310 ChapTEr 1 3 | a Gilded aGe | period Six 18 65 –1898p raCTICINg historical Thinking
Identify: What is Grady’s main argument?
Analyze: Who is Grady’s audience?
Evaluate: What are the political and economic motivations for reintroducing
Southern workers into the Northern economy?p raCTICINg historical Thinking
Identify: What are the similarities and differences between these two images?
Analyze: Which of the two images presents a more optimistic view of America’s
future? Why?
Evaluate: To what extent did greater mobility foster a new national identity? Use
your textbook to help you prepare your response.Document 13.2 HENRy GRady, “The New South”
1886Henry Grady (1850–1889) was a journalist and witness to the Civil War in the South. His
plan for the South’s reemergence from the war was modeled on the North’s industrial
economy. He described his plan in a speech in 1886 at a meeting of the New England
Society in New York City.But what is the sum of our work? We have found out that in the general summing up
the free negro counts more than he did as a slave. We have planted the school house
on the hill top and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities
in the place of theories and put business above politics. We have challenged your
spinners in Massachusetts and your iron makers in Pennsylvania. We have learned
that the $400,000,000 annually received from our cotton crop will make us rich,
when the supplies that make it are home-raised. We have reduced the commercial
rate of interest from 24 to 6 per cent. and are floating 4 per cent. bonds. We have
learned that one Northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners and have smoothed
the path to the southward, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon’s line used
to be, and hung our latch string out to you and yours. We have reached the point that
marks perfect harmony in every household, when the husband confesses that the
pies which his own wife cooks are as good as those his mother used to bake; and we
admit that the sun shines as brightly and the moon as softly as it did “before the war.”
We have established thrift in city and country. We have fallen in love with work....Henry Grady, “The New South,” The Critic (ed. Jeanette Leonard Gilder and Joseph Benson
Gilder) 10, no. 157 (1887): 10.TopIC I | the New economy 31114_STA_2012_ch13_307-326.indd 310 31/03/15 4:11 PM