The Sunday morning news. [volume] (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1886-1891, 1889-12-01
The New South.

Once again we turn to the New York
Ledger to comment on an important
contribution to the thought and in
formation of the day. Henry w.
Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Con-
Stitttioaa is writing for it series of
papers upon the New South, no less
remarkable for their richness of in
formation and strength OF portrayal
than for that clearness and beauty of
style which, illustrated in spoken
words, have won for the writer the
soubriquet of the silver tongued.n
1t is needless to say that Mr.. Grady's
papers are written in strong South
ern spirit; equally needless to state
that they arc at the same time per-
fectly loyal in tone to the Federal
Union. He opens with glance at the
South of -bellum days, and the
picture he shows is strangely different
from that which we gather from the
somewhat bitter pages of Horace
Greeley, not to speak of the night
mare romances of Mrs. Harriet Beecher
Stowe At this time, it is possible to
see that there is, at least, as much his
toric truth in Mr.. Grady's view as in
that of the controversial literature of
the abolition epoch. But Mr.. Grady
frankly admits the evil of slavery, and
we infer that he considers it's disap-
pearance as an institution an advan-
tage and not detriment to the South.
But his one swift look at the time
before the war bears no relation to the
main design of his essays. We only
allude to it in passing as a wholesome
antidote to popular error, a corrective
which Northern men will receive with
confidence from one whose temper
they have come to admire and whose
truth and honor they know and can
therefore trust. The main interest of
the articles springs up with the ac-
count of the state of things in the
slave states as the tide of Union sue
cess swept away their wealth, their
industry and their institutions. The
desolation, the detection, the poverty,
the stagnation which were coincident
with the cessation of actual hostilities
constitute situation as gloomy as
any that has ever darkened country
under the yoke of foreign conquest.
In the midst of this despond, how
ever, the spirit of the people re-
NAMED indomitable, and the same
courage and energy which nerved the
soldiers of the South to fight against
overwhelming odds inspirited her citi-
zens to battle with discouragements
and difficulties of well-nigh insuper-
able magnitude. 1t is not an eXag
geration when Grady says the energy
and elasticity displayed by the South
in this crisis of her history surpassed
even that of the gallant French re-
public after the disasters of Sedan
and Metz and Paris.
Mr.. Grady takes especial pride in
the fact that the great work of COM
mercial and industrial reconstruction
was effected by the people of the
South themselves. He takes Atlanta
as a special illustration. He says
1t is a typical Southern city. None is more
generally thought to lie so largely the result OF
Northern capital and enterprise. And yet the
census of 1850 shows that OF Ass people in
Fulton county (of which Atlanta is the capitaD
less than 900 were of Northern birth. This will
astouud those Northern men, who, amazed at
Atlanta's simple and comprehensive growth,
have declared that the South never had built and
never could build such a city, but that it was
Yankee city in the South.
Mr.. Grady particularlzes. He gives
from the census the figures for the