Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,382

This is the grave of Henry Grady.

Born in 1850 in Athens, Georgia, Grady grew up in the upper middle class of the old South. His father was a pretty big time merchant and based solely on that fact, was commissioned in major when he committed treason in defense of slavery. Luckily, he was killed at Petersburg. Guess he got what he asked for.

Anyway, despite his father’s death, the family had money and Grady went into writing, as well as debate. He went to the University of Georgia. He then went to the University of Virginia for graduate work, but soon dropped out and returned to Georgia. He became a journalist. He first worked for a paper in Rome (the South sure loved its classical allusions), but it went bankrupt. Then he and some partners started a new paper in Atlanta, the Daily Herald.

In those pages, Grady became the prophet for a different South. Grady’s South was one still based on white supremacy, let’s be perfectly clear. But he was able to tap into a national market about reconciliation that would exclude Blacks from the body politic and would promote business and development. This was already happening by the time Grady published his influential 1874 editorial, coining the term “The New South.” The South was a mess economically. The old plantation economy was never going to return. Cotton prices were in the toilet. The future for Grady was in industrial development and he welcomed northern investors to make their fortunes in the South with southern whites as partners. He was a huge railroad booster already. His editorials and support for industrial development got the attention of the owners of the Atlanta Constitution, the city’s largest paper. They offered Grady a quarter share of the paper (he did have to pay for it) and the chief editor position. He gladly accepted.

Grady made the Constitution a hugely important paper. He was a man of many opinions and he expressed them openly in the editorial pages. That of course included industrial development and white supremacy, but also included temperance, the cause of Confederate veteran care, and the need for things such as libraries. Grady was certainly not a Republican, but a lot of these positions made northern Republicans pretty comfortable in seeing him as a partner for growth. But the other reason they were comfortable with Grady is that they too mostly didn’t care about Black people.

One of the biggest myths about the North in the Civil War is that it was pro-Black. It was very much not. Yes, there were real abolitionists and they should be celebrated. But for most Republicans, the problem with slavery was not how it affected Black people, about which they didn’t care much. It’s how it affected white people. Some of that changed upon actually seeing slavery, but it’s always worth remembering that until just a couple months before the election, Lincoln thought he would lose to the race-baiting Democrats, even though the entire South had seceded. So we have to be careful to temper the idea that there was much in the way of deep support for Black rights after the war. The actions of Andrew Johnson, the Black Codes, and the temerity of the South to send Alexander Stephens back to Congress was enough to create space for action for a few years. But by the time Grady wrote his editorial in 1874, Democrats were about to retake Congress and even Grant had basically given up on enforcing Black rights. There just wasn’t any political interest in Black rights among the white North by this time.

So when Grady laughed at lynchings in his editorials, his potential northern partners could handwave that away. They just didn’t care. Now, Grady wasn’t generally trafficking in race-baiting. No, that wouldn’t do. It was a general indifference that northerners wanted to hear. It was claiming that in fact southern Black people were happy and contented. That they were good workers. That they were cheap, pliant labor. That whites treated them well. Of course the reality was sharecropping, convict labor, dispossession. But whites in neither part of the country cared.

Rather, for Grady, the South was the perfect place, the truest arena of American democracy. To use his own words, “The new South presents a perfect democracy…; a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace; and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age.”

Meanwhile, Grady was also very active in Georgia Democratic Party poltiics, heading the so-called Atlanta Ring, a group of pro-industry Democrats who sought control over the state and policies that would promote the city of Atlanta. They were pretty successful at this, got their ally Joseph Brown elected to the Senate in 1880 and worked hard to promoter their kind of man as governor too.

Grady was a sickly guy though. In 1889, in response to a congressional bill that would allow for federal intervention in elections where the South had not let Blacks vote (it died in the Senate), Grady decided to travel north to speak against it. He had a sympathetic audience wherever he went. Again, while there were northerners who still believed in Black rights, there weren’t that many of them and they were largely older anyway by this time. Grady’s speeches were all about white supremacy uniting the nation. He claimed, correctly, that northern and southern whites had already united to create a White Man’s Nation, first by getting rid of Indians and then through the Chinese Exclusion Act. So, he argued, why would the North break this united white supremacy in favor of Black people? Plenty in Boston supported this case, even that old abolitionist city, where if there was a real center of pro-Black whites, it was there.

However, the already ill Grady caught pneumonia in Boston and died shortly after returning to Georgia. He was 39 years old.

This is case where I think even had he lived another thirty years, the story wouldn’t be too different because in 1889, the nation was really just consolidating Jim Crow and there would not be any meaningful white support for Black Americans for a very, very long time to come.

Henry Grady is buried in Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. In 2020, a protestor vandalized the grave of this racist.

If you would like this series to visit other figures associated with the so-called New South, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Hathaway Edmonds is in Baltimore and William Henry Belk is in Charlotte. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.