Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
Sectional jealousies and angers are the only enemies of the
Union, and those who claim to place the preservation of the
Union above all other duties, ought to be the foremost
forwarders of the fraternity of the American people. They who
love the Union should help to heal its wounds.
Strange spectacle! Noble culmination of a noble life! From the
midst of those charged with hate toward the Union, Henry W.
Grady went forth a minister to plead for love to all its parts.
“Blessed is the peacemaker.”
His voice was for that peace in our country made perpetual by
justice to all and respect for the sacred things of earth. His
voice was for building an American temple of peace, not upon the
quicksands of comparative power, subject to the shift from one
section to the other, but upon the everlasting foundations of
right to all, respect to all, liberties and liberality to all!
Oh, what a cause he had! If successful, unfolded glories of the
Union of future times; the sweet and swelling harmonies of the
ever-increasing choir of free and happy States; the grand ideals
of the venerable fathers all realized, and every bloom of
American hope fruited in happiness, in love, in liberty, in
enduring peace!
And if unsuccessful! If he and those to come must plead in vain
for the unity as well as union of the country, then the dread
doubt whether all peace is to be only preparation for deadly
grapplings; the dread doubt whether, as in England and Scotland,
these feuds are to harry our homes and our hearts for hundreds
of years!
What a cause! and, thank God, what an advocate! It would seem
that our own Southern sun had warmed and sweetened him for the
work. He exactly fitted the culmination and mission of his life.
His noble soul propelled his thoughts. His eloquence rushed from
mountain-side fountains, pure and bold and free. His reasoning
was so blended with appeal that the one took the shape of
stating truths in sequence, and his appeal seemed responsive to
the heart-beats of his listeners.
Thus the cause, the advocate and the occasion met, and once more
in New England a Southern man was applauded as an American
patriot. With the triple levers of his great soul and mind and
tongue he moved two mighty sections, with all their weights of
passions of victory and passions of defeat, with all their
weights of misconceptions and misjudgments. With his hands he
moved these mighty bodies nearer each to the heart of the
other—nearer to that true Union for which the real heart of this
country, in every part of it, beats with the pulses of a devoted
love, never entirely to be stilled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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