Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “They expect all generals to carry themselves like McClellan,” Rawlins said, a little scathingly, and Julia had to smile. She knew that the fashionable, impeccably attired General McClellan suffered in comparison to Ulys in the eyes of the public and, apparently, the president. Whereas General McClellan had drilled and dithered and complained that he was perpetually, hopelessly outnumbered, Ulys planned shrewdly and advanced persistently and unrelentingly. McClellan had invited mockery when the Washington press reported that he had needed six wagons, each pulled by a team of four horses, to carry his attire and personal belongings to the front, while reporters marveled that Ulys often took the field carrying only a spare shirt, a hairbrush, and a toothbrush. McClellan enjoyed lavish champagne and oyster banquets at his gracious mansion on H Street in Washington City; Ulys preferred pork and beans cooked over a campfire. McClellan had graduated second in his class at West Point—but that was the only measure by which he exceeded her Ulys.

  The clerk at the Willard soon learned his mistake. Ulys and Fred had gone upstairs to change for supper, and soon after they were seated in the dining room, another guest recognized Ulys, pointed at him in astonishment, and exclaimed, “There sits General Grant!” A shout of welcome rang out and swelled into a chorus of cheers, and the crowd cried out his name and pounded the tables with their fists until Ulys rose and bowed.

  Ulys and Fred had been immediately reassigned to a room befitting a general, and after seeing Fred upstairs, Ulys had made his way on foot to the Executive Mansion to meet the president. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln had begun receiving guests for their weekly reception in the Blue Room at eight o’clock, and when Ulys and a few of his aides arrived ninety minutes later, their entrance caused great commotion.

  “What did Mr. Lincoln say when he met you?” asked Julia.

  Ulys’s cheeks took on a slight flush. “His face lit up in a broad smile when saw me coming toward him, and rather than wait for me to reach him, he came to me. He said, ‘Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure.’ He shook my hand with brotherly warmth and we talked a little, and then he introduced me to Secretary of State William Seward, who tried to help me navigate the crowd.”

  “That was not easily done,” Rawlins broke in. “The cheering throng was calling the general’s name and descending upon him in a mad, rapid, frantic crush of torn laces, mashed crinolines, and trod-upon boots.”

  Julia felt a sting of jealousy as she looked from Rawlins to Ulys and back. “You make it sound as if the reception was comprised solely of admiring ladies.”

  Rawlins shook his head. “No, he was swarmed by ladies and gentlemen alike. The crush was so intense that Mr. Seward steered him into the East Room and made him stand on the sofa so everyone could see his face better.”

  “I imagine his face was as red then as it is now,” mused Julia, imagining a crowd of beautiful, adoring ladies in fine silk gowns pressing themselves toward her husband, their pretty gloved hands patting out applause.

  With the hearty, indefatigable Secretary Seward at his side, Ulys had received the frenzied crowd for an hour before he was escorted to a drawing room where he, President Lincoln, and Secretary of War Stanton discussed the next day’s ceremony. The president, aware of Ulys’s well-known disinclination to speechify, kindly provided him with a copy of his own remarks so that Ulys could prepare a response.

  “When Pa came back to the Willard, he wrote a few lines on a half sheet of paper,” Fred added. “I was standing right beside Pa the next afternoon at the White House when President Lincoln gave him his commission. Mr. Lincoln gave his speech, and then Pa read his, and I think Pa was every bit as good as the president.”

  “That’s high praise indeed, considering that Mr. Lincoln is such a renowned orator.” Smiling, Julia reached out to squeeze her son’s hand. “I wish I could have been there.”

  “Lots of people were,” said Fred. “The whole cabinet, and important men from the government, and some ladies.”

  “Was Mrs. Lincoln present?” asked Julia. “What was she wearing?”

  Fred shrugged. “She was there all right. She wore a fancy dress.”

  “Is that the best you can do, when I asked you to remember every detail?” Turning to her husband, Julia prompted, “Ulys?”

  “It was a fancy white dress,” he added helpfully. “And she wore a lace shawl around her shoulders and flowers on her head.”

  “That’s a little better, I suppose,” said Julia, too fascinated to be truly exasperated with them.

  The next day, while Ulys was consulting with General George Gordon Meade at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station, President Lincoln telegraphed to invite the two generals to a military dinner Mrs. Lincoln had arranged in their honor. On Thursday morning Ulys called at the White House, where the president interrupted a cabinet meeting to see him. “I asked to be excused because I felt most urgently that I should return to the field,” said Ulys. “The president smiled in a frank and friendly way and said, ‘I don’t see how we can excuse you. It would be like Hamlet with the prince left out!’”

  “I must say I agree with him. What was your reply?”

  “I told him that I fully appreciated the honor Mrs. Lincoln meant to show me, but time was very precious just then, and I’d had enough of the show business.”

  “You said that to the president?” Julia exclaimed, mortified. “You turned down an invitation from Mrs. Lincoln because your time was too precious?”

  “She’ll despise you for that,” Rawlins remarked.

  “She despises me already.” Ulys drew deeply from his cigar and studied the burning end as he exhaled. “I’ve heard she calls me a butcher and tells the president that I have no regard for life. She was perfectly pleasant to me at her reception, though, so maybe that’s just idle gossip.”

  “If she has made such ridiculous disparagements,” said Julia, “the president evidently doesn’t agree.”

  “Apparently.” Ulys brushed ashes from his trousers and sighed. “After that, I left immediately for the West, so I missed the dinner with the dozen or so other generals—and I missed what followed after.”

  When Ulys paused, Rawlins straightened in his chair, which told Julia he knew what Ulys was going to say. “And what was that?”

  “When President Lincoln and I spoke alone, he confided to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted. He never wanted to interfere in military matters, but the procrastination of his commanders and pressure from the Congress and the people of the North forced him to issue certain orders throughout the war.” Ulys puffed on his cigar, brooding over the memory. “All he’d ever wanted, he told me, was a general who would take responsibility and act, calling on him for assistance as needed. I assured him I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and I’d avoid annoying him and the War Department as much as possible.”

  “Then—” Julia paused, weighing the men’s words. “He expects you to be that general.”

  “Yes, Julia.” Ulys set the stub of his cigar in the ashtray and leaned forward to take both of her hands in his. “The day after I left Washington, President Lincoln appointed me general in chief of all the armies.”

  As Julia sat quietly absorbing the revelation, Ulys dismissed Rawlins and sent Fred off to tend to his pony. “I would have you and Jesse come with me to Washington,” he told her when they were alone. “For a few weeks at least, or maybe a few months, for as long as my headquarters is close enough for me to visit you, and safe enough for you to visit me.”

  “Of course,” said Julia, her heart thumping with trepidation curiously mixed with delight. “As you wish, Ulys.”

  She was going to Washington City. She shook her head in disbelief at the very thought. A greater distance than could be measured in miles stretched between Hardscrabble and the nation’s capital, and she had nev
er thought to cross it.

  Fred protested when Julia informed him that he must return to St. Louis and, if Dr. Pope thought him healthy enough, back to school. “A soldier must follow orders, son,” Ulys reminded him, and so Fred swallowed his complaints and packed his satchel, emulating as best he could his father’s stoicism.

  Ulys’s promotion obliged him to make changes to the command structure, which he revealed to General Sherman, his successor as commander of the Army of Tennessee, aboard a train to Cincinnati. As she listened to their conference, Julia admired her husband’s tact and fairness. “I want to restore to duty some officers who have been relieved from important commands,” she overheard him tell Sherman. “They’re all good, loyal soldiers, and we must not let them go under if we can avoid it. I’d like you to look out for those who have been removed from the West.”

  “Send them out and I’ll see they’re provided for,” Sherman replied.

  “Don’t make any assignments until after I’ve spoken to Stanton.”

  Sherman nodded and made a foreboding remark in an undertone, something about whether certain generals would be willing to serve under commanders they had once outranked. Julia hoped he underestimated the officers’ dedication.

  Before they parted company in Cincinnati, Julia, anxious and uncertain about the proper etiquette in Washington City, found a moment for a private word with General Sherman. “I’ve never sought the public eye, but I fear it will fall on me regardless now that my husband has risen to such heights,” she said. “I want always to conduct myself so that people will think well of us both. You’ve been to the capital often. What do you think I should do while I’m there?”

  “What should you do in Washington?” Sherman looked a trifle annoyed, as if it were a ridiculous question or she had interrupted his contemplation of some serious war matter. “Return all your calls, every one of them, and promptly too.”

  Chastened, Julia thanked him with a bow and wished him safe travels and great success in his new command.

  Aboard the train that would carry them to the East, Ulys offered no such advice on public life. “If all goes well,” he said, digging into the pockets of his duster for a cigar, “I’ll defeat Lee in Virginia, Sherman will capture Atlanta, and Lincoln will be reelected in November. I don’t envy the president. I saw enough of the burdens of his position while I was in Washington to know that I’d be a fool to covet them.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  MARCH–APRIL 1864

  Julia’s first glimpses of the capital through the carriage window revealed a startling juxtaposition of elegance and squalor. The tall marble dome of the Capitol, still under construction, rose proudly above snow-dusted streets where cows, pigs, and geese freely roamed. Pennsylvania Avenue and a few adjacent blocks of Seventh Street were paved, but the carriage rattled painfully over broken, uneven cobblestones. The opulent marble edifices housing various federal departments inspired awe, but the one-hundred-fifty-six-foot stub of the Washington Monument stood forlornly in the midst of an open field where cattle grazed.

  “It was begun with such good intentions,” Rawlins remarked, peering past her, “but construction was halted thanks to political squabbling, economic uncertainty, and vandalism.”

  “Do you suppose they’ll ever finish it?” Julia asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Rawlins, frowning skeptically. “After the war is won.”

  “After the war is won, the South will need to be rebuilt,” said Ulys. “I think President Washington would agree that houses and towns should come before monuments.”

  As they rode on, the white tents of the soldiers’ camps provided a reassuringly familiar scene, but the overcrowded hospitals served as a painful reminder of what became of the wounded soldiers carried from Ulys’s battlefields. Though it was late March, the city clung to the vestiges of winter, and Julia shrank back from the window and pressed her handkerchief to her nose when a gust of wind carried to her the fetid miasma of innumerable outhouses and refuse dumps. Eyes watering, she fervently hoped that come springtime, flowers budding on the trees lining the broad swath of grass south of the Executive Mansion would release their lovely fragrances throughout the city, masking the stench.

  Their carriage soon arrived at the Willard Hotel, an elegant, five-story structure on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The Willard, Rawlins informed Julia, was not only the city’s finest and largest hotel but also a nexus of Washington society and politics. Some observers considered the Willard more the center of Washington and the Union than the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.

  The hotel had endured the hardships of war, the front desk clerk told them, but not without great effort and ingenious diplomacy. When tempers first flared over secession, the Willard brothers had tried to maintain peace between contentious factions by assigning Southern guests rooms on a single floor and urging them to use the ladies’ Fourteenth Street entrance, while Northerners were encouraged to use the main doors on the Pennsylvania Avenue side.

  “Which entrance should I use?” Julia inquired as the clerk passed Ulys their heavy iron room keys. “I am a western woman for the Union.”

  “You are the wife of our great general Grant,” the clerk said graciously. “You may use whatever entrance you like.”

  It was a relief to enter their lovely suite on the second floor and shut the door against the noise and bustle. Their rooms were comfortably furnished and appointed with all the modern conveniences—gaslights, polished mirrors, running water, and toilets. Best of all, the windows offered enticing views of the White House, rising tall, proud, and breathtakingly elegant on the other side of Lafayette Square.

  Julia scarcely had time to rest and unpack before the bellman began bringing up cards from callers. While Julia went down to receive them in the ladies’ parlor, Ulys went out to sit for a photograph at the offices of Matthew Brady. Julia wished she could have accompanied him instead, not that she wanted her heavy features and cross-eye preserved in all their imperfection. She was gratified that the ladies of the city’s political and social elite wished to make her acquaintance, but hours of smiling and clasping hands and conversing with dozens of friendly callers wearied her, so after supper, when Ulys left to spend the evening at the White House with Mr. Lincoln, she and Jesse retired early.

  She woke when Ulys climbed quietly into bed beside her sometime after midnight, smelling of tobacco and coffee. “How was your evening?” she murmured sleepily, rolling onto her side to snuggle up to him.

  “I would’ve enjoyed it more had my lovely wife been on my arm.” He kissed her on the forehead. “Tomorrow I’m leaving for the field. General Meade will meet me at Brandy Station, and he’ll accompany me to Culpeper Court House. I think I’ll make my headquarters there, but I want to take another look at the place before I decide.”

  “Shall Jesse and I accompany you?”

  “Not this time, my dear little wife.” He drew her closer. “But I’ll be obliged to return to Washington now and then to consult with President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, so you’ll see me often.”

  “Not as often as I’d like.”

  “Nor I.”

  Ulys and most of his staff departed for Brandy Station at ten o’clock the next morning, but in his absence, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Badeau, Ulys’s military secretary, dutifully escorted her whenever she needed to venture from the Willard. He was of Huguenot descent, a short, stoop-shouldered, red-haired, thinly bearded, blue-eyed fellow who would have had a scholarly air even without his wire spectacles. Before joining Ulys’s staff, he had served as a clerk in the War Department, as a reporter for the New York Evening Express, and as a brigadier general’s aide in Mississippi and Louisiana. Nearly a year before, Badeau had been severely wounded in the Siege of Port Hudson, and he had been sent to his home in New York City to convalesce. There, he confided to Julia as they strolled through the muddy
streets as she returned her calls, he had been tended and entertained back to health by two friends—the famous actor Edwin Booth and his somewhat less celebrated brother, John Wilkes Booth.

  “I imagine they made rather diverting nurses,” Julia remarked.

  “Quite so,” said Badeau, still limping from his injuries, as he probably would for the rest of his life. “I never knew whether my bandages would be changed by one of my friends or by Hamlet, Bottom, or King Lear.”

  • • •

  As Jule lifted her skirts clear of the mud and studied the street for the least treacherous crossing, the trill of a familiar laugh riveted her in place. Flooded with apprehension, she held her breath and turned her head slowly, scanning the faces of the passersby—and discovered Julia on the opposite sidewalk, laughing merrily on the arm of a short, red-haired, bespectacled officer.

  Quickly Jule turned back to face front. Julia and her escort were walking west on Pennsylvania Avenue, as was she. If Jule retraced her steps and fled home, she would surely draw Julia’s attention, but if she continued on, Julia’s gaze might alight on her all the same.

  Before she could decide what to do, an impatient gentleman brushed against her in passing, propelling her forward. Walking sedately, she silently berated herself for wearing her favorite knitted shawl, once dove gray but now fading black. She should have left it in Cincinnati with the rest of her old clothes, but it was warm and soft and boasted some of her finest, most intricate knitting. Gabriel had thought her especially beautiful in it, and she had kept it out of vanity, out of a foolish hope that he might admire her in it again one day.