad beauty of reminiscence and departing vision. He had seen the red streaks of a dawn which betokened the interior splendors of a grander day. Up the eastern horizon he saw arising the wondrous foregleams of a great future. Under the stimulus of this light from the frontiers of new time, the letters in his living spirit began to gather themselves into words and the words into sentences, and the sentences to