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_John Boyle O’Reilly, in the “Boston Pilot.”_
“THE South is in tears!” said the sorrowful dispatch from Atlanta on
Monday last; and the grief and the sympathy of the North went freely
southward in response. Next to his own city, indeed, this death strikes
Boston most deeply, for here with us, only a few days ago, he poured
forth the noblest stream of eloquence that ever flowed from his gifted
tongue. It matters not now that many New Englanders, the _Pilot_
included, dissented from his Southern view of the colored question. We
disagreed with the word, but we honored the silver tongue and the heart
of gold beneath it. “He was the most eloquent man,” said the Hon. P. A.
Collins, one who knows what eloquence consists of, “that I ever heard
speak in Boston.”
Since the olden times there has been no more striking illustration of
the power of oratory to appeal to the nation and to make a man famous
among his people than is found in the career of Mr. Grady. Within ten
years he leaped from the position of a modest Georgian editor to that of
the best-known and the greatest orator on this continent. So potent is
the true gift of eloquence when the substructure is recognized as solid
in character and profoundly earnest in purpose.
To Irish-Americans, as to the State that has lost him, the death of Mr.
Grady is a special affliction. He represented in a fine type the
patriotism and the manly quality of a citizen that every Irish-American
ought to keep in spiritual sight. He was a man to be trusted and loved.
He was a proud Georgian and a patriotic American, though his father had
died for “the Lost Cause.” He was, while in Boston, introduced to the
great audience by Colonel Charles H. Taylor as “the matchless orator of
Georgia.” Playfully, and yet half seriously, he accounted for himself
thus: “My father was an Irishman—and my mother was a woman. I come
naturally by my eloquence.”
North or South, it matters not the section—all men must honor such a
character. His brief life reached a high achievement. He was a type of
American to be hailed with delight—courageous, ready of hand and voice,
proudly sentimental yet widely reserved, devoted to his State and loyal
to the Republic, public-spirited as a statesman, and industrious and
frugal as a townsman, and the head of a happy family. His devotion to
his parents and to his wife and children was the last lesson of his
life. In his Boston speech he drew tears from thousands by the unnamed
picture of his father’s death for the bleeding South; from Boston he
went South, insisting on being taken to his home when they told him in
New York that he was dangerously ill. He died surrounded by his
own—mother, wife, and children. Almost his last words to his mother
were: “Father died fighting for the South, and I am happy to die talking
for her.”
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