Page images
PDF
EPUB

weakness, he became the center of a nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the winepress alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet, he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the Divine decree.

6. As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive stifling air, from its homelessness and hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices.

7. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars.

8. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting scul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world, he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.

I. Definitions: (1) pre mo ni'tion, previous warning; (2) frěn'zỹ, madness; (2) wan'tỏn ness, recklessness; (2) quail, flinch, shrink; (3) rẻ lín'quish ment, the act of giving up; (3) lăn'guor (-gwêr), weakness; (3) său'dẽr ing, parting; (5) en shrined', preserved or cherished as something sacred; (5) dẻ mō'nĬ ăe, pertaining to a demon, or evil spirit; (5) as sǎs'sin, one who kills or attempts to kill by surprise or secret assault; (6) stī'fling, choking; (7) wạn, pale; (7) wist'ful lỹ, longingly ; (8) răpt, enraptured.

II. Note: On the morning of July 2, 1881, President Garfield, while standing in the railroad station in Washington, was shot by an assassin. After hovering between life and death for more than two months, he died on the 19th of September.

XXXVIII. THE NEW SOUTH.

BY HENRY W. GRADY.

Henry Woodfen Grady, journalist, was born in Athens, Ga., in 1851, and died in Atlanta, Ga., in 1889. In 1886, he delivered before The New England Society an address on The New South, which marked him as a most eloquent orator. This address caused him to be especially beloved in the South and highly esteemed in the North.

1. A master hand has drawn for you the picture of your returning armies. You have been told 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?

2. Let me picture to you the foot-sore 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, halfstarved, 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.

[ocr errors]

3. What does he find let me ask you 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.

4. 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.

5. But what is the sum of our work? We have found out that 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.

The

6. The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. 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.

7. The South has nothing for which to apologize. 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

[ocr errors]

I shall send my children's children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood.

8. 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 a 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.

9. Now, what answer has New England to this message? 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, be verified in its fullest sense when he said:

66

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."

« PreviousContinue »