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(biographical sketch from "The Case of the South Against the North")

"I was born in Duplin County, North Carolina on the 10th of

October 1831, my great-great-grandfather having come over from

Ireland in 1739. By intermarriages his blood in my veins is mingled with

that of the Whitfields, the Bryans and the Sloans. The John Grady who

was killed at the battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge was his son.

My father, Alexander Outlaw Grady (pronounced “Graddy”) owned,

first and last, twenty-five or thirty slaves; and, during my childhood the

little Negroes were my play mates. As I grew up I hunted and fished

with the Negro boys, and worked with them in the fields and woods

except during about three months each winter when I attended the “old field schools.” As I approached my manhood my father and his neighbors employed a classical scholar to teach their children ten months in each year; and in 1851 I became a pupil of Rev. James M. Sprunt, a Scotchman,

who taught in the Grove Academy in Kenansville.

In September 1853, I entered the University of North Carolina where

I received the degree of A.B. in June 1857. Then I returned to Kenansville and taught two years with my old Master, at the end of which period I

was chosen Professor of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences in Austin College, then located at Huntsville, Texas. There I began work in the summer of 1859, and taught till the war caused the Institution to suspend operations. Soon afterwards typhoid fever prostrated me and unfitted me for military service till May 1862.

Then I enlisted in a cavalry company which became K (troop) of the 25th Regiment; but in a few months General Hindman dismounted us, and we served on foot till the close of the war. On January 11, 1863 we were captured at Arkansas Post---about 3,000 of us, and 45,000 of the

enemy with 13 gunboats---and carried to Camp Butler, near Springfield, Illinois. Having been exchanged about the middle of April 1863, we were sent to Bragg’s army which was then in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and in this army we served until the war ended. On the morning of the battle of Bentonville I went to Peace Institute Hospital in Raleigh, where typhoid fever kept me till May 2, 1865.

After the war I taught school, farmed, served as Justice of the Peace,

and was County Superintendent of Schools in Sampson and Duplin Counties till 1891. From that year till 1895 I served as a Representative

in Congress; and after that I returned to farming. But during the last four years I have been in Clinton teaching and pursuing literary work."

B.F. Grady

Clinton, NC, May 1906

Purchase reprints of B.F. Grady's two fine books on American history at www.confederatereprint.com, click on "Northen Rebellion."

His book, "The Case of the South Against the North" was originally published in 1899; and his "The South's Burden, The Curse of Sectionalism" was published in 1906.