Henry Grady was a proponent of what came to be called the New South Creed, and this movement was strong in the three decades after the Civil War. Its very title shows that it was intended as a contrast to the Old South that had existed before the war, the Old South of myth as well as reality. Henry Grady was the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and along with other young Southern moderates, he developed a philosophy that was designed to improve the fortunes of the South, to restore its power and prestige, and to expiate some of its guilt over slavery. The creed was also intended to solve the race question so it would never again be the controlling factor in Southern life. The idea of the New South was grandiose and doomed to failure, and it would itself become part of the myth of the South. While the New South movement had as one element the desire to end the race question, in fact many of the men who professed a belief in the development of the black population of the South were actually white supremacists. The failure of the New South movement would result in the institutionalization of the Jim Crow laws that would rule the South until the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the 1950s.
Henry W. Grady did not coin the term New South, but he popularized it in his speeches and his writings for his newspaper. He appeared before the New England Society of New York in 1886 and made a speech that would become something Southern schoolboys for generations would have to commit to memory. He announced at that meeting that the Old South of slavery and secession had disappeared and had been replaced by a new South of union and freedom. This speech was well-received by the national press, and Grady was dubbed the chief spokesperson for the movement. Grady would only live three more years, dying young, but his name would be remembered as having set in motion this movement for a New South. Grady never claimed to have coined the ph...