United States Congressman Benjamin Franklin Grady 

One of the most distinguished sons of Duplin County is Benjamin Franklin 
Grady (pronounced “Graddy”), an accomplished author and one who served his 
region as an educator,  Justice of the Peace, Superintendent of Public 
Instruction, and United States Congressman from 1891-1895. 

Grady was born on October 10, 1831 near Serecta in the Albertson Township, 
the descendant of a great-great-grandfather who emigrated from Ireland in 1739.
He was the oldest son of Alexander Outlaw and Anne Sloan Grady.

The Grady and O’Grady’s genealogy is traced back to Ireland in the 4th Century, 
and in 1365 a John O’Grady is found as Arch Deacon of Cashell; in 1405 another
John O’Grady was Bishop of Elfin---the cathedral founded by St. Patrick in the
mid-5th Century. A Standish O’Grady was appointed Attorney General of Ireland 
in May, 1803 and later served as a Justice and Chief Baron of the Exchequer. 

The first Grady to settle in Duplin County was John, who acquired fertile land 
at the fork of the Northeast River and Burncoat Creek in 1739. He was to marry
Mary Whitfield. Two sons of this union, John and Alexander, were to fight at 
the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in 1776; the former losing his life there 
and for whom the lone monument memorializes. 

After the Revolution, Alexander Outlaw Grady and wife Nancy Thomas lived on 
the family farm, and his son Henry, referred to by the Grady family as “Lord 
Harry,” married Elizabeth Outlaw on January 6, 1799. This last marriage 
produced Alexander Outlaw Grady on February 17, 1800. 

Alexander would marry Anne Sloan, daughter of Gibson and Rachel (Bryan) Sloan 
in 1830, and the following year would witness the birth of Benjamin Franklin 
Grady.  

Grady's Early Years:

Alexander Outlaw Grady was a slaveowner with “twenty-five or thirty slaves” 
who were Grady’s playmates and friends during his childhood, and Grady related
that “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.” He states that “My boyhood days were spent 
on the farm, where I worked with the slaves during nine months of the year…” 

As was common in antebellum North Carolina, his father and neighbors employed 
a classical scholar to teach their children ten months in each year from which
Grady. benefited, and in 1851 he was under the instruction of Rev. James M. 
Sprunt who taught in the Grove Academy in Kenansville.

Grady entered the University of North Carolina in September 1853 and graduated
four years later, returning to Kenansville to teach two years at the Grove 
Academy under Dr. Sprunt’s supervision. He obtained the position of professor 
of mathematics and natural sciences at Austin College, located at Huntsville, 
Texas, beginning work there in the summer of 1859. Grady continued in his 
position until classes were suspended by impending invasion in 1861, and in 
his words, “soon afterwards typhoid fever prostrated me and unfitted me for 
military service until May 1862.”  Grady married Olivia Hamilton (a grandniece
of Alexander Hamilton) of Huntsville, Texas and they had one son named 
Franklin. 

Olivia passed away in 1863 whilst Grady was a prisoner of war, and he later 
married Mary Charlotte Bizzell of Clinton, North Carolina in 1870. This 
marriage produced nine children. 

In his own brief biography in 1898, Grady writes of his father’s prevalent 
political beliefs: 

“By intermarriages his (my great-great-grandfather’s) blood in my veins was 
intermingled with that of the Whitfield’s, Bryans, Outlaws and Sloans. All 
hese families were Whigs during the Revolutionary War; and they were advocates
of “strong government” in 1788-1789. Most of them, however, if not at all, 
gradually drifted toward Jefferson’s exposition of the powers of the Federal 
Government; and my father, Alexander Outlaw Grady, became a disciple of John 
C. Calhoun in 1832-1833, after hearing that statesman defend his position 
before the General Assembly of North Carolina, of which my father was a member. 
In 1860-1861, he was a secessionist.”


Military Service:

Grady enlisted in a local unit which eventually became K (troop) of the 25th 
Texas Cavalry Regiment under General (Thomas C.) Hindman, but was soon 
dismounted leaving him to serve as infantry. He served as an Orderly Sergeant 
during the war and twice refused the captaincy of a company in order to carry 
a rifle, often detailed as a sharpshooter. 

Grady reported of his capture by Northern forces:

“On January 11, 1863 we were captured at Arkansas Post---about 3000 of us and 
45,000 of the enemy with 13 gunboats---and carried to Camp Butler near 
Springfield, Illinois.” 

Grady wrote of the inhuman treatment at the hands of his Northern captors, 
writing that Southern prisoners were shot at by guards for refusing to remove 
their caps in the presence of Northern officers, robbed of any personal 
effects and exposure to the cold winters with only a blanket as protection. 

In the middle of April 1863 Grady was freed in an exchange for Northern 
prisoners held by Southern forces, and sent to General Braxton Bragg’s 
command near Tullahoma, Tennessee. He fought with Bragg’s army as it moved to 
North Carolina near the end of the war, serving in (General Hiram B.)
Granbury’s Brigade of (General Patrick R.) Cleburne’s Division in (General 
William) Hardee’s Corps. Grady was lucky to survive the war in Cleburne’s 
division as every officer above lieutenant rank had been killed by the end of 
the war, including Cleburne and Granbury. 

He participated in all the engagements of his brigade (excepting Nashville 
and Bentonville): Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, New Hope Church, and 
Atlanta; and witnessed the deaths of his commanders Granbury and Cleburne at 
the Battle of Franklin in November of 1864. 

Grady writes: “On the 19th of March 1865, while the cannon were booming at 
Bentonville, and my command preparing to leave the railroad for the scene of 
action, I was sent by our surgeons to Peace Institute Hospital in Raleigh 
where typhoid fever kept me till May 2.”

Grady would lose two brothers in the war, one killed at Bristoe Station and 
the other at Snicker’s Gap; his remaining brother would lose a hand.  He was 
himself wounded twice, suffering a hand wound and one to the face that left a 
deep scar near the right eye.

Grady describes his view of the South’s war for independence in the following 
passage from his “Case of the South Against the North”:  

“I did not agree with my father regarding the policy of nullification or of 
secession. While I subscribed to the doctrine that no State in the Union had 
ever relinquished the right to be its own judge of the mode of measure or 
redress whenever its welfare and it peace should be put in jeopardy by the 
other States, acting separately or jointly, 

I doubted whether the nullification of a Federal act was consistent with the 
obligations imposed by the “firm league of friendship” with the unoffending 
States, if any….”

“As to secession, I believed it to be the best for the Southern States to 
remain in the Union, and trust to time and the good sense of the intelligent 
people of the Northern States for justice to themselves and their children. 
This hope was strengthened by the circumstance that the interests of the 
expanding West being identical with those of the South, the time was not far 
distant when that section would join the South in the struggle for riddance 
of the burdens imposed by the shipping, fishing, commercial and manufacturing 
States of the East.” 

Grady concludes by stating:

“this was the stand I took and held until Mr. Lincoln compelled me to choose
whether I would help him to trample on the Constitution and crush South 
Carolina, or help South Carolina defend the principles of the Constitution 
and her own “sovereignty, freedom and independence.” I went with South 
Carolina as my forefathers went with Massachusetts when “our Royal Sovereign” 
threatened to crush her.” 

 Postwar Life and Teaching:

“without money, without decent clothing, and suffering from the effects of 
the fever, I went to my father’s (home) and obtaining employment in the 
neighborhood at my chosen profession, I waited on him in his last sickness 
and saw him die of a broken heart in the year 1867, having survived the war 
and lived to see the dark shadow of “reconstruction” and government by the 
ex-slaves hovering over his beloved Southland.”  

Thus Grady returned to his hometown of “Chocolate” at war’s end.  

His father would die of a broken heart, the family servants had scattered and 
the farm was in ruinous condition.

He returned to education and after organizing a school in Moseley Hall (today 
LaGrange) and teaching for two years, he established the Clinton Male Academy 
with fellow teacher Murdock McLeod at nearby Clinton (Sampson County). There 
Grady taught until failing health in 1878 forced him to return to his Duplin 
County family homestead to farm where he, his father, grandfather, and 
great-grandfather were born. 

Grady continued to teach at his home, and provided instruction for young men 
unable to attend the university; and additionally conducting Sunday school at 
Sutton’s Branch School House. In 1867 he published a school textbook entitled 
“An Agricultural Catechism,” and would go on to write two more books at the 
end of the century. 



Public Service:

The mid-1870’s would see Grady begin a long career of public-service beginning
with Justice of the Peace (1878-1889); appointed a Trustee of the 
re-established University of North Carolina in 1874 (serving until 1891 when 
congressional duties limited his time); and elected Superintendent of Public 
Instruction for Duplin County in 1881, serving in that capacity for eight 
years. While serving as Superintendent, brother Stephen Miller Grady held the 
post of Chairman of the Board of Education as both advanced the cause of 
education in Duplin County.

Grady was elected twice as a United States Representative to Congress from the
Third District (Democrat), serving in Washington City from March 1891 to 
March 1895 in the 52nd and 53rd Congresses. He was known by his congressional 
colleagues as “the encyclopedia as his mind remembered everything. He 
campaigned for repeal of the Sherman Act of 1890, writing the New York Times 
on June 11, 1893 from Wallace, North Carolina: 

“I prefer a cheap money of our own. I will vote to repeal the Sherman law 
with a free coinage substitute and a tax on State banks. Let the people 
rather than the Government control money volume.” 

Benjamin Franklin Grady held political views consistent with his North 
Carolina roots, especially regarding the War Between the States.  In May 1894 
while serving as a US Representative he penned a response to a Pennsylvanian 
in which he reflected upon the dismal outcome of that war. He condemned the 
“cranks, fanatics and unscrupulous tyrants” who were in national political 
power and regarded his own State of North Carolina as a conquered province of 
the victorious North. He saw the unbridled military power of the Washington 
government unleashed during the War as dangerous; and verbally attacked the 
“advocates of imperialism” who viewed the globe as their own.  

His viewpoint on the War Between the States as this: “the cause of the South 
was the cause of Constitutional government, the cause of government regulated 
by law, and the cause of honesty and fidelity in public servants. No nobler 
cause did ever man fight for!”

Grady was wary of politicians and government, and saw that “Extravagance is 
almost unavoidable when the method of taxation enables the Legislature to lay 
unperceived burdens on the shoulders of the taxpayers.” He saw too the dangers
of unrestrained democracy and demogogues as: “written constitutions present 
no effective barrier to the avarice of classes, the ambition of individuals, 
the schemes of party, or the machination of fanatics; and so long as the mass 
of the people are unable to understand the structure and administration of 
their Government, they will continue to be dupes of callow statesmen and 
professional office-seekers, and victims of misgovernment."

He looked to future generations of Americans to recognize misgovernment and 
to strive for the vision of the Founders by stating: 

“We cannot retrace our steps or right the wrongs of the past; but it is not 
too much to hope that a more enlightened generation  now entering upon the 
duties of guarding themselves and their posterity from recurrences of the 
mistakes of the past, may strive to restore and vivify the principles on 
which alone any just government can be founded, and by reestablishing the 
system of governments in and between these States which our fathers hoped 
would be “indestructible, “insure domestic tranquility” and “secure the 
blessings of liberty” to themselves and their posterity.” 


Return to Teaching:

In 1899 Grady established the Turkey Academy (in Turkey, NC) with son Henry 
Alexander who had studied law at the University of North Carolina. 

Since 1896 Henry had been working as a law clerk with his half-brother 
Franklin, an attorney in New York City, who had earned a law degree at 
Georgetown University. 

In 1900, Henry would leave the Academy in the summer of 1900 to pursue a 
short law course at the University of North Carolina, and being licensed to 
practice by the Supreme Court in September 1900. For three years he was a 
member of the firm Faison & Grady of Clinton, his partner being the well-known
Henry Faison. He afterward became a partner of Archie McLean Graham, a 
connection that was maintained for twenty years. In 1922 he was elected to 
the bench of the County Court in Sampson County and continued to serve in 
that capacity until January 1, 1939, when he retired and under law became 
emergency judge of the Superior Court for life.

After Henry Alexander’s departure, Grady would spend his last years “teaching 
and pursuing literary work.” His literary retirement gave him time to write 
two exceptional books, the first published in 1899 entitled “The Case of the 
South Against the North; and the second published in 1906, “The South’s 
Burden.” Both are articulate and well-reasoned Constitutional arguments 
regarding the Southern States struggle for independence from 1861-1865. They 
are currently reprinted and available through www.confederatereprint.com.

Benjamin Franklin Grady died on the 6th of March, 1914 and is buried in the 
Clinton Cemetery.

Grady’s son Henry Alexander went on to legal success as mentioned above, and 
the other siblings were Cleburne; James B.; Stephen S.; Benjamin; Louis D.; 
Lessie R.; Mary Eva; and Anna B. Grady.

It is said that Benjamin Franklin Grady was a lover of literature and: 

“as scholarly a man as ever lived (and a) first class man in Greek, Latin, 
French, and mathematics at the university, a born teacher, (and) conveyed to 
his son(s) his knowledge in such a way the son’s education is equal to that 
of any college graduate.”  

After his death, the Sillers Chapter of the United Daughters of the 
Confederacy in Clinton wrote the following about Grady in their periodical, 
the Southern Cross: 

“Franklin, as he was called by the family, attended the old field schools and 
was prepared for College by the Rev. James Sprunt. Among his classmates were 
Colonel Thomas S. Kenan, Judge 

A.C. Avery, Major Robert Bingham, Dr. D. McL. Graham, Captain John Dugger, 
Honorable John Graham, and many others of like kind, who have helped to make 
history honorable in North Carolina.

Two of his brothers had been killed in the war, one at Bristoe Station and 
one at Snicker’s Gap; while the remaining brother had lost the use of a hand. 
He saw that it was necessary to build up a New South upon the ruins of the 
past. 

Teaching was his chosen profession and he believed that in the education of 
the people lay the salvation of the country.”





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