Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  Swiftly Julia bent to hug her daughter. “Yes, of course he is.” She had told him in parting that she was sure he would return victorious. It was not a prophecy, just an ardent wish, but he had seemed glad to hear it all the same.

  A few days after the troops set out, three of the steamers that had carried them up the Ohio River returned, bringing with them the wounded, the deceased, and the glorious news of Ulys’s victory. Breathless from relief, Julia sank to her knees on the landing, her heart overflowing with gratitude to Almighty God. Kneeling, clasping her hands, she prayed for his continuous favor for her nation and her beloved husband.

  She was terribly disappointed when she discovered that Ulys had not returned aboard one of the steamers, but he had sent her a letter telling her of his intention to attack Fort Donelson without delay. “Fred may accompany one of the staff officers to Fort Henry for a brief visit, if that would not make you too anxious,” Ulys wrote.

  The very thought of it filled Julia with apprehension, but Fred pleaded so earnestly that she eventually acquiesced. After subjecting him to a lengthy lecture about safety and responsibility, she let him depart the next morning with an officer she knew well and trusted, and by evening he returned bearing war trophies he had collected from the field of battle—a handful of grapeshot, two empty cigar boxes, and several pipes, which he generously divided among the other children, who regarded him as a hero.

  Fred saved the best treasure, a small cannonball, for four-year-old Jesse, whose eyes widened with wonder as he accepted the gift. Jesse amused himself by rolling the cannonball back and forth on the windowsill, the rumble of iron upon wood strangely reminiscent of distant thunder—until suddenly it tumbled off the sill and landed on his foot. He cried out in pain, but Fred quickly exclaimed, “A soldier never cries, Jess.” At that Jesse gulped back his sobs, clutched his injured foot in both hands, and sank trembling and pale to the floor. Julia immediately summoned the doctor, and to her relief, when he examined Jesse’s foot he found no broken bones, only some vivid, painful bruising that would fade with time.

  Julia had made up her mind to remain in Cairo as long as she could, but all too soon Ulys wrote to tell her that she must go to Covington at once and remain there until he sent word. Aboard the steamer to Cincinnati, by day Julia was preoccupied with the children, but at night she was overcome with loneliness. One evening, sitting alone on the deck, she felt so desolate that she buried her face in her hands and broke down in sobs, releasing into the night the unhappiness she struggled to conceal from the children throughout the long days.

  “Are you quite all right, madam?”

  With a start, Julia looked up to discover an elderly woman looking kindly down upon her. “Yes, yes,” she stammered, suddenly ashamed. Other women had lost husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons in the previous week’s fighting, and she was blubbering away over a little homesickness. She would have made a terrible soldier.

  “Shall I call someone for you?”

  “No, I’m quite fine, thank you.” Forcing a smile, Julia rose and hurried away.

  In Covington, she found Jesse Root Grant in excellent spirits, as well informed about Ulys’s maneuvers in the field as many of his officers. He recited facts and statistics and compared his son’s strategies with those of military geniuses of bygone eras, always to Ulys’s advantage. For her part, Hannah confided that she did not worry as much about Ulys as she had in the Mexican War, when his inadvertent silence had caused her hair to go white. “I believe that Ulys has been raised up for the particular purpose of fighting this evil rebellion,” she said with quiet certainty. “The same power that raised him up will protect him.”

  One afternoon in mid-February, Mary darted into the parlor where Julia and Jennie were sewing. “Have you not heard the great news?” she exclaimed, breathless and pink cheeked. “Richmond has fallen!”

  “That is not and cannot be true,” Julia declared, as Jennie gasped with delight and clapped her hands. “Richmond will fall only before Ulys and his army.”

  “Oh, Julia,” Mary said, fondly exasperated. “We’re all proud of Lyss, but does it matter which general takes Richmond as long as it falls?”

  “I wish it were true, but Richmond hasn’t fallen,” insisted Julia.

  Soon enough, news reports proved her right: It was Fort Donelson that had fallen, and to her beloved Ulys, in a joint effort with the navy. After enduring the Union assault for several days and failing to break through Ulys’s lines, the Confederate commanders had realized that their position was hopeless. Confederate Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner, left in charge after his two superior officers relinquished their commands and fled, sent a message to Ulys proposing an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to settle the terms of his capitulation. Ulys’s response was reprinted in all the Cincinnati papers. “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,” Ulys had written with his usual brevity and directness. “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

  General Buckner was said to have sent back a bitter, petulant reply, stating that Ulys’s overwhelming forces compelled him, despite the “brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms you propose.”

  “How can this rebel suggest that Ulys is anything less than a gentleman?” Julia protested, but her indignation was but a drop compared to the wave of exultation that swept through Covington, Cincinnati, and the entire Union. Here is a general who fights, the people declared in the streets and the parlors and in the press. Ulys’s victories thoroughly rejuvenated the depressed morale of the people of the North, and soon his letter to General Buckner inspired a new nickname: Unconditional Surrender Grant.

  The day after Fort Donelson fell, Ulys was promoted to major general—so Julia was astonished when, after making a quick trip to Nashville to consult with General Don Carlos Buell, he was accused of leaving his command without permission. Other bewildering accusations quickly sprang up—Ulys failed to maintain order in camp, he failed to communicate his plans to Commander of the Department of the Missouri Major General Henry W. Halleck, and he refused to answer Halleck’s daily messages. Scarcely a month after his triumphs, Ulys was suspended from his command, and the expedition into Tennessee he had so diligently planned was assigned to another general.

  To Julia’s dismay, the controversy stirred up the old malicious lies about Ulys’s sobriety, prompting army headquarters to order an investigation. No evidence of drunkenness could be found, and other officers rushed to defend him on the other charges, testifying with adamant certainty that Ulys had always sent General Halleck frequent reports, sometimes two or three a day.

  Eventually the truth came out: After a Southern sympathizer employed in the telegraph office deserted, it was discovered that he had intercepted numerous messages that were supposed to have been sent between Ulys and General Halleck. Thus exonerated, Ulys was reinstated to his command in the middle of March, and he immediately joined his army in Savannah, Tennessee.

  The uproar following the capture of Fort Donelson had barely subsided when Ulys and his brave army defeated the rebel forces at Shiloh in Tennessee. “Again another terrible battle has occurred in which our arms have been victorious,” he wrote to Julia. “I got through all safe having but one shot which struck my sword but did not touch me.”

  Julia’s heart thumped so hard it pained her. A strike upon his sword was still much too close.

  A week later he wrote that General Halleck had arrived and had taken command, although Ulys and General Buell remained in charge of their separate armies. “I am looking for a speedy move, one more fight and then easy sailing to the close of the war,” Ulys wrote. “I really will feel glad when this thing is over. The battle at this place was the most desperate that has ever taken place on the Continent and I don’t look for another like it. I suppo
se you have read a great deal about the battle in the papers and some quite contradictory? I will come in again for heaps of abuse from persons who were not here.”

  As trainloads of wounded men were carried from the battlefield to hospitals, tales spread that the Confederate attack had caught Ulys entirely by surprise, that he had not established adequate defenses, that he had ineptly directed his forces, that green troops had turned cowardly and had refused to charge until their own guns were turned threateningly upon them. Ulys was blamed for the more than thirteen thousand killed, wounded, or missing on the Union side and nearly eleven thousand for the South; was called bloodthirsty, a butcher—charges that brought angry tears to Julia’s eyes.

  “If the papers only knew how little ambition I have outside of putting down this rebellion and getting back once more to live quietly and unobtrusively with my family, I think they would say less and have fewer falsehoods to their account,” Ulys wrote to Julia two days before his fortieth birthday. “I do not look much at the papers now, and consequently save myself much uncomfortable feeling.”

  “Someone has to set the record straight about my boy,” Jesse declared. His anger filled Julia with foreboding, but no prophetic dream warned her of his intentions. She learned along with everyone else in Cincinnati that he had forwarded a private letter from Ulys and another from Colonel Hillyer defending Ulys’s actions at Shiloh to The Cincinnati Commercial, which immediately printed them. Rather than silencing Ulys’s critics, the letters provoked more criticism as other newspapers picked up the story.

  One day, Julia was alone in the Grants’ parlor reading yet another scathing editorial in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette when Hannah appeared in the doorway. “You have a visitor,” she said, showing in a tall, slender woman clad in black crepe. Despite her pale face and melancholy expression, she was stunningly beautiful.

  Julia invited the woman to sit beside her on the sofa, where she introduced herself as the widow of Lieutenant Colonel Herman Canfield, one of the many brave Union officers who had perished at Shiloh.

  “Oh, Mrs. Canfield,” said Julia, stricken. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  “No, there is not, and that is not why I wished to see you.” The beautiful widow pressed her lips together, fighting back tears. “I’ve come because I must tell you of your husband’s kindness to me.”

  Puzzled, Julia folded her hands in her lap and nodded for her to continue.

  “A few days before the battle commenced, I was seized by a strange, uncanny feeling that my husband desperately needed me, and I resolved to go to him.” Mrs. Canfield hesitated. “You will think me a superstitious fool—”

  “I think nothing of the sort,” Julia assured her. “I’ve been known to have such feelings myself.”

  “I arrived in Shiloh on the evening of the first day of that dreadful fight, and I was told—and I had felt it in my heart all along as I traveled—that my husband was among the wounded and was at that moment lying in a hospital a few miles down the river. I despaired when I learned that I was forbidden to go to him, that it was against orders and absolutely impossible.”

  “How dreadful, after you had come so far!”

  “As I stood there, utterly despondent, a cavalcade rode up, and I at once recognized General Grant and his staff. I saw, too, that the general was unable to dismount, but was helped off his horse and all but carried aboard his dispatch boat.”

  “What?” Julia exclaimed. “Was he wounded?”

  Mrs. Canfield clasped her hand reassuringly. “I tried to see him, but the guard told me that I could not, that the general was injured. I hesitated, but my intense anxiety to go to my husband overcame all else, and I boldly passed by the guard and boarded the boat. As I approached the general, I saw the doctors cutting the boot off the general’s foot.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “I learned that the previous evening, his horse had stepped on a rolling stone and had fallen, landing upon his ankle. It hadn’t troubled him all day, but when he dismounted, he was astonished to find his leg quite swollen and numb.”

  Julia felt faint. Had Ulys lost the leg? Was that what the grieving widow had come to tell her?

  “I explained that my husband had been wounded and needed me and that I had been told I could not go to him. I begged the general to allow me to proceed.” Mrs. Canfield took a quick, quavering breath. “Your gallant husband said, ‘I will write my report at once, and you may go on the dispatch boat that will deliver it.’ Paper and ink were brought, and as soon as the general had written and sealed his report, he wrote an order to pass me on the dispatch boat, and to grant me permission to visit my husband in the hospital. Then he bade me good-bye with his sincere hopes that my husband and I would soon be reunited.”

  “That is the General Grant I know,” said Julia. “Did you reach your husband in time?”

  Two large tears trickled down Mrs. Canfield’s face. “I was too late, too late,” she choked out. “I was conducted down an aisle between the cots in the hospital, and my escort paused and pointed to a figure on a cot, the blanket drawn up to cover the face. I knelt beside the cot and drew the blanket down and lay my hand upon my husband’s bosom. He was still warm, but his great heart had ceased beating. The blood was clotted on his beard and breast.” Her chin trembled, she took another deep breath—and then she could restrain her weeping no longer. “I think he might have lived if I had been near.”

  Julia embraced her, murmuring words of comfort even as her own tears began to fall. The poor, good woman—nothing Julia could say or do, no prayers or patriotic words about the lieutenant colonel’s sacrifice, could ease her suffering.

  When Mrs. Canfield’s tears were spent, she composed herself and continued her tale. “I’m determined to devote my time to the wounded soldiers for the duration of the war,” she said. “My husband might have lived if he had only had the services of a kind nurse. I hope to spare other wives and mothers this cruel, terrible grief.”

  “How noble you are!”

  “No, not at all, not I. It’s something I’m compelled to do.”

  “And I’m determined to help you.” Excusing herself, Julia hurried upstairs to her bedchamber and retrieved the roll of bills Ulys had given her in Cairo. After briefly considering how much Ulys would insist she save for herself and the children, she divided the bills in half, made two rolls, put one away, and hurried back to the parlor with the second. “I hope this will help you purchase supplies and make your travel easier,” Julia said, closing Mrs. Canfield’s hands around the roll of bills.

  “Mrs. Grant,” she protested, astonished. “I didn’t come seeking donations. My only intention was to tell you of your husband’s great kindness. One sees such horrid things in the papers of this good man, and he has been greatly wronged, for in my hour of need he was so kind, so gentle, so full of sympathy.”

  “Yes, he is,” said Julia, “and he would be the first to agree that you must take this offering for your work.”

  Eventually Mrs. Canfield agreed, and when she was quite restored to herself, and braced with tea and Hannah’s wholesome bread and apple butter, they parted with embraces and promises to write. Julia knew that Mrs. Canfield would offer faithful service to the Union, and for a wistful moment, she wished she could join her.

  Afterward, whenever the press vilified Ulys, Julia reminded herself of Mrs. Canfield’s kind words and took heart. Although the Battle of Shiloh provoked many people to call for Ulys to be removed from his command, President Lincoln would not bow to their demands. “I can’t spare this man,” he was reported as saying. “He fights.”

  Chapter Ten

  MAY–DECEMBER 1862

  At the end of April, Ulys’s army advanced on Corinth, Mississippi, settling into a long, slow siege that rendered Ulys impatient and restless. He wrote of beautiful apple and cherry orchards blooming all aroun
d the encampment, but also of the tedium of routine duties and of hundreds of men dying of dysentery. He spent his evenings around the campfire with the other officers, smoking, sharing tales of the Mexican War, and playing whist and twenty-one. The attacks in the press continued, and it vexed Ulys that the men subject to his command could not help hearing of the ludicrous charges against him.

  At his new headquarters in Memphis, Ulys met his family at the wharf, all smiles for the children and tender kisses for Julia. His beard, chestnut brown with tawny threads, was neatly trimmed, and the injury to his ankle had apparently fully healed, leaving not even a trace of a limp. “My dear little wife,” he said as he embraced her, his voice a sigh of relief, and when he held her she could feel his strength and good health, but also his frustration and loneliness. Weather-beaten, he looked every bit of his forty years, and a troubled, wary look seemed permanently etched upon his features, but his eyes were as startlingly blue as ever, and they regarded her with the same love and admiration she had discovered there when she was a belle rather than a matron of thirty-six.

  They had barely settled in Memphis when Ulys moved his headquarters to Corinth. When Julia and the children arrived a few days later, he sent an ambulance to meet them at the depot. Ulys rode on horseback alongside, reaching through the window for Julia’s hand. “Did you miss me as much as I missed you?” he asked.

  “I missed you more,” she said warmly, smiling up at her beloved general.

  Dusk was falling as they approached the Corinth encampment, the campfires alight, the rows of white tents illuminated like thousands of lanterns. “What are they singing?” Buck asked, crawling over Julia in his eagerness to listen.

  “John Brown,” said Fred, and soon Julia, too, could make out the familiar melody, the verses carried by perhaps a hundred voices, with what must have been almost the entire army joining in the choruses, so powerfully did the glorious anthem ring out.