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_From the “Louisville Courier-Journal.”_
HENRY W. GRADY died at his home in Atlanta yesterday. There is that in
the very announcement which is heart-breaking. He was the rose 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 gifts, 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 brilliant development and broad
usefulness all was prepared, is almost as much a public calamity as it
is a private grief. We tender to his family, and to Georgia, whom he
loved with the adoration of a true son for a mother, the homage of our
respectful and profound sympathy.
Mr. Grady became a writer for the _Courier-Journal_ 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. He was not long with us. 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 fame for himself, and an
audience of his own. Here he carried the policy with which, in the
columns of the _Courier-Journal_, 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, at once rhetorically fine and rarely solid, and was coming home
to be welcomed by his people with open arms, when the Messenger of Death
summoned him to his last account. The tidings of the fatal termination
of his disorder are startling in their suddenness and unexpectedness,
and will be received North and South with sorrow deep and sincere, and
far beyond the bounds compassed by his personality.
The _Courier-Journal_ was 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. It is with poignant regret that we record his death. 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.
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