Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  In early June, Ulys wrote to Julia that he no longer expected a reply from Washington, but undaunted, he had decided to pursue another course. General George B. McClellan, whom Ulys had known at West Point, in the Mexican War, and at Fort Vancouver, had established his headquarters in Cincinnati. Ulys had secured another week’s furlough to visit his family in Covington, and while there he intended to call on the general and offer him his services. “While I am gone,” he asked in closing, “please open my letters, and if any are important, forward them to me.”

  Julia waited anxiously for word from Covington, praying that Ulys’s interview with General McClellan would meet with success. She dreamed of Ulys every night, sometimes as the young lieutenant she had known at Jefferson Barracks, often as the sun-browned captain who had returned to her from the war, but forebodingly, never as a colonel leading Illinois troops into battle. What she did dream, curiously enough, three distinct times in a single night, was that she had received an unusual package in the mail. When she opened it, a small item wrapped in tissue paper tumbled out. Removing the wrappings, she discovered a familiar, cherished ring that had belonged to Mamma, and as she admired it, the diamond refracted a circle of bright stars of light upon the paper.

  The dream brought Julia great satisfaction, for as the eldest daughter she had always believed she would inherit Mamma’s favorite ring upon her death. Nell had claimed it, and at the time, Julia had been too overcome with grief to object. The dream gave her the reassuring sense that what she had long desired would soon be hers. “I will surely receive the ring before the week is over,” she wrote to sister Emma. “Nell will remember it was supposed to be mine and send it to me.”

  For several days thereafter, Julia awaited the mail, her faith in her dream unshaken by the failure of the peculiar package to appear. Then, only days after she wrote to Emma, an envelope arrived, addressed, “Colonel U. S. Grant. Official Business.”

  Her heart leaping at the unexpected title, Julia opened the envelope and withdrew a sheet of vellum covered with tissue paper. As she drew the tissue paper aside, her gaze fell upon on the great seal of the State of Illinois in the masthead—encircled by stars, just like the lights cast by the ring in her dream, the ring Mamma had worn that long-ago summer evening when she declared Ulys a great statesman and predicted that his worth would someday be known to all.

  Julia’s hands shook and the paper and vellum fell to the floor, but she quickly snatched them up again. She scanned the page and discovered that she held the commission of U. S. Grant as a colonel and commander of the Illinois Seventh Congressional District Regiment.

  Thrilled, she shared the letter first with the children and next with their bustling housemaid, and then she hurried across the street to tell her friend Emily Rawlins, who congratulated her with genuine warmth, lamenting that she was too ill to rise from her bed and celebrate properly. Returning home, Julia took pen in hand and made a copy of the commission to send to Jesse and Hannah Grant and all the family in Covington, and then, prompted by a perverse streak of mischief, she made one for Papa too.

  She assumed that Ulys had already learned of his appointment through other channels, and his next letter home confirmed this. General McClellan deserved no credit for the commission, he wrote, for although Ulys had called at the general’s headquarters twice, he had not been granted an audience. Instead, while traveling back to Springfield, he had received a telegram from Governor Yates offering him the command. Shortly after accepting the post, Ulys learned that when the regiment had first formed, the soldiers had elected as their commander an amiable and popular but very young and inexperienced fellow from their hometown. Later, when confronted by the reality of following an untested officer into battle, the soldiers had urgently demanded that someone more qualified be appointed in his stead. Ulys was that replacement.

  Julia didn’t care what unusual circumstances had brought about Ulys’s appointment, only that it had come at last. She needed but a moment to count back the days and confirm her suspicions: Ulys had learned of his commission on the same day she dreamed of Mamma’s ring, the long-awaited treasure, the circle of stars.

  • • •

  In the last week of June, Ulys managed a quick visit home to see Julia and the children and to collect supplies—namely, a horse and a uniform. When Ulys had formally taken command of his regiment three days before, he had found the men in a demoralized condition, wholly undisciplined, lacking tents, uniforms, and in many cases, weapons. “They weren’t terribly impressed at the sight of me in my civilian clothes,” Ulys said, “but they came around quickly enough once I began drilling them.”

  Julia glanced up from sewing the badges of his rank on his new uniform. “They’ll need your firm hand.”

  “They’ll get it.” Ulys shook his head as he leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. “My predecessor did his best to develop their recklessness. He even went so far as to occasionally take the guard from their posts and go with them into the nearby village, where they’d all make a night of it.”

  “Goodness! It’s little wonder the men didn’t want him to lead them into battle.”

  “Most of them realize they badly need discipline.” Ulys grinned as Jesse ran into the room, whooping with delight, and launched himself at his father, who snatched him up and flung him over his shoulder. “I’m sure that with the application of a little regular army punishment, I’ll get as much discipline from them as I could possibly want.”

  During his all too brief furlough, Ulys spent every possible moment with Julia and the children, as if their company and laughter were water he must store in vessels for a long desert crossing. Eleven-year-old Fred was always by his side, engaging him in serious discussion about the soldiers’ weapons and the enemy’s positions, poring over maps he had drawn himself, proudly demonstrating how well he marched. “You should let me come with you,” he often remarked, feigning nonchalance, as if his wild suggestion were so undeniably reasonable that he need not beg. “I’m old enough, and I could be a big help to you.”

  On the last night, after putting the children to bed, Ulys mused, “I’m of a mind to grant Fred’s wish.”

  They were sitting on the front steps, savoring the cool night breezes. Seated two steps below Ulys, Julia had closed her tired, strained eyes and was resting her head on his knee, but at that her eyes popped open and she sat upright. “Take a boy into battle?”

  “Not into battle, only so far as Springfield. Seeing the encampment might satisfy his appetite for the army life—”

  “Or whet it.”

  Ulys nodded, acknowledging the possibility. “The excursion would teach him responsibility and discipline, and I would surely welcome his company.”

  “That would make Fred immeasurably happy, I know—but Ulys, think of the danger.”

  “If we’re ordered to march on the Confederates, I’ll send him home.”

  The regiment was unlikely to run into real danger in Illinois, Julia silently conceded, and everyone believed the whole conflict would be settled within a few months. “I suppose that would be fine,” she said. “As long as you keep him out of danger, it should be a very pleasant summer outing for you both.”

  Ulys smiled and drew her close for a kiss. She recalled, as she often had throughout that frenzied spring, the overwhelming, almost debilitating homesickness that had overcome him when he was stationed in Oregon Territory. If Fred’s company would spare Ulys that melancholy, how could she let her motherly fears keep her son at home?

  Little Buck, naturally, was terribly jealous when Fred proudly departed with their father the next morning, his knapsack on his back, his attire as much like a soldier’s as Julia had managed to put together on such short notice. “I want to do my part,” Buck said after they left, and when Nellie chimed in that she did too, Julia told them they could help best by remembering their father, their brother, and all the
other brave Union soldiers in their prayers every night.

  Julia shared her children’s patriotic desire to contribute to the cause, and, somewhat shyly, she decided to attend a meeting of one of the many ladies’ organizations founded to support the Union cause. “May I assist you?” she timidly asked one of the busy leaders at a strawberry festival, a fund-raiser to purchase tents and rifles. Wordlessly the woman gave her a quart bowl of strawberries to hull, and when she finished, another, chattier woman asked her to help drape black crepe above a portrait of the late Stephen A. Douglas, who had died only three months after Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration.

  Another day, Julia offered her services at a sewing bee, but she arrived after all the piecework had been distributed. “Can you knit?” the lady in charge queried, peering at her over the tops of her spectacles.

  Julia considered the muffler she had knit for Papa as a schoolgirl. “Yes, a little.”

  The woman took from her basket two long, slender knitting needles and a skein of yarn. “This is enough to make a pair of socks,” she said, placing them in Julia’s hands. “Try to get them done by next week’s meeting.”

  Julia felt the heat rise to her face. “I’m terribly sorry. I confess I don’t even know how to begin, and I fear the war will be over before I could possibly finish them.”

  She held out the needles and yarn, and after studying her a moment, lips pursed, the woman snatched the yarn away and gave her a different skein, one attached to the sleeve of a sweater that some other, more competent lady had begun. Julia accepted the new assignment with a nod and quietly stole away, taking the sleeve home to work on it in the safety of solitude. She eventually finished it, returned everything she had borrowed to the lady in charge, and silently vowed never to attend another meeting. The sight of the other women knitting away, piles of finished socks accumulating in their baskets, shamed her. At White Haven, a lady was considered accomplished if she could mend and embroider prettily and if she could capably manage servants who knit and sewed well. In the Yankee North, a lady was expected to be able to mend, embroider, quilt, knit, and sew expertly, even if she hired a girl to do the household chores.

  All the while, Ulys and Fred had been at Springfield, where Ulys’s troops had been mustered into the national service for three years as the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. They were in a good state of discipline, he informed Julia in a letter, as disciplined and up on the company drill as any in the army. Ulys wrote home often, and Fred wrote occasionally, but mail delivery was inconsistent, so sometimes she would receive their letters out of order, or a few days would pass with nothing in the post, followed by a delivery of a bounty of a week’s worth of news.

  It was from the newspaper, though, that Julia learned that the Twenty-First Illinois had been ordered to Quincy, Illinois, a town on the Mississippi River more than one hundred miles west of Springfield, about two hundred and fifty miles south of Galena. Soon thereafter, Julia received a letter from Ulys confirming that the regiment was on the march. “Fred has little Rondy to ride and he enjoys it hugely,” Ulys reported, and Julia smiled, imagining the scene. “The Soldiers and Officers call him Colonel and he seems to be quite a favorite.”

  A few days later, Ulys sent another, longer letter noting that the regiment was already preparing to leave Quincy, having been ordered to Missouri. Although Missouri had remained within the Union, small bands of Southern sympathizers had formed regiments and threatened to make trouble, which the Union army was determined to swiftly quell. “Fred started home yesterday,” Ulys had written, “and I did not telegraph you because I thought you would be in a perfect stew until he arrived.”

  With a gasp, Julia checked the date of the letter—July 13, 1861. “Oh, no, Ulys,” she murmured. “What were you thinking?”

  Quickly she read on in hopes of finding the answer. “He did not want to go at all and I felt loath at sending him but now that we are in the enemy’s country I thought you would be alarmed if he was with me. Fred is a good boy and behaved very manly. Last night we had an alarm which kept me out all night with one of those terrible headaches which you know I am subject to.”

  Julia felt a headache of her own coming on. Quickly she sat down to pen and paper and ink and wrote a hasty reply that Ulys must not send Fred home alone, that even though he would remain within Union borders, Fred was safer with his father in Missouri than traveling alone among strangers in Illinois. “If you do not want me to be in a perfect stew as you say, do not send Fred home,” she urged. “Alexander the Great was no older when he accompanied his father Phillip of Macedon. Do keep him with you.”

  She sent off the letter suspecting she was already too late, and with steadily increasing apprehension, she studied riverboat and railroad schedules, trying to determine when Fred might arrive if he had taken the steamer from Quincy to Dubuque and the train from Dubuque to Galena. But Fred did not appear the morning she expected him, nor did he come on the afternoon train, and as dusk fell she became frantic with worry. She had just decided to telegraph the railroad office in Dubuque and ask them to begin a search when the front door banged open and in trooped Fred, disheveled, exhausted, and thoroughly disgruntled.

  “Where have you been?” Julia cried, flying to embrace him as he let his knapsack slump to the floor with a heavy thud. “What happened to you?”

  “I missed the train in Dubuque,” he said with a mutinous scowl, “so I walked the rest of the way.”

  “That’s seventeen miles!”

  “That’s why I’m late.” Suddenly the soldier disappeared and a forlorn little boy stood before her. “And I didn’t get any dinner, Mamma.”

  She hurried to fix him a hearty meal, and when he had eaten his fill, she sent him off to wash up and change. Then, with her anger still at full boil like a covered pot on a hot stove, steam shooting out from beneath the clattering lid, she wrote Ulys a furious, indignant letter. By morning it was evident that Fred had suffered no more than a few blisters on his long hike, so Julia wrote again to Ulys, slightly less stridently than before. She knew full well that if Ulys was on the march, he might not have received her accounts of Fred’s shame and suffering, much less found an occasion to respond to them.

  At last, he did. “I have received two letters from you since our arrival,” he wrote to her from Mexico, Missouri, on the third day of August, “one in which you gave me fits for sending Fred home by himself and one of later date. Fred will make a good general someday and I think you had better pack his valise and start him on now.”

  Ulys’s gentle rebuke and easy jest made her regret her hasty words, but in early August, an astonishing, wonderful announcement chased away her lingering chagrin. A Grant would indeed become a general, but Ulys was not the prophet Julia was, for he had the details wrong. Ulys and Julia both learned the good news the same way, though hundreds of miles separated them: not by a prophetic dream, nor by a thick letter from army headquarters, but from the press, which seemed to take a reckless pleasure in wantonly divulging military secrets unknown even to the men involved.

  Ulys had been promoted to brigadier general.

  Chapter Eight

  AUGUST–DECEMBER 1861

  Jesse Root Grant reveled in his son’s achievements, and soon his loud, public boasts ensured that everyone in Covington knew it. He read Ulys’s private letters aloud to any audience he could muster, and he sharply criticized other Union generals as if they were his son’s rivals. Whenever unflattering reports of Ulys appeared in the Cincinnati press, Jesse fired back sharply worded refutations, stirring up controversy that created trouble for Ulys at army headquarters.

  Equally vexing to Ulys was his father’s determination to profit from his son’s high rank. Jesse encouraged acquaintances to write to Ulys and request certain staff appointments, and he tried to obtain a government saddlery contract for the Grant leather company using his son’s position as leverage.

&n
bsp; As Ulys traveled about Missouri chasing Confederates, he bluntly rejected all such requests for patronage, especially as he assembled his personal staff. He thought it proper to select a man from the regiment as one of his aides, but the other two appointees were men he had known before the war: William Hillyer, the young Republican lawyer from Kentucky with whom Ulys had worked at cousin Henry Boggs’s real estate firm in St. Louis; and John Aaron Rawlins, their neighbor across the street in Galena, recently bereaved of his dear wife, Emily, who in August had lost her long struggle with consumption.

  In early September, Ulys occupied Paducah, Kentucky, without bloodshed, giving the Union a strong foothold in the West, but his family’s proud elation was cut short by tragedy. On September 13, Simpson, who had been traveling in Minnesota on company business, died of consumption at St. Paul. Ulys’s elder brother had endured his terrible affliction for so long that his death surprised no one, and when his father and sisters traveled to Galena for the funeral, in the midst of their mourning they took comfort in knowing that he would suffer no more.

  • • •

  As soon as Ulys left Paducah and returned to his headquarters in Cairo, he urged Julia to visit him. He assured her that she would be perfectly safe—so safe, in fact, that he wanted her to bring the children along.

  Her friend Katharine Felt offered to help her prepare for the journey, but on the afternoon of her departure, Julia had worked herself into such a state of nerves that she was obliged to excuse herself and go upstairs to lie down for a few moments while Katharine continued packing.