Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule (26 page)

The column needed more than four hours to cross Pennsylvania Avenue. After the soldiers came scores of ambulances, followed by thousands of cattle to feed the troops, all heading across the river to Virginia. A sense of purpose and determination filled the city, from the marching soldiers to the people lining the streets showering them with blessings and good wishes. And then they were gone, leaving hope and fear and anticipation and apprehension in their wake.

The crowds dispersed, and Jule, too, turned toward home. Now, she knew, the citizens of Washington City would again prepare for the inevitable deluge of casualties.

•   •   •

In New York, Julia anxiously awaited Secretary Stanton’s telegrams bringing her news from the front.

Ulys’s army and Lee’s clashed in the Wilderness, and the dead and wounded poured into Washington from field hospitals, just as they had after the battles at Bull Run, the Peninsula, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Julia felt faint when she imagined the noxious odor of bodies in the summer heat hanging sickly sweet over every street and alley, no corner of it spared the miasma of death. She was stung, too, by a guilty grief when she learned that General Longstreet had been seriously wounded in the neck and shoulder in the battle, accidentally shot by Confederate troops who had mistaken him and his companions for federal cavalry. Julia did not know where her cousin had been taken or whether he was expected to live or die. When she closed her eyes to pray for him, she saw him as he had been on her wedding day, standing beside Ulys, handsome and happy and gallant in the uniform of the nation he would eventually repudiate. She knew that the best she could hope for was that Cousin James would recover from his wounds but would be unable to return to the field.

From the Wilderness the fighting moved on to Spotsylvania Court House, and from there to the North Anna River. Casualties were massive on both sides, disproportionately so for the Union, but the outcomes of the battles were tactically inconclusive. As stunned as the people of the North were by the staggering tolls of the dead and wounded, they were also heartened by what Ulys did each time he failed to destroy General Lee’s army: In circumstances where his predecessors had retreated, he regrouped and moved his valiant army forward, again and again, keeping General Lee on the defensive and inching ever closer to Richmond. Everyone then realized what Julia, well aware of his superstition about retracing his steps, had known for decades—General Grant possessed a very different military mind than the people of the Union had yet observed in that terrible war.

In the second week of May, an escort was secured at last and Julia and Jesse left New York for St. Louis, so she missed the long-awaited letter Ulys had sent her from Spotsylvania Court House. Colonel Hillyer telegraphed her the essential details, but it was not until she arrived in St. Louis several days later that she held the precious letter and read it entire.

Near Spotsylvania C. H. Va.
May 13 1864

Dear Julia,

The ninth day of battle is just closing with victory so far on our side. But the enemy are fighting with great desperation entrenching themselves in every position they take up. We have lost many thousand men killed and wounded and the enemy have no doubt lost more. We have taken about eight thousand prisoners and lost likely three thousand. Among our wounded the great majority are but slightly hurt but most of them will be unfit for service in this battle. I have reinforcements now coming up which will greatly encourage our men and discourage the enemy correspondingly.

I am very well and full of hope. I see from the papers the country is also very hopeful.

Remember me to your father and family. Kisses for yourself and the children. The world has never seen so bloody or protracted a battle as the one being fought and I hope never will again. The enemy were really whipped yesterday but their situation is desperate beyond anything heretofore known. To lose this battle they lose their cause. As bad as it is, they have fought for it with a gallantry worthy of a better.

Ulys.

As she read, Julia envisioned the scenes of carnage so vividly that she wept—for Ulys, for his courageous men, for the fallen men and widowed women on both sides.

By the first day of June, Ulys had driven the Army of the Potomac closer to the Confederate capital of Richmond than it had been in two years. At nine o’clock that night he had written to tell Julia that a very severe battle had taken place that day, and that despite the late hour he still heard firing along some parts of the battlefront. “The rebels are making a desperate fight,” he had written, “and I presume will continue to do so as long as they can get a respectable number of men to stand.”

Ulys wrote with such unadorned composure that if not for the press and Secretary Stanton’s occasional telegrams, Julia almost could have imagined that he was back in Washington, miles away from the horrors at Cold Harbor, where six thousand brave Union soldiers died within a single hour on the way to a costly defeat.

Ulys—her valiant general, her victor—was indomitably resilient despite setbacks that would have staggered a lesser man. On June 15, he directed his engineers to construct a pontoon bridge twenty-one hundred feet across the James and stealthily moved his troops over the river, catching General Lee entirely by surprise. “Since Sunday we have been engaged in one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army,” Ulys wrote to her later that same day, although nearly a week passed before she received the letter, “that of withdrawing from the front of an enemy and moving past his flank, crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have to improvise. So far it has been eminently successful and I hope will prove so to the end. About one half of my troops are now on the South side of the James River.”

Julia needed Fred to show her on his maps to be sure, but her hopes were justified—Ulys’s army now threatened Petersburg, the most important supply base and railway depot for the entire region, including the Confederate capital of Richmond. When Ulys captured Petersburg, Richmond would inevitably fall—and so too would the Confederacy.

While Ulys conducted offensive maneuvers north and south of the James River to extend his siege lines and attempt to cut off Confederate supplies, Julia made what contributions she could to the Union cause. She joined sewing bees to make uniforms and necessities, often bringing Nellie along to help with the easier tasks. She visited wounded soldiers at Jefferson Barracks, which had been converted to a military hospital in 1862 and held more than three thousand beds, which were nearly always full. She patronized sanitary fairs and performed whatever kindnesses she could for Union widows and orphans, who were increasing in number day by day.

At Wish-ton-wish, where Papa resided most of the year, she could lose herself in simple pleasures—putting the pretty cottage in order with new India matting and muslin curtains, reading aloud with the children on the rose-covered piazza, strolling in the cooling shade of the forest. On rainy mornings when she could not go riding, she lingered over breakfast with Papa to discuss politics—or rather, to listen while he opined and then to tease him with questions that toppled his arguments, or at least rattled them a little. The last of the Dents’ colored servants had left them long ago, but Papa had hired German and French immigrants to replace them, and he grudgingly acknowledged that they performed their duties just as capably. Why shouldn’t they, Julia thought after observing them for a few days, with ambition and the lure of prosperity to motivate them rather than the fear of the lash?

She wondered what had become of Jule. She resigned herself to never knowing.

Throughout Julia’s visit, the family had many visitors, for although most of Julia’s old friends with Confederate sympathies shunned her, neighbors and acquaintances loyal to the Union sought her out. Julia had never realized how much work it was to entertain guests until she had to do it without the old family servants who had been with them for years, sometimes their entire lifetimes, and knew the house and the family’s needs better than they did themselves. Slavery was a selfish necessity, she had told herself in the early years of her marriage whenever Ulys’s steadfast opposition made her doubt the traditions of her people. After Jule fled, so dignified in her anger, Julia had begun to question whether slavery was necessary at all, or merely selfish. Watching the colored soldiers in Union blue march and drill and suffer in military hospitals, observing that the end of slavery in Washington City and elsewhere had not brought about the economic ruin advocates of the “peculiar institution” had ominously predicted, Julia realized that the answer was obvious. She had simply been too concerned with her own comforts to see it.

J
UNE
1864–J
ANUARY
1865

I
n the middle of June, Ulys established his headquarters at City Point, Virginia, fixed his sights on Petersburg, and settled in for the siege.

As the summer passed, Julia decided that she ought to establish new headquarters too: a residence in a city in the East within an easy day’s journey of City Point, someplace with excellent schools for the children. Ulys agreed, and so at the end of August, Julia packed up the children, bade farewell to Papa and her sisters, and headed to Philadelphia.

Her brother Frederick, newly appointed to Ulys’s staff, met them at the station. His fair hair was thinner than she remembered, and his angular face boasted a new thick mustache and chin beard, but his familiar military bearing was as upright and precise as ever. The children showered their uncle in hugs and kisses, which he heartily returned, adding a warm embrace for Julia. “Ulys regrets that he couldn’t be here to welcome you,” Frederick added, smiling sympathetically. “But you know as well as anyone that while the war lasts, no one can fill his position but he.”

“Of course I understand.” Julia embraced her brother again, overjoyed to see him after their long separation. “I’m honored that he sent his very best officer to meet us.”

Fred had arranged for a carriage to take them to the Continental Hotel, and while they awaited Ulys’s summons, they caught up on all the family news and made inquiries about a more permanent residence for the family. Two days after their arrival, Ulys telegraphed that Frederick should immediately escort Julia and the children to visit him at City Point.

The next morning, after Julia scrubbed the children thoroughly and dressed them smartly, they departed by train for Baltimore, where they boarded a steamer that carried them down the Chesapeake, past Fortress Monroe, and up the James River to City Point. When their steamer docked beside Ulys’s headquarters boat, it was all Julia could do to restrain the children from disembarking before the crew set the gangplank in place. Then they ran ashore and raced aboard their father’s boat.

Escorted by her brother and greeting officers she knew in passing, Julia followed her children’s shouts and shrieks of laughter to Ulys’s stateroom. When she at last found her darling husband, she burst out laughing, for he had a child dangling from each arm, a leg, and his shoulders, his coat was askew, and his cigar, though clamped firmly between his teeth, seemed seconds away from tumbling to the floor.

“I think they’re happy to see me,” he remarked by way of greeting when he saw her standing in the doorway. His eyes shone with affection.

“Oh, Ulys,” she murmured, hurrying to embrace him. He freed an arm long enough to pull her close and kiss her, but moments later his sons wrestled him to the floor, while Nellie danced around them, clapping her little hands and cheering, “Get up, Papa! Get up! No surrender!”

Suddenly a shadow darkened the doorway, and all the Grants as well as Frederick glanced up to discover one of Ulys’s aides-de-camp, dispatches in hand, staring in mute astonishment at his general in chief, whom he had discovered on the floor, interrupted in the middle of a rough-and-tumble wrestling match.

Red in the face and chuckling, Ulys got up at once and brushed off his knees. “Well, Horace,” he greeted the lieutenant colonel apologetically, “you know my weaknesses—my children and my horses.”

City Point proved to be a much busier place than Julia had imagined. Gunboats, monitors, and transports crowded the river, and vessels of every description lined the quartermaster’s docks, where men unloaded stores and munitions for the army. Storehouses all around the wharf were being filled at a steady pace, and a near constant stream of wagons traveled to and from the front. It was a splendid summer day, sunny and breezy and not too hot, and the children were enchanted by the sights and sounds of the military camp—the boats moving briskly up and down the James on military missions, bright flags whipping in the breeze, bugles calling from the heights down to the river. When the children begged for a tour, Ulys obligingly led them from the headquarters mess, past the rows of white tents where his brave soldiers slept, to his own larger tent—which they thoroughly explored and insisted had room enough to accommodate them all quite comfortably if he would let them stay.

Julia held fast to Ulys’s arm nearly every moment of their visit, so happy was she to see her beloved husband again, so reluctant to part from him at the end of the day, as she knew she must. They had little time alone, so it was not until the afternoon waned that she found a moment to inquire about the war. With Ulys apparently unable to advance upon Richmond except in the smallest of increments and General Sherman stalled near Atlanta, the Union advance seemed to have ground to a dispiriting halt.

“The siege of Petersburg will succeed,” Ulys told her with unmistakable certainty. “Richmond, too, is suffering the effects of the blockade, and it’ll crumble from the inside out if my troops don’t capture it first.” He touched a finger to her lips. “Now, my dear little wife, this is for your ears alone. You mustn’t repeat anything that I tell you, not even to someone you assume is utterly loyal.”

“You have my solemn vow that I won’t breathe a word to anyone.”

Late in the afternoon, Frederick escorted Julia and the children back to Philadelphia, from whence they launched their search for a suitable residence for the duration of the war. After considering Philadelphia and other cities in the region, on the advice of friends they chose nearby Burlington, New Jersey. Frederick went ahead to scout for a house, and when he found a cottage pleasantly situated in a good neighborhood, he immediately secured it for them.

Ulys was in the Shenandoah Valley conferring with General Philip Sheridan when Julia and Frederick moved their little household about twenty miles up the Delaware River to their new home. “What an excellent brother you are,” Julia exclaimed when she saw the pretty two-story cottage her brother had discovered. Verdant ivy covered the spacious porch, tall fir trees flanked the front gate, and French windows upstairs and down let in sunny views of the garden.

It was a lovely but lonely home in which to pass the long days until she could see Ulys again.

•   •   •

After a dismal summer full of stalemate, discouragement, and defeat, General Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in early September elevated Mr. Lincoln from a beleaguered administrator into a triumphant commander in chief. As hope for a victorious conclusion to the war soared throughout the Union, Radical Democracy Party candidate General Frémont withdrew from the presidential race, and as Election Day approached, Democrat General McClellan, the popular but perpetually hesitant military commander who did not support his own party’s peace platform, seemed a dangerously imprudent choice.

On the first Tuesday of November, Julia sat up late, too anxious to sleep, until a messenger brought word that Mr. Lincoln had been reelected—and decisively so, receiving fifty-five percent of the popular vote and an enormous margin in the Electoral College, two hundred twelve votes to General McClellan’s twenty-one. Best of all, her home state of Missouri, so long conflicted over the questions of slavery and secession, had proven its loyalty by choosing Mr. Lincoln.

Soon thereafter, Ulys was able to leave headquarters long enough to visit Julia and the children in Burlington, but although they were happy to be reunited, Ulys could not rest for the steady stream of visitors who descended upon the cottage to pay their respects. He was constantly reading telegrams and issuing dispatches, and it seemed that no sooner had he arrived than he was obliged to depart. On his way back to City Point, throngs of admirers turned out to cheer him all along his route, and to his consternation, the press printed detailed accounts of his movements, divulging his whereabouts not only to loyal citizens, but also to the enemy, who read Northern newspapers smuggled through the lines almost as soon as did the residents of the cities where they were printed.

In early December, Julia repaid his visit, traveling by train to Washington City, where she boarded a steamer and sailed down the Potomac to Fortress Monroe. There Ulys met her, and she transferred to his boat so they could continue on to City Point together.

Julia enjoyed every moment of her visit, her time alone with Ulys most of all, but also meeting his staff officers, the corps commanders, and the many distinguished gentlemen who came down from Washington City to tour the camp and confer with the general in chief. Often their ladies accompanied them, and, by popular custom, many requested buttons from Ulys’s coat as souvenirs.

“I think it is very silly for ladies to be cutting off your buttons,” Julia said tartly one afternoon after lunch, sitting with Ulys at headquarters, enduring eyestrain and headache to sew buttons back onto his coat while he read dispatches. “Your loyal and devoted admirers don’t seem to consider how their general appears with half a dozen buttons missing from his uniform.”

Ulys looked up from his papers, mulled it over, and shrugged. “Very well. From now on, if any lady wants a button, I’ll refer her to you.”

In the days that followed, ladies appealed to Julia for buttons in ever increasing numbers, pretty maids and charming wives and earnest dowagers alike, and despite her reluctance she felt obliged to consent. It seemed too trifling a thing to refuse, especially since so many of the ladies were parted from brave husbands, sons, and sweethearts serving in the Union army.

On another occasion, Julia was strolling alone on the deck when she encountered a young woman clad in a simple, dark-blue wool dress and shawl approaching the stateroom Julia and Ulys shared. Her head was swathed in a veil and she carried a plump, rosy-cheeked baby.

“I would like to see General Grant, please, madam,” the woman asked breathlessly, her voice shaking with agitation.

“When I left the general he was resting,” Julia replied. “I don’t believe he can see anyone presently.” In truth, Ulys was suffering from a sick headache. Julia had applied a poultice to his brow and had left him alone in their quiet, darkened stateroom, hoping she had remembered Jule’s recipe correctly, wishing forlornly that Jule had been there to guide her.

“I must see him,” the young woman implored. “I must see him! I will!”

“I’m very sorry, but—”

“Oh, madam, please let me see him!” She burst into tears, and the child in her arms fussed and mewed. “My husband is sentenced to be shot!”

“Oh, my goodness. When?”

“This day, at twelve o’clock, and it’s all my fault.” Shaking her head, the sobbing woman paced and patted her baby on the back in a futile attempt to calm him. “Our son is seven months old, and my Bob had never seen him, so I wrote and begged him to come.”

“I see,” Julia replied, dismayed. “You do understand that soldiers can’t simply leave the army without permission, don’t you?”

“I thought they’d never miss him from out of all these thousands of men.” The distraught young wife drew closer to Julia, the desperate plea in her eyes visible even through her veil. “My Bob did come home as I asked, and he was on his way back to the regiment when they caught him and now they say he must be executed for desertion. Oh, please do let me see General Grant!”

“Wait here,” said Julia. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She slipped inside the stateroom only to find Ulys awake, dressed, and preparing to light a cigar. “Ulys, a young lady wishes to see you on a most urgent matter.”

Quickly Julia told him the sad tale, but even before she reached the end, Ulys was shaking his head regretfully. “I can’t interfere. The lady should petition General Patrick.”

“But her husband is meant to be shot today at noon, and it’s nearly nine o’clock now.”

“Julia, it’s not appropriate for me to intercede.”

Pressing her lips together and inhaling sharply, Julia strode to the door, flung it open, and announced, “You may enter and tell General Grant yourself.”

Julia stepped into the corridor and waited just outside the door, listening to the woman’s soft entreaties and Ulys’s rumbling questions. Soon thereafter, he called Julia back inside. “Have paper and ink brought to me,” he commanded, and with a nod she hurried off.

Before long the young wife emerged from the stateroom, the baby dozing on her shoulder, a folded piece of paper in her hand. “Thank you, madam,” the woman said, her face transfigured by joy. “God bless you, and God bless the general.”

Julia nodded in farewell, and as the woman hurried off to see to her husband’s reprieve, Julia hesitated a moment before entering the stateroom. “Thank you, Ulys.”

He frowned, but without rancor. “I’m sure I did wrong.”

“I’m sure it would have been a far greater wrong to deprive that young woman of her husband and the child his father.”

“You may think so, but I’ve no doubt that I’ve just pardoned a bounty jumper.”

Silently Julia inclined her head to him. She knew the importance of discipline in the ranks, but she also understood a soldier’s longing to see a child born in his absence. Ulys ought to empathize even better than she. Surely he had not grown so great that he had forgotten the loneliness and misery that had compelled him to resign from the army when Fred and Buck were very young.

•   •   •

On Christmas Day, Washington City rang with the thrilling news that General Sherman had reached the Atlantic, the terminus of his march across Georgia. Word quickly spread that he had sent the president a telegram declaring, “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

The citizens of the capital celebrated Christmas with a fervent, patriotic jubilance Jule had never before witnessed, and their renewed interest in merrymaking kept her satisfyingly busy dressing the hair and beautifying the skin of the social elite. For the first time in her life, she had plenty to eat, nice dresses to wear, a comfortable room to call her own, and a steadily increasing savings.