Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I’m saving every cent I earn,” Jule told Gabriel one humid afternoon as they lingered on the bluff above the Mississippi, gazing across the churning expanse of muddy water to the Illinois shore, postponing as long as they could their return to White Haven. “I’ll buy our freedom. You can be a minister in a church and I’ll dress hair, and we’ll keep a little house all our own.”

  Gabriel kept his gaze fixed on the brown ribbon of water winding ever southward. “That’s a nice dream.”

  “Miss Julia’s dreams sometimes come true. Why not mine?”

  “Jule—” He sighed, shifted the reins to one hand, and rested his elbow on his knee. “It’ll take years to save enough to buy freedom for even one of us, and that’s if the old master agree.”

  “Then I’ll buy my own freedom first. Once I can keep all my earnings, I’ll save up faster.” Jule studied him. “You know I mean it when I say I’m not bringing any babies into slavery.”

  “Then we better make sure you don’t get any babies anytime soon.”

  Jule frowned and looked away. “Maybe Miss Julia will speak to the old master for me, make him set a fair price.”

  “Or maybe she could get him to set you free in his will.” The forced agreeability in Gabriel’s voice told her he was saying so only to please her. “She might do it. She likes you.”

  Neither of them mentioned that Julia might like her too much to let her go.

  With a rueful glance at the sun in its declination, Gabriel chirruped to the horses and turned the wagon toward White Haven.

  Julia liked her, Jule reminded herself resolutely, and her new husband’s people were abolitionists. The longer they were married, the longer Julia lived in a free state, the more likely it was that Julia would adopt their ways.

  Julia had been away so long in the North, surely she had come to see slavery for the evil it was.

  • • •

  Julia and Ulys spent their first winter as husband and wife at Madison Barracks in Sackets Harbor, a bleak, remote outpost on Lake Ontario in New York State. When spring came and the ice broke up, they moved on to Detroit, where Ulys assumed the post of regimental quartermaster. Julia quickly became popular among the officers of the garrison for her excellent dancing and lovely singing voice, and her generous, friendly ways made her a favorite among their wives and children. Though Ulys was not happy shifting papers, ordering supplies, and supervising commissary affairs, he was proud to serve his country.

  Less than a year after their arrival in Detroit, the couple discovered that by late spring they would become a family of three.

  As the months of waiting and preparation passed, they debated where their child should be born. Julia dreaded to leave Ulys, but she knew that when her labor began, she would want Mamma, her sisters, and Jule close by. And so in early spring she and Ulys parted at the train station in Detroit with a kiss and a promise that they would be reunited as soon as Julia and the baby were strong enough to travel.

  The joy of her long-awaited reunion with her family eased the unhappiness of her separation from Ulys. Papa and Mamma, her siblings and friends, White Haven itself—so familiar, so beloved, changed slightly with the passing of the years but still somehow exactly as she remembered.

  Jule’s welcome sounded the only discordant note to her homecoming. She had greeted Julia with a warm smile and kind inquiries about her health, but there was a new aloofness to her manner, as if her mistress’s needs commanded only a portion of her attention. She had blossomed into new beauty in Julia’s absence too. Her skin had always been a lovely ginger color, but it had become deeper and richer and seemed to glow from within. She was much prettier than her mistress, Julia privately admitted, or she would have been if not for the firm set to her jaw, the deep crease of worry between her brows, and the guarded look in her eye.

  That first night, after Jule helped Julia ease carefully into bed, she fluffed the pillows, straightened, and fixed Julia with a determined gaze. “Since you been gone, I ain’t been sleeping at the foot of your bed.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to,” said Julia, although she had not given the matter any thought. “Mamma or my sisters wanted you closer to them, I assume.”

  “No, Miss Julia,” said Jule. “I stay nights in the hayloft with Gabriel now.”

  “Oh, I see.” Julia felt faintly embarrassed by all that the brief admission implied, but since Mamma had apparently not forbidden it, it was not for Julia to punish the indiscretion. “You may remain there for now, if you prefer, but after the baby comes, I’ll need you back in the house.”

  “You going to hire a wet nurse?”

  Of course. That explained Jule’s reticent, almost defiant manner. She worried that she would be replaced. “No, Jule,” she said, smiling reassuringly. “I intend to nurse my child myself, and you can help me with everything else.”

  Jule nodded, but curiously, she seemed no less ill at ease. “Can I ask you, Miss Julia,” she ventured, “what Northern ladies do for help?”

  “They hire servants, German and Irish immigrants, mostly,” Julia replied. “I sympathize with them. I don’t know how they manage.”

  “Them and they,” echoed Jule. “You mean the servants or—”

  “I mean the employers, of course,” Julia interrupted. “The Irish and German girls welcome the work, and they’re fortunate to have it. But their employers—let’s just say they’re obliged to have lower expectations for their households than we do here.” She sighed and settled back against the pillow. “Nothing makes you appreciate the customs of home more than spending time away.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Miss Julia.” Jule’s voice was oddly flat. “You need anything else tonight?”

  Julia did not, so she reminded Jule of a few chores for the morning and dismissed her. Bemused, Julia put out the light, wondering why Jule had not seemed more pleased by the tacit compliment.

  Nevertheless, Jule remained the same dear, faithful servant she had known almost all her life, and Julia was so glad to see her that she could forgive her a few small, unwitting slights.

  • • •

  On May 30, 1850, Julia gave birth to a strong, healthy son. As she and Ulys had agreed, she named the robust little boy Frederick Dent Grant, in honor of her father. “Someday this boy will be a general,” Papa proudly declared, which Julia decided to take as a compliment to Ulys.

  Little Fred was almost a year old when Ulys was assigned once more to Sackets Harbor. There Fred grew into a lively toddler and the adored mascot of the regiment—and Julia discovered that their little family would welcome a younger brother or sister for him in the summer of 1852. Happily, Julia dreamed and prepared, but in springtime, official orders from Washington threw all her plans awry. Ulys’s regiment had been reassigned to Columbia Barracks, Oregon Territory.

  One spring afternoon while Fred napped, Julia pulled out the trunk holding his old baby clothes. Ulys, home early from work, found her sitting on the parlor floor beside the trunk, inspecting each garment to see what could be packed for the journey to Oregon Territory for the new baby. “Julia,” he scolded gently, hurrying over to help her into a chair, whether she liked it or not. “You shouldn’t be sitting on the floor in your condition.”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him, laughing. “Indian mothers-to-be sit on the bare ground when they aren’t on horseback, or so you’ve said.” Something about the set of his mouth, wariness or determination or both, chased away her amusement. “What’s wrong, Ulys?”

  He sat down in the chair beside her. “Julia, I’ve decided that it would be unwise for you to come with me in your condition.”

  Her heart thumped. “What do you mean? I’m perfectly healthy.”

  “You’re with child.”

  “Yes, I know.” A trifle angrily, she gestured to her unmistakably rounded abdomen. “I recognize the symptoms from last time.”r />
  “Julia, darling.” He reached for her hand. “The doctor agrees that you shouldn’t hazard such a long and dangerous voyage.”

  “Many of the officers’ wives are going, and some are taking their children,” she protested. “Mrs. Gore. Mrs. Wallen. Most of my friends—”

  “None of them are a few weeks away from being delivered of a child.”

  “You promised we would never be parted again. We promised each other.”

  “Yes, but now we have your life and Fred’s and the baby’s to consider.” Gently he touched her cheek. “It’s too great a risk.”

  “I know,” she admitted, fighting back tears. For weeks she had worried over what would become of her and the child if her pains came upon her aboard ship or, worse yet, as they were crossing the Isthmus of Panama. “You’re right. It would be best for the baby and a great comfort to me to be among family when I face my ordeal.” Then she faced him squarely so he could not mistake her resolve. “After the baby is born and we’re both well and strong, I want to join you, wherever you may be.”

  Ulys regarded her for a long moment in silence. “If you have the baby before the regiment departs for California, I’ll come for you and the children, and we’ll sail from New York together.”

  Julia knew he would offer her no more than that, and so she agreed. Within a week, she and Fred left to join Ulys’s family in Bethel.

  On July 5, Ulys departed Governors Island in New York with his regiment aboard the Ohio. Less than a fortnight later, with Hannah supervising and Ulys’s sisters tending to her every need, Julia gave birth to a vigorous, red-faced little boy, Ulysses Simpson Grant Jr., who had his father’s wide brow and regular features, but was more like a Dent in his expressiveness.

  Julia held him in her arms and kissed him, and wept that Ulys was not there to marvel at his sweet perfection.

  • • •

  Julia soon learned that Ulys had been wise to discourage her from accompanying him to California. Against the regimental physician’s warnings, the soldiers attempted to cross the Isthmus of Panama in the midst of a cholera epidemic, and by the time Ulys’s namesake took his first breath, nearly a third of his comrades had perished and had been laid to rest in the jungle.

  “You would have been so proud to see your husband rally the men through their trials, although I am grateful you were not there to suffer with us,” wrote Mrs. Gore, Julia’s newly widowed friend, her distress evident in the broken, staccato strokes of her pen. “He looked after the women and children most solicitously through every calamity, transporting people and goods across the treacherous Isthmus, helping Dr. Tripler with the afflicted, attending to the burials—all manner of horrific duties fell to him, and he bore them all with a saint’s patience and a soldier’s courage.”

  “Saint Ulys,” Julia murmured as she folded the letter and put it away, the stories of his valor warming a heart chilled from loneliness and worry.

  After a few weeks with the Grants in Bethel, Julia had recovered enough to travel home to White Haven. Ulys had at long last arrived safely at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, and it was there he received the tracing she had made of the baby’s tiny hand on paper. “He looks like you,” she had written. “He will be as handsome and strong as you, but not, I think, even half as reticent, if his current habits remain true.”

  Letters arrived from Ulys in nearly every post. He was relieved to know that she had recovered from her ordeal, and that the child was a boy, and that she had named him Ulysses.

  “Little Buckeye,” friends and neighbors would coo as they bent to kiss the baby’s soft cheek, or “Buckie,” they would murmur tenderly as he wrapped his fist around their fingertips. Eventually, despite Julia’s gentle protests, more people called him Buckie than used his honorable given name. Julia knew she had lost the battle the day Papa called him Buck, and her son turned and smiled brightly back at him.

  • • •

  The months passed and stretched into long, lonely years. Even as Ulys rose to the rank of full captain, he took no pride in it. “I think that I have been away from my family quite long enough,” he wrote to Julia in February of 1854, after the day’s mail had brought no response to his petitions for leave or transfer nor any letters from her. “Sometimes I feel as though I could almost go home nolens volens.”

  Julia’s worries grew when Ulys wrote with increasing vehemence of wanting to quit the army and come home. “I have the sweetest little wife in the world, a son who has likely forgotten my face, and another whom I have never met,” he lamented angrily in a heart-wrenching letter that brought Julia to tears. “How can I remain in the army when it keeps me from everything I most cherish?”

  There was no shame in resigning, Julia assured him through the post. The nation was no longer at war. He had served his country honorably for almost a decade. “You have always wanted to farm, and we have my sixty acres,” she reminded him. “If it’s my blessing you seek, know that I will be as proud to be a farmer’s wife as I am now to be a soldier’s.”

  She meant every word, and yet she was still astonished when, in late April, she received a letter he had written nearly two weeks before. “This is the third letter I write today,” he said. “The first was my formal acceptance of my promotion to full captain. The second was my letter of resignation from the army.”

  Julia’s cry of astonishment and relief brought Jule running, little Buck in her arms, Fred trotting at her heels. “Your papa is coming home,” Julia cried, sweeping Fred into her embrace.

  The next letter she received from Ulys at Fort Humboldt was strangely curt and cryptic. Dated May 2, it warned her not to write to him there anymore, for he would likely not receive her letters. He planned to visit her brother Louis in San Francisco while he settled his affairs and arranged transportation home. “My love to all,” he concluded. “Kiss our little boys for their Pa. Love to you dear Julia. Your affectionate husbd. Ulys.”

  But the joy of their anticipated reunion was tainted by rumors that swirled about Jefferson Barracks and in the army circles in St. Louis. Ulys had had a confrontation with a superior officer, some whispered, and he had been given the choice to resign or face charges of insubordination. He had fallen into drunkenness and dissolution, others said more maliciously, and he had been forced to resign.

  “Drunkenness?” Julia protested when a concerned friend told her the latest gossip. “Ulys has no taste for liquor. He was an officer in the Sons of Temperance in Sackets Harbor, for goodness’ sake.”

  “But they say he takes to his bed often,” her friend replied. “He closes the blinds and stuffs cotton in his ears to block out all light and sound. They say his vision is distorted, his speech slurred, his stomach upset.”

  “He suffers dreadfully from sick headaches,” Julia said, her anger rising. “Migraines, the doctor calls them.”

  Her friend nodded sympathetically, but Julia knew she didn’t believe her. If she could not convince a friend of Ulys’s sobriety, what even worse rumors would strangers believe?

  • • •

  It was late summer in 1854 when Julia was called to the window by the sound of a buggy coming up the zigzag path. Although she could not see the driver, and she had been waiting for weeks for a lone rider on horseback, she knew at once that her husband had come home.

  She ran outside to meet them, hurrying past Fred and Buck where they played on the grass under Jule’s vigilant gaze. Bewildered, the children stared as the buggy halted before the house and a worn, bearded man stepped out. Julia froze at the sight of him, so shocked was she by the new lines of worry etched deeply into his face, the exhaustion in his eyes. But it was he, her beloved Ulys, and she flung herself into his arms, weeping with unrestrained joy and relief.

  “Oh, my Julia,” he murmured, kissing her all over her face, tangling his calloused fingers in her hair. “Oh, my darling Julia.”

 
“Ulys,” she choked out, hugging him with all her strength. “At last, at last, you’ve come.”

  Jule had brought the boys forward, and after one rough, lingering kiss, Ulys broke away from Julia and turned his gaze to their children, nearly staggered by the sight. “Fred,” he said thickly, holding open his arms to him. “And this must be little Ulysses.”

  A smile slowly began to dawn on Fred’s round cheeks. “You’re my papa,” he declared. “I remember you.”

  Ulys’s eyes glistened. “I remember you too.”

  Chapter Five

  AUGUST 1854–APRIL 1860

  In late September, when they could defer it no longer, Ulys and Julia left their sons in her parents’ care and took the steamer to visit Hannah and Jesse Root Grant at their new residence in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.

  A barrage of letters had already warned them that Jesse was grievously disappointed in Ulys, that he had taken the news of his son’s resignation as an almost physical blow. Ulys’s sister Jennie, ever loyal, had confided that their father had written to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in a vain attempt to rescind his son’s resignation. Thus Julia was not surprised when her father-in-law spent most of their visit lamenting that Ulys had failed to meet all his proud expectations, that he could not fathom how Ulys supposed he might earn a living now that he had decided to squander his education and abandon the profession for which he had trained. Ulys listened stoically as his father complained, while inwardly Julia fumed and did her best to emulate her mother-in-law’s serene calm.

  On the eve of their departure, Jesse summoned Ulys and Julia into the parlor, where Hannah, too, waited. “I’ve decided to give you a position at the store in Galena,” Jesse announced. “Your brother Simpson is doing well there, and he can teach you the business.”

  “Thank you, Pa.”