Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Papa was well recovered by evening, but he was easily persuaded to remain home and rest rather than attending the inaugural ball. “I could stay to watch over him,” Ulys offered, all innocence, but his grin betrayed him.

  “It would be just like you to avoid your own inauguration ball,” Julia scolded, giving him a playful swat on the arm. “You are the president, and you must go, and finely dressed too.”

  After much conflict and controversy over where the ball should be held and whether it should be held at all, the inaugural committee, which had been refused permission to host the grand affair in the Capitol rotunda, had settled upon the unfinished wing of the Treasury Building, though evidence of ongoing work remained. There were several rooms for dancing, each furnished with an accomplished band, flooded with warm gaslight, draped in a profusion of bunting, and beautifully adorned with garlands and wreaths of flowers and evergreen. The allegorical painting Peace had been brought over from the Capitol and was on display in the Cash Room, another note of grace in a spacious chamber that boasted gleaming polished marble, a beautifully painted ceiling, and an airy balcony encircling all.

  Despite her concerns about Papa’s health, Julia had a marvelous time. She felt almost regal in her new gown of heavy white satin trimmed in point lace, her neck, ears, and hair adorned with pearls and diamonds. After receiving their six thousand guests, the Grant and the Colfax families withdrew to a private room and dined with their most intimate friends and family. Only afterward did Julia learn that some other guests did not get a mouthful of supper, or lost coats, hats, and wraps in the mad chaos of the cloakroom, or could not find their carriages afterward in the bedlam among the hacks on Fifteenth Street. Many a distinguished gentleman and distressed lady made their way home on foot through slushy streets, shivering without their wraps. “Everything today has been a great success,” a correspondent for The New York Times later remarked, “but the inauguration ball tonight was too much of a success to be really a good thing.”

  The Grants and their entourage had no difficulty securing their own carriages, and in the very early hours of the morning they rode home to the Grant residence on I Street, weary but glowing with pride and happiness.

  The entire household slept long past dawn, but by midmorning Ulys had reported to his offices at the White House, where Julia knew he was deliberating with his most trusted advisors about the remaining vacancies in his cabinet and elsewhere in the government. Julia spent the day enjoying the company of her family, receiving callers, and tending to Papa. When Ulys returned home for supper that evening, he remarked, “It’ll be a great convenience to me, and to my staff, when we reside in the Executive Mansion. You should make ready to move.”

  Julia adored their home and was in no hurry to relocate, and she had made no secret of it. “It’s impossible for me to make any arrangements with the house full of guests,” she explained, gesturing vaguely over her shoulder as if all the Dents and Grants stood behind her, affirming her words.

  The next day, Ulys returned from his new offices carrying a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. “A gift from the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” he said, placing it in Julia’s hands. “Mr. Chase had it delivered to you at the Executive Mansion, where he reasonably assumed you would be.”

  Blushing at his gentle rebuke, Julia untied the string and removed the paper. “Why, it’s a Bible,” she said, admiring the fine leather cover. A letter from the chief justice informed her that it was the very Bible upon which Ulys had taken his oath of office. “‘His lips pressed the 121st Psalm,’” Julia read aloud. “‘The Book will, I am sure, be to you a precious memorial of an auspicious day; destined, I trust, to be ever associated in American remembrance with the perfected restoration of peace, and with the renewal and increase of prosperity throughout our land.’ What a lovely sentiment.”

  “How fine that Bible will look on display in our private family drawing room at the White House,” Ulys said pointedly. Julia responded with a nod and a noncommittal smile.

  For a week their guests lingered, but all too soon, they prepared to return to their own homes, and Julia reluctantly accepted that she, too, must make arrangements to depart. The president and his wife must live at the Executive Mansion—it was customary, pragmatic, and far safer for them all. Ulys wanted to sell the I Street residence, and when Julia learned that generous donors from New York wanted to purchase it as a gift for General Sherman, she consented to the sale without further complaint out of friendship to him and Mrs. Sherman.

  When the Grants finally moved into the White House in late March, they found the residence in a state of utter confusion and disarray. Upon inspecting the family’s private quarters, Julia was so appalled by their dilapidated, threadbare condition that she immediately ordered the installation of new wallpaper, carpets, and furniture. The public rooms also required significant refurbishing, and so Julia set herself to the formidable task of organizing the household, arranging for repairs, and hiring servants.

  While Julia was settling into her role as official White House hostess, Ulys was assembling his cabinet and filling other important government posts. One of his first official acts as president was to appoint General Sherman as general in chief of all the armies. This he did over the objections of numerous senators, congressmen, and other advisors who urged Ulys to keep the position vacant so that he could return to it when his term as president expired. That sounded like an excellent idea to Julia, but when she tried to persuade Ulys, he adamantly refused. “I resigned my commission to become president,” he said firmly. “If I don’t fill the position of general in chief, neither Sherman nor any other general will be promoted. Sherman has always succeeded me as I climbed through the ranks, and I won’t deny him this promotion to save a place for myself four years from now. He deserves that office, and he’ll serve me and the country loyally in it.”

  “When you explain it that way,” Julia remarked, “I’m not only thoroughly convinced; I’m embarrassed that I ever objected.”

  Ulys gave her a wry smile. “I hope all of my opponents will be as amenable as you when the facts are placed before them.”

  “Oh, my dear Ulys,” she said, shaking her head, profoundly sympathetic. “No president in the history of the country has ever been that fortunate, though I would rejoice if you were the first.”

  Ulys’s cabinet was complete long before Julia’s renovations, and privately she suspected she relished her tasks far more. After so many years of pecuniary uncertainty, it was intoxicating to be able—not only able, but encouraged—to spend lavishly on furnishings and decor. The family quarters and the executive offices at the east end of the second floor received most of her attention, but she took special delight in choosing a new china service for state dinners and official events. She commissioned the artist William E. Seaton to create exquisite floral illustrations to grace the center of each piece, which were transferred to fine porcelain by the celebrated Haviland and Company of France. An elegant yellow-gold border bearing the Grant coat of arms provided what Julia considered the perfect final touch.

  Within a few weeks the White House began to assume some semblance of order, and by autumn the house was in excellent shape, the private family chambers comfortable and cozy, the public rooms elegant and magnificent enough to impress foreign dignitaries and heads of state. It was by any measure an Executive Mansion worthy of the president of a powerful, bountiful, and rising nation.

  • • •

  As the years passed, Jule followed her former mistress’s rise to the pinnacle of Washington society via the press, marveling at her transformation from a bashful belle of St. Louis to a confident, celebrated society hostess to the nation’s elite. Time and distance had softened Jule’s anger and whetted her curiosity, so she read with interest—and perhaps even a measure of fondness—of Julia’s obvious delight in her role as First Lady. The White House had become a magnificent stage for glorious
balls and receptions, levees and state dinners, where Julia entertained foreign ministers, princes, emperors, heads of state, and the most distinguished gentlemen and ladies of her own country.

  In January of 1870, President and Mrs. Grant received their first royal guest, Prince Arthur of England, Queen Victoria’s third-eldest son. A twenty-seven-course dinner was served in the state dining room, which was elaborately decorated with evergreen wreaths and boughs, a portrait of Queen Victoria, and the American and British flags. The center of the table was adorned with a magnificent floral arrangement surmounted by the royal crown of England and surrounded by nine bouquets representing the queen’s most precious jewels, her nine children. “The toilets of the ladies were extremely rich,” The New York Herald reported. “Mrs. Grant wore a dress of white satin, trimmed with Valenciennes lace and pearly and diamond ornaments. Miss Nellie Grant wore a blue satin, trimmed with puffed lace, and a broad sash of deep blue.” Jule could not help wondering who had arranged their hair, and how—thinking, somewhat jealously, that she would have done better.

  Whenever she read of such grand occasions, Jule would imagine Julia dressed in fine silk gowns amid distinguished company in gilded and marbled halls, and then she would remember Julia in a faded calico dress pulling weeds from the kitchen garden at Hardscrabble. “What a strange world it is,” she would murmur, shaking her head in wonder.

  Jule’s indignation rose whenever she read the occasional catty mockery of Julia’s cross-eye and dumpy figure, but she felt an unexpected surge of pride if a reporter praised the First Lady’s kindness, modesty, and friendly charm. “Mrs. Grant possesses a wonderful power of conciliating all distracting elements which helps to unite social and political society,” one lady reporter wrote warmly. It was little wonder, Jule thought, considering how throughout most of her life Julia had been obliged to reconcile intense contradictions within herself. She was the daughter of a slave owner wed to the son of abolitionists. She was generous and empathetic, and yet she had never felt a twinge of conscience as she enjoyed the comforts that had come from exploiting other human beings—Jule, Gabriel, Annie, Dinah, and too many more.

  Jule was satisfied for the nation’s sake and happy for Julia’s when President Grant was elected to a second term in November 1872, for she approved of several measures he had enforced to secure rights for people of color. He certainly could do more, Jule and her friends and neighbors agreed, but life was much better for their race under Grant than it had ever been under Johnson. Even so, Jule was less than confident in his position on woman’s suffrage, which had become one of her most ardent causes. The General Grant she remembered had been courteous to ladies, but he had never treated them as his intellectual equals. He had listened when his wife expressed her opinion on political and military matters, but to Jule he had always seemed to do so with an air of amused indulgence, as if entertained by the prattle of a precocious child. Jule could not imagine that he would trust Julia, and by extension, other women, with the vote.

  Rights for people of color, the vote for women, the care of colored orphans—those were to Jule the most pressing matters of her day. Her business had thrived in postwar New York, and with her success had come prosperity, respect, and a certain amount of fame. She had bought a comfortable home in Brooklyn, and with no children of her own to cherish, she had found fulfillment in supporting asylums for colored orphans. She had made many friends through her congregation, the Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, and when she realized her home was too large and quiet and empty for one lone woman, she adopted two children, a brother and sister. Charles and Dorothy were sweet and smart and curious and funny, and when Jule fed them breakfast and walked them to school and heard their prayers as she tucked them into bed at night, her heart swelled with happiness and gratitude. She had never expected to be a mother, to have any family but Gabriel, who had been gone so long.

  But as thankful as she was for her little family, it felt incomplete.

  Over time she had learned the merits of advertising. Her lotions, balms, and tonics had become popular throughout the cities of the East, not only because of recommendations from satisfied customers, but also due to the notices she regularly placed in newspapers. And so she began running “Information Wanted” advertisements in the press—first in New York, then in St. Louis, and after Texas was readmitted to the Union and communication became easier, in Dallas and Houston—seeking information about a man in his late forties called Gabriel, russet skinned and golden voiced, born in Missouri, last known whereabouts in Texas, possibly working as a groom or a minister.

  Each notice ended with the same quiet, urgent plea: “Any information concerning this gentleman will be gratefully received by Madame Jule of Brooklyn, New York.”

  • • •

  Julia’s darling Nellie was but eighteen in 1873 when she met the handsome, Oxford-educated Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris at sea while returning from a European tour, and her heart was swiftly captivated. Soon thereafter, Algernon, a twenty-two-year-old English officer assigned to the British legation in Washington, strode into Ulys’s study in the White House and declared, “Mr. President, I want to marry your daughter.” Ulys demurred, arguing that Nellie was much too young and the two had not known each other long. Unsettling rumors suggested that the young Mr. Sartoris would not be a suitable match for the president’s daughter—and more troubling yet, his own parents had written to warn Ulys that Algernon had given them much trouble and they were not optimistic about the marriage. But Nellie was thoroughly in love and swore she would never have another happy day without her Algy, and Ulys and Julia, mindful of their own parents’ objections to their betrothal, eventually gave their blessing.

  Nellie and Algernon wed in the East Room of the White House on a gloriously beautiful May morning the following year. Flowering trees filled Washington with shade and perfume, and seventy carriages brought two hundred guests to the Executive Mansion—generals, statesmen, diplomats, wealthy businessmen, and their elegant, beautifully attired ladies. Nellie was breathtakingly lovely in a heavy white satin gown trimmed with point lace, the Marine Band played soft, romantic music, and the banquet was a culinary triumph. Their distinguished guests enjoyed themselves tremendously—although many observed that President Grant was silent and tense throughout the ceremony and reception. Later, after Nellie departed on the arm of her bridegroom, Ulys was nowhere to be found. After most of the guests had gone home, Julia went in search of her husband and found him in Nellie’s room, sitting on the bed and weeping without restraint.

  Five months later, Fred, a lieutenant colonel on General Sheridan’s staff, married the lovely, enchanting Ida M. Honoré—not at the White House, but at the Honoré country home near Chicago. Julia and Ulys agreed that Ida was as amiable as she was beautiful, and they delighted in Fred’s wedding day as they had been unable to enjoy his sister’s. Not quite two years later, Ida gave birth to a beautiful daughter at the White House, and Julia was moved to tears when the happy couple announced that the child’s name would be Julia Dent Grant.

  But the family witnessed tragedy as well as happiness during their time in the White House. Nellie’s first child, a son named Grant Grenville Edward Sartoris, died before his first birthday. Consumption eventually claimed the life of the long-suffering Rawlins, who had served in the Grant cabinet as secretary of war, and two years later, his lovely wife, Mary Emma, perished of the same dread affliction. Jesse Root Grant died in Covington scarcely four months after Ulys’s second inauguration, and in December of that same year, Papa passed away at the White House, opinionated and curmudgeonly until the very end.

  Nor were all of their tragedies personal, for Ulys’s administration was plagued by scandal—the gold conspiracy crisis that culminated in Black Friday, the Delano affair, the Whiskey Ring, the Belknap scandal—and too many others, each with its own odious moniker for the press to bandy about in blistering editorials. Ch
arges of nepotism were so copious that Julia did not even try to keep track of them, but waved them off like so many swarms of irritating, biting flies. Julia staunchly believed that Ulys ran his administration as he had run his armies, with tremendous force of will, great honor, utmost integrity, and steadfast faith in the men he appointed to serve him. But far too often, his trust was betrayed. Time and again Ulys was exonerated of the crimes committed by his subordinates, but that did not quell the grousing of his critics in Congress and the press.

  But whatever obstacles appeared before him, Ulys regrouped and moved ever forward, refusing to retreat or retrace his steps. The people had made him president, but nothing could transform him into a politician. He was, and would ever be, a general.

  • • •

  In early spring of 1875, more than a year before the Republican delegates would meet to choose their nominee for the next presidential election, fervent speculation that Ulys would seek an unprecedented third term filled newspapers and drawing rooms and front porches across the country. Julia reveled in her role as First Lady and eagerly looked forward to another four years, but whenever she asked Ulys about his intentions, he evaded her queries with jokes or noncommittal replies.

  “I suppose when you finally make up your mind,” Julia lamented, “the press will know before I do.”

  “They’ll probably know before either of us,” Ulys remarked, ever calm and reticent.

  Finally, one Sunday afternoon at the end of May, Ulys informed her that he had written to the chairman of the Republican State Convention at Philadelphia to announce that he had no intention of running for a third term. Profoundly disappointed, Julia sank down heavily in a chair. “Was that kind, to send the letter before telling me? Was it just?”

  “You would have tried to talk me out of it, and I’ve made up my mind.”

  He was right, of course, but Julia still wished he had given her the chance to persuade him.