University of Virginia Library

Introduction

A French philosopher has said that "the romances
of fact are stranger than the romances
of fiction." A close study of the lives of successful
men in all periods of the world's history
will show this to be true. And history is simply
the record of human effort, of the success of individuals
who have done the thinking and the acting,
who have made a pathway for mankind from
barbarism to civilization. No imagination can
conceive a character in which the romantic element
can be compared with that to be found in
the life of every man who has been conspicuous
in the world's thought and effort. The most
successful poets and novelists have drawn upon
the great storehouse of history for materials for
their most successful and lasting work. All else
has perished, or is perishing. And this will continue
to be so while success and failure shall remain
the basis of the heroic and the pathetic in
human life.

Strangely enough, the Southern States have
produced only two men, since the War of the

Rebellion, who have achieved a national reputation.
These two men are Henry W. Grady, of
Georgia, and Booker T. Washington, of Alabama.
The one represented the white South,
with which he was identified by blood and sympathy,
and spoke for it alone, and secured for himself
an audience as wide as the continent, which
has become—in what it stands for rather than in
what it is—the hope and the inspiration of the
oppressed and downtrodden of all lands; and
he was dangerous because he spoke for a part
and not for the whole of the Southern people,
because he contended for a part and not for the
whole truth, as it is related to manhood and
citizenship, and to that Christian charity which
embraces all the children of men. The other represents
the whole South, because he is identified
with the whole South by blood and sympathy, and
he speaks for the whole South, and has secured
for himself an audience as wide as the continent;
and he is a safe and a helpful man because he
speaks for the whole Southern people, because
he contends for the whole and not for a part of
the truth, as it is related to manhood and citizenship,
and to that Christian charity which embraces
all the children of men.

Mr. Grady laid it down as the corner-stone of
his faith, and was content to rest his fame with
posterity upon it, that "the supremacy of the
white race of the South must be maintained forever,

and the domination of the Negro race resisted
at all points and at all hazards, because
the white race is the superior race. This is the
declaration of no new truth; it has abided forever
in the marrow of our bones, and shall run
forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon
hearts."

This sentiment is opposed to Christian philosophy,
and is specifically disavowed by the
Federal Constitution, which does not recognize
the divine right of the Anglo-Saxon race or the
Afro-American race, or any other race comprehended
in our American citizenship; and the life
was shot out of it on a hundred battlefields in
the War of the Rebellion!

Mr. Washington said (in his address at the
Alumni Dinner of Harvard University, June 24,
1896, after having received the honorary degree
of Master of Arts), and he is content to rest his
fame with posterity upon it, that "while we
are thus being tested, I beg of you to remember
that wherever our life touches yours we help or
we hinder. Wherever your life touches ours
you make us stronger or weaker. No member
of your race in any part of the country can harm
the meanest member of mine without the proudest
and bluest blood in Massachusetts being degraded.
When Mississippi commits crime, New
England commits crime, and in so much lowers
the standard of your civilization. There is no

escape,—man drags man down, or man lifts
man up.

"In working out our destiny, while the main
burden and centre of activity must be with us,
we shall need in a large measure, in the years
that are to come, as we have had in the past, the
help, the encouragement, the guidance that the
strong can give the weak. Thus helped, we of
both races in the South soon shall throw off the
shackles of racial and sectional prejudices, and
rise, as Harvard University has risen, and as we
all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance,
narrowness, and selfishness, into that atmosphere,
that pure sunshine, where it will be our highest
ambition to serve man, our brother, regardless of
race or past condition."

Upon another occasion Mr. Washington said:
"I thank God I have grown to the point where I
can sympathize with a white man as much as I
can with a black man, where I can sympathize
with a Southern white man as much as with a
Northern white man." Again: "The black man
who cannot let love and sympathy go out to a
white man is but half free."

The difference between Mr. Grady and Mr.
Washington is to be found in the fact that the one
was an Anglo-Saxon American, and the other an
Afro-American; that the one was born a free
man, and the other a slave; that the one was
educated to believe that God made freedom and

opportunity for His white children alone, the
other that He made them for all His children,—
of Ham and Shem and Japheth, the black and
white and yellow. And so each, according to
his lights, builded,—the one upon sand, the other
upon rock, the one for the present, the other for
posterity!

These two men were born orators of great
power. The one spent his genius and energy
in seeking to clinch the rivets in the chain that
bound the intellect and the soul of two races—
"one as the hand, separate as to the fingers"
—to the blighting prejudices and dogmas of the
dead past, to the decaying carcass of slavery;
while the other spends his genius and energy in
seeking to loosen the rivets in the chain of the
dead past, to unite the whole people for mutual
help and sympathy, to make the freedom of both
races a positive force for power and for good in
our national life,—to heal up the wounds of the
past, that we may be strong as a united people
to enjoy to the fullest extent the destiny which
God, in His mercy, has set as a prize for our high
calling among the nations of the earth,—and
the people of the North and the South and the
West, lend willing ears to the "tidings of great
joy" which it is his privilege to deliver.

And these, two men were born educators. The
one planted a newspaper, which grew and waxed
strong, so that it became as an oracle, speaking

as with authority, and it will bear upon its front
the impress of his genius and of his limitations,
—of his provincialism in the matters of race and
of country,—and remain a disturbing element,
because out of joint with the irresistible philosophy
of human and national progress, for many
years to come; while the other planted an institution
of learning in a rich soil,[1] which has been
and is and will remain a nursery of Christian
love and charity for all the children of men, and
of a patriotism as broad and deep as our Declaration
of Independence, the strongest pronouncement
of human freedom ever made, and as
abiding as the Federal Constitution, upon which
our institutions rest "in the love of man and the
fear of God."

The voice of Henry W. Grady is silent in
death. While he lived, "the proud scion of a
proud race" divided the honors, as the South's
representative orator and educator, with Booker
T. Washington, the humble offspring of a slave
woman who could not call her soul her own.
Fate could go no further in giving vitality and
force to the poet's declaration, that "one touch
of Nature makes the whole world kin," and in
teaching the sublime lesson that—

Mr. Washington still lives; and to-day the
South possesses no voice stronger than his,—
that has the nation for an audience when he uses
it, that is teaching Christian love and sympathy
and national unity with like power and success.
The God that lifted him out of bondage has
made of him a great power for good in the
land. And it is due to the Southern people—to
all the Southern people—to say that they recognize
the native ability and the consecration to service
—the sustaining the weak, and the lifting up
of the fallen—of the man, the tower of strength,
who has taken the place so long and worthily
filled by Frederick Douglass, as "the guide, philosopher,

and friend" of the ten million Afro-American
citizens of the Republic, with whom
his lot is more particularly cast, and to emphasize
the fact that one of the strongest elements
of his strength and influence is the respect and
confidence of the whole Southern people which
he enjoys in such unstinted measure; a respect
and confidence which, added to that of the people
of the North and West, have enabled him to erect
and sustain a lighthouse of knowledge in the
Black Belt of Alabama, whose reflection, whose
pervasive influence, is blinding the eyes of ignorance
and prejudice, so that men may see the
beauty and the wealth that abound in Nature, and
thus intelligently lay hold upon them for their
use and comfort, and that they may see and imbibe
that reverence for the Creator and love of
mankind in which the happiness of the people
and the strength of the nation abide.

It is appropriate to say this much, in submitting
to the reader the collection of some of the
wise thoughts which Mr. Washington has uttered
at various times and places, and which have
been culled, with so much of industry and discrimination
and devotion to the life-work of the
man, by Mrs. Matthews.