II
CADETSHIP AND COURTSHIP
I don’t think we should ever dip into the professional military field for our Presidents…. Their education does not fit them for the job at all. To a graduate at West Point there is one prime objective in his training, and that is how much that hill out there is worth in terms of casualties to hold or to capture.
—Alfred M. Landon
You can have but little idea of the influance you have over me Julia, even while so far away. If I feel tempted to do any thing that I think is not right I am shure to think, “Well now if Julia saw me would I do so” and thus it is absent or present I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.
—Ulysses S. Grant
WHEN ULYSSES GRANT reached West Point in 1839 he was still a boy. At seventeen he weighed 117 pounds and was five feet one inch tall. His hair was sandy brown; his fair skin was freckled. His hands and feet were small, and then, as later, his body was not tightly muscled but smoothly turned. The journey to the academy had been exciting, with a canalboat portage of the Alleghenies and a first trip on the railroad from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. There, in his first large city, he stayed with Simpson relatives for five days, walking “about every street” in town and going to the theater. Then, alone, he went on to New York, where he again walked the intriguing streets. The experience was exhilarating, but he confessed later that he was “dallying” because “I had rather a dread of reaching my destination at all.” When, finally, he made the trip up the Hudson Valley to West Point, Ulysses Grant was as fresh faced and innocent looking as any new boy who had ever walked into Roe’s Hotel.1
Grant took advantage of his new start in life to tinker with his name. He had always been called Ulysses—pronounced U-lis-sis—and so he now gave his middle name first billing and wrote “U. H. Grant” on the hotel register. He continued to use the name Ulysses H. Grant for some time after a congressman’s haste had changed it for him. Thomas Hamer had had little time in which to respond to Jesse Grant’s urgings and make the appointment. He knew the boy as Ulysses and, needing a middle initial but forgetting that his name was Hiram, apparently recalled Mrs. Grant’s maiden name and sent in an appointment for “Ulysses S. Grant.” When the boy walked up from the hotel to register at the academy, he found on the roster appointments for two Grants—an Elihu Grant from New York State and a U. S. Grant from Ohio. He claimed the latter. Possibly he thought of correcting the name later, but he never did. Long before graduation and commissioning he was, irrevocably, U. S. Grant.2
West Point. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The cadet from the little town in southern Ohio was strikingly unnoticeable, a not inconsiderable advantage for a plebe. His slight frame somehow did not invite the taunts of the more pernicious hazers. Unlike the many cadets who found the first year torture, Ulysses Grant complained merely that it was “wearisome and uninteresting.” James Longstreet, proud of his massive physique, called Grant “delicate” and recalled that the man who became his powerful adversary in war had been too small to excel at any sport save riding, which he did exceedingly well. Grant amazed himself by doing well in his studies also. The thought of the academy had been intimidating and he had expected great rigor, but he passed his entrance examination “without difficulty, very much to my surprise” and in his courses did comfortable middling work. He did best in mathematics and least well in French, and in his second year at the academy stood tenth in a class of fifty-three. His performance is summed up well in his own words: “I never succeeded in getting squarely at either end of my class, in any one study during the four years.”3
There was little intellectual incentive to do anything ambitious with the dreary courses. The curriculum was sluggish partially because no one had a clear picture of what the education of soldiers was all about. French, taught badly by rote, was studied so the cadets could read untranslated treatises on war by Napoleonic experts, but there was no course in which these works were systematically investigated. In classic American fashion, West Point, while giving some recognition to the need for military leadership, refused to face up to the fact that the ultimate aim of this leadership was to get men to kill. Only subversively, in a highly popular course on engineering, did Dennis Hart Mahan edge into this aspect of a military education. In 1843, the year Grant graduated, the term “Science of War” appeared in the course listings for the first time, but the subject was still taught as an adjunct to Mahan’s course, in which the excitable high-voiced instructor preached his enthusiasm for war. He held a view of military history as progressive: since Thucydides, wars had been getting bigger and better, and finally his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, had perfected the science. Mahan’s interpretations were dependent largely on those of Antoine Henri Jomini, a Swiss student of war, and the professor’s good students, most notably Henry Wager Halleck, with whom Grant later contested, learned from this authority to see the battlefield as a chessboard on which opposing forces, in complex deployment, faced each other. It was an abstract concept of war, and to the later good fortune of the United States Army, Ulysses Grant seems not to have been interested in the cold theories of Jomini and was repelled by Jomini’s and Mahan’s hero; perhaps he perceived in the small, controlled, frightening, foreign Bonaparte something too close to his own urges for comfort. Later he detested hearing himself likened to him. Professor Mahan was president of the Napoleon Club, of which George B. McClellan was an enthusiastic member; Grant did not join.4
Class distinctions at West Point were not troubling. Far from being a last bastion of aristocratic values, West Point seems to have had very few values at all. James Lunsford Morrison has pointed out that the cadets in Grant’s time were drawn not from a rural gentry, but from the small-town bourgeoisie. Ulysses Grant, the Ohio town boy, was a more typical man of the academy than was Robert E. Lee of tidewater Virginia. West Point men were from families that were trying to gain advancement in position or to prevent slippage from a precarious place by having a son achieve—free—prestige that would open new doors. Some of both motivations were involved in Jesse Grant’s decision to send his son to the academy. Initially, Ulysses also tried to see West Point in this light, declaring, in a comfortable letter to his cousin, written in his first fall at West Point, “On the whole I like the place very much…. The fact is if a man graduates here he safe fer life.” Later that year his enthusiasm waned. Congress was debating abolition of the academy, and Grant hoped that it would be shut down.5
There was no action on this proposal in his first year, and by the time the legislation was introduced again, and failed, Grant no longer favored abolition. His change of mind, however, is not evidence that he had been reached by West Point’s greatest lesson; he had not been converted to the academy’s religious commitment to Duty, Honor, Country. The more devout West Point men saw the duties of their calling as apart from and above those of other pursuits in the Republic, but Grant would not have known what George S. Patton meant when he called West Point “a holy place.” Of his years at the academy Grant wrote, “A military life had no charms for me,” and in the West Point sense, it never did. Unlike many, Grant did not tangle himself emotionally in a knot of hatred and love for the great fortress of military virtue. He liked neither West Point nor peacetime army posts. It was war itself, not army life, that aroused Grant.6
“My pants sit as tight to my skin as the bark to a tree. And if I do not walk military, that is if I bend over quickly or run, they are very apt to crack with a report as loud as a pistol,” he told his cousin, and there were other aspects of military life that were still more trying. Grant found the officer-class mentality unattractive, and was uncomfortable when he had to be the witness who quoted the offending words at the court-martial of a cadet who had called an officious cadet officer “a d….d shit ass.” The pompous taking of such testimony in a pretentious trial exemplified, for Grant, the hollowness of the place. He himself became, of course, one of West Point’s most illustrious graduates, but Grant Hall was named after him in the face of the fact that he had seldom been happy there. Years later, at a sour moment in the White House, he wrote a friend that he would “hail” the day he left public office “as the happiest of my life, except possibly the day I left West Point a place I felt I had been at always and that my stay had no end.”7
Since he did not leave West Point, he had to find his own private escape within the school. In his Memoirs he wrote, “I did not take hold of my studies with avidity, in fact I rarely ever read over a lesson the second time during my entire cadetship. I could not sit in my room doing nothing. There is a fine library connected with the Academy from which cadets can get books to read in their quarters. I devoted more time to these than to books relating to the course of studies. Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of a trashy sort.” Here with his characteristic balance of boldness and conventionality, Grant credited himself with intellectual initiative and then, as quickly, apologised for it. Those books mattered to him; he felt it important to record his debt to them. They were good books, and reading them was fun. Grant read “all of Bulwer’s [novels] then published” (which means, if the library was keeping up with the prolific Edward Bulwer-Lytton, nine historical novels), James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, the naval adventure stories of Frederick Marryat, and the lively anecdotal novels of Charles Lever, the Irishman who wrote about exuberant young men traveling in Europe. Either the library’s collection of Lever disappointed Grant, or (like the duke of Wellington) he enjoyed the Lever so much that he wanted his own copies of the novels. In the spring of his last year at the academy Grant twice urged Lever’s American publisher to fill his order for Charles O’Malley and Harry Lorrequer.8
It is difficult to know how important this world of imaginative literature remained for Grant. In later life he disliked discussing literary matters, perhaps because of his lack of formal training or possibly because he liked the books themselves better than the talk about them. He was, for example, unwilling to admit his familiarity with literature in order to establish his intellectual credentials, even with a college president. His wife was both amused and dismayed when her famous husband returned from “a gentlemen’s dinner party and…telling me of the events and bright witticisms of the evening, as he invariably did,…said: ‘I am afraid I have ruined myself in the estimation of President——-[his host, whose name Julia left blank], who sat next to me at dinner…[and] at once began talking of books, mentioning one or two familiar names, and I—well, I looked as though if I had read that particular book I had forgotten it. After a while, he made some allusion to a character of Dickens. I was equally ignorant of poor little Oliver. So the old gentleman gave me up, and I enjoyed the rest of the evening.’” Julia Grant may have enjoyed her husband’s account of his escape from a tedious conversation, but she knew it would carry a price: “You will hear of this, remember!” Julia was correct: “…sure enough, within a year after General Grant’s death, Mr. —— did announce to his class that General Grant was no reader, citing the…incident as evidence.”9
If Grant was at home with good novels, he never revealed in what ways they stirred him. We can only infer, from their contents, what his mind was invited to explore. Luckily, we have better evidence of where he was carried by another expression of his imagination, drawing and painting. In his second year Grant took a required course with one of the most remarkable teachers ever to be part of the West Point faculty—Robert Walter Weir, the drawing master between 1834 and 1876. Weir had two talented sons, John Ferguson Weir, a baby when Grant knew him, and Julian Alden Weir; all three were painters of greater ability than has been generally recognized. Robert Weir was an attractive man and a consummate teacher. His studio was a creative haven in the sterility of West Point routine. The cadet was required to study art so that as an officer he would be able to sketch the bridge needed to cross a river, and to render the lay of the land when planning a battle, but for Grant, at least, these reasons for the course fell away. Neither he nor Weir seems to have worried about the military usefulness of his drawings; not even perspective got much of a nod.
Weir’s studio provided a road away from West Point concerns for a few hours. (Sometimes his students made the recess last; ten years after Grant’s time, Weir taught James McNeill Whistler, who chose a deficiency in chemistry rather than great proficiency in art as his permanent route out of the academy: “Had silicon been a gas,” he announced, “I would have been a major general.”) A good many cadets drew well, and Grant was one of them. There is no more beautiful prospect than that seen from the bluff—the Plain—at West Point: the hills to the north grandly plunge down to the Hudson, “that beautiful river” as Grant put it, “with its bosom studded with hundreds of snow white sails.” The view is one thing; the seemingly endless succession of nineteenth-century renderings of it is another. By 1840 Weir, recognizing how banal repeated representation could make even the most beautiful of places, appears to have directed his students to subjects farther away. Too bad. It would have been interesting to see how the river looked to Grant and more interesting still to see how the activities and the people of West Point appeared to him.10
Instead, Grant turned his imagination (and his pencil) toward Europe, no doubt under the influence of his teacher. Copying was the respectable way to learn drawing and painting, and Weir had studied in Rome and Florence. Grant had an aptitude for rendering, with considerable grace, Italianate landscapes and crowded marketplaces that bore little kinship to Georgetown, Ohio, or Maysville, Kentucky. There is a lack of originality, but not of curiosity, in his sketches of Old World towers and bridges, and there is a good deal of movement in the people, figured often at too great a distance for clarity, who move through his towns. But not all of his sketches were so genteel. Occasionally technical skill and an affinity for a subject came together well, as in the simple circular sweep of the shoulders and arms of an Indian woman holding a nursing child. (Both the trader and the Indian brave in this painting look surprisingly like the artist.) Another instance is his straightforward, witty painting of a draft horse. Although the legs of the little animal and the cart he pulls have the too charming look of a scene of peasant life one might bring back as a souvenir from Europe, the horse’s head, bent low into a feeding bag, conveys the heft of a real animal. This is neither the gleaming stallion of a romantic vision nor a picturesque Sicilian donkey, but rather an overharnessed little beast that Ulysses Grant has under perfect control.11
A horse that gave Grant at least equal pleasure was the one his father gave him to ride during the summer furlough after his second year at West Point, a time “I enjoyed beyond any other period in my life.” His family had moved to Bethel, Ohio, and the change was disconcerting for Grant, who had known no home other than Georgetown, twelve miles away. His father had bought an unbroken horse for him to master and ride while on leave. Here was a challenge and an opportunity for some fun. Knowing no one in Bethel save his siblings and parents, he used the horse as an excuse not to spend much time there. Instead, with old friends in Georgetown and a powerful young animal saddled beneath him, he had a perfect world. His home became not a place of confinement, but a comfortable base from which to roam, and he found “these ten weeks shorter than one at West Point.”12
Painting done by Ulysses S. Grant while a cadet at West Point, now at the United States Military Academy. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
With Grant’s immense fondness for horses, there can be little doubt that he was disappointed when upon graduation he was not assigned to the branch of service which was his first choice, the cavalry. He held up the tailor, hoping, to the last minute, that he could order a dragoon’s uniform rather than the less splendid clothes of an infantry officer. Grant feared making a fool of himself in negotiations and except for an unforceful letter written in the fall after graduation, requesting, unsuccessfully, a transfer to the cavalry, he did no politicking for the preferred assignment. Once, that fear of asserting himself ineptly had spoiled a fantasy. General Winfield Scott, six feet five and massive, in splendid uniform and with vast military dignity, had been reviewing the corps of cadets. “I thought him the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld,” Grant wrote, “and the most to be envied. I could never resemble him in appearance, but I believe I did have a presentiment for a moment that some day I should occupy his place on review….” Grant quickly dispatched the dream: “My experiences in a horse-trade ten years before, and the ridicule it caused me, were too fresh in my mind for me to communicate this presentiment to even my most intimate chum.” Minor childhood agonies were not after all minor.13
In Grant’s view, his graduation from West Point did not establish his life’s work. Almost immediately after receiving his commission, he was planning to resign from the army after the obligatory tour of duty as a second lieutenant (a customary practice of West Point graduates), but he had neither the assurance nor the inclination to enter his father’s world of business. Taller now—he had grown six inches and stood five feet seven—he was, at graduation, not in good health. When he got home to Ohio, he was down to the 117 pounds he had weighed four years earlier and was suffering from a respiratory ailment that made him fear tuberculosis, which had killed two uncles. The illness proved unimportant, however, and soon Grant put the splendor of West Point to the test. He dressed in his well-cut new uniform for a visit to Cincinnati and rode proudly down into town. On the main street, a little boy looked up and Grant expected admiration. Instead the child mocked the splendid warrior: “Soldier! will you work? No, sir-ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!!” Grant never again counted on a smart uniform to give him self-confidence.14
Although Ulysses Grant had been comfortable among the men with whom he lived at West Point, he developed no prescient friendships with those who were later famous. William Tecumseh Sherman and George H. Thomas were in their fourth year when Grant was in his first, and he was in his fourth year when George B. McClellan and Thomas J. Jackson entered. But Grant had no instinct or capacity for cultivating useful people, and those who had such inclinations did not find him worthy of their efforts. However, the parade of personalities did not escape his notice; Grant took in more than people realized, and he remembered things about men who, for their part, never noticed him at all. What he retained was not a sense of how to make these men useful to him, but rather a feeling for their capabilities. After Grant himself became famous, awkward claims of intimacy with him were made by many army officers whose remarks exposed them as unable even to recall his face. The evidence of later intimacy suggests that Grant may have been close to Simon Bolivar Buckner, a year behind him, and he roomed with the not very illustrious Rufus Ingalls, who later capitalized a bit on their long friendship. In his last year at West Point, Grant shared a room with Frederick Tracy Dent, and after graduation, both Grant and Dent were assigned to the Fourth Infantry Regiment, stationed at the Jefferson Barracks, outside St. Louis. The assignment pleased Dent since his family’s place, White Haven, was nearby. There was a great deal of free time, and Ulysses Grant soon was spending most of it with Fred Dent—and his sister Julia—at White Haven. Eventually, honoring an old American custom, he married his roommate’s sister.
Julia Dent during her lifetime turned White Haven in her imagination into a kind of Tara. She wrote in her Memoirs of an Edenic world on the family plantation:
…my time and sister Nellie’s was passed mostly out-of-doors. I had my nurse, dear old black Kitty, and Nell had Rose, a pretty mulatto. Besides, we always had a dusky train of from eight to ten little colored girls of all hues, and these little colored girls were allowed to accompany us if they were very neat….
Lieutenant Grant at twenty-one. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Once, when I was nine years old, I…had wandered far up the brook and deeper than usual into the woods when we came upon a beautiful, shadowy, moss-covered nook. My little maids exclaimed: “Oh! Miss Julia! Have this for your playhouse, and we will mark it out with all the pretty stones we can find.” Hastening to the brook they gathered all the “petrified honeycomb” and round boulders they could find, placing these so as to mark the supposed walls of my mansion.15
An intensely romantic vision of the past was of enormous value to Julia Grant. She was determined to make people see her as the center of a luxurious world in which she could command absolute attention. It was critical to her image of herself that people not recognize the plain truth of her life, about which she had never complained but against which she had relentlessly struggled. If she could make her girlhood beginnings at White Haven seem idyllic, then perhaps people would think the troubles she faced as a young woman had been just a minor interlude before all dreams came true for her in the White House. Julia sought to justify her hunger for that glamorous place by suggesting that her origins made it inevitable that she be there. Her need to be thought of as someone who had always counted was similar to Ulysses’ even if she expressed it in very different rhetoric. While he spoke in his own plain speech, she surrendered her personal voice and spoke instead with the intense sentimentality with which women of her class and time disguised rather than revealed their feelings.
Julia knew she was expected to be a dutiful daughter, and her references to her parents were entirely respectful. Ellen Bray Wrenshall Dent and Frederick Dent—“my gentle, beautiful mother and noble father, of whom I was always of proud”—had reached Missouri before 1820. According to family legend, they came part of the way along the Ohio River from Pittsburgh on a flotilla of rafts on which cabins had been built as living quarters. The rafts were manned by Dent, his good friend George Tracy, and two slaves. The rest of the way, it was said, they came in a fine carriage. White Haven, twelve miles outside St. Louis, where Julia grew up, was thought of as an ancestral Maryland home transferred west—along with all the mores and some of the slaves! “Most of our old colored people were from Virginia and Maryland, and papa used to buy for them great barrels of fish—herring from that part of the country.” With her bow to her father’s generosity, Julia sought to make her readers understand that her family had been rich enough to own and command slaves and kindly enough to treat them with whimsical largesse.16
Actually, the Dents were at least two generations removed from the old South; Julia’s grandfather lived in the western town of Cumberland, Maryland, and the aristocratic transfer to White Haven was preceded by detours into trade in Pittsburgh and again in St. Louis, where the money was made to buy the farm. Julia liked to see her origins as above commerce. She recalled her father as saying, “My daughter, the Yankees that have come west have reduced business to a system. Do you know now if a man wants a loan of a few thousand dollars for a few days—God bless you!—they want a note and interest.” (He was describing her future father-in-law with precision.) Colonel Dent, for his part, loved the “repose of a country life.” He was, in fact, a splendidly lazy old codger.17
But Julia’s mother “hated the country and this place [White Haven] especially.” In this one phrase the canvas is cut from the frame and the idyllic picture of Ellen Dent as the happy chatelaine of White Haven is gone. She had expected better than a Missouri farm, having ridden on horseback from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, in its greatest days, to go to school. The trip, after all, did not take her to a great future. However, en route she did move into a world of romance. The story goes that she stopped exhausted at a tavern only to find Aaron Burr and his traitorous men already there: “Mamma, though much fatigued, was very loath to lie on the settle, or bench, before them all to rest until they pressed around and made for her a bed and a pillow of their cloaks and begged her to rest, telling her she would be just as safe there as in her mother’s arms. Lying down at last, they covered her with another martial cloak, and she slept as soundly as the princess in the fairy tale.” (Safe in the keep of the most lustful prince of American history? It was an odd reverie.) Deprived of Colonel Burr, Ellen Wrenshall went back to Pittsburgh after her schooling and settled for Colonel Dent, who later, at White Haven, “gave up all occupation and passed his time in the summer months sitting in an easy chair reading an interesting book, and in the winter, in the chimney corner beside a blazing hickory fire, occupied in the same way.” When not reading, he could be counted on to pontificate on politics. As the years went on, praise for Jackson and Benton yielded to apologias for the Confederacy, and these grew no less fervent when, in his eighties, he moved in with the enemy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.18
The colonel’s daughter, Julia, attended the Misses Mauros’ boarding school in St. Louis, studied a bit of philosophy and history, and read not only Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield but some of the same novels that Ulysses read at West Point. But Julia was not well educated. In her Memoirs and in conversation she could introduce an interesting line of thought, but she could not sustain it. She did have a pleasant manner of speaking, and getting along with people was no problem; a perceptive granddaughter called her “childishly intense.” Physically, she was powerful; although she felt compelled to pretend a fluttering femininity, her fondest recollections were of an open outdoors world. She engaged in conventional competition with her sister Ellen (Nellie) in flirting with suitors, but it was her brothers whom she most admired and wanted to emulate: “My four dear brothers, John, George, Fred and Louis,* were brave fellows…and they were wonderful athletes too—such leaps, handsprings, pitching of quoits, as papa, mamma, Nell and I used to witness from the front piazza!”19
Julia got off the piazza as often as a girl could. She loved to fish. “Oh! what happiness to see that nibble,” she wrote, remembering her very early childhood, “to feel the pull, and to see the plunge of the cork; then the little quivering, shining creature was landed high on the bank.” Quickly and carefully, in her Memoirs, she re-established her femininity by noting that there was always a slave or a brother present to remove the fish from the hook. As she got older, she fished and hunted with her brothers and rode horseback with her sister. Once, coming to the Gravois when it was swollen with rain, they “stood confounded, watching the waters fairly laughing at us.” Julia said they could ford the stream on faith. Nellie asked what faith was; Julia, replying, “Little goose, believe you can and you can,” pushed her horse ahead through chest-high water and “went on…to the other side and scrambled up the bank….”20
The first of Fred Dent’s sisters whom the pleasant-looking sandy-haired young lieutenant met was Ellen, but when Julia got back from St. Louis she set her cap for Ulysses. Julia was no beauty; even at seventeen her figure was stumpy, she had more neck than chin, and she suffered from strabismus. A malfunctioning muscle caused her right eye to move up and down involuntarily. She was no match for her mother in appearance, and she knew it. As she was putting on a new dress one day, the “colored maids said…‘Oh, young Missus, you are looking very pretty, but you never will come up to Old Missus in looks.’” But Julia was lively and, when Ulysses arrived, determined. “Such delightful rides we all used to take!” she recalled; the “Lieutenant rode a bonny little brown steed with flowing wavy mane and tail. He called him Fashion. My horse was a beauty, a chestnut brown, and as glossy as satin, and such pretty ears and great eyes. She was part Arabian, and I named her Psyche. Such rides! in the early spring, the tender young foliage scarcely throwing a shadow.” The two were together daily. As Julia remembered it: “He was always by my side, walking or riding.” Ulysses recalled (with a bit of unexpected humor) social visits which had been their excuse for going off together: “We would often take walks, or go on horseback to visit the neighbors, until I became quite well acquainted in that vicinity.”21
They were in love. They barely knew what that meant until a day came when, on the next, they would not be able to see each other. Ulysses was going to Ohio on leave, with the prospect that his regiment would soon be given a new assignment. Julia recalled that before leaving Missouri, Ulysses “spent the whole day…. As we sat on the piazza alone, he took his class ring from his finger and asked if I would not wear it.” Julia first responded with the passivity of the flirtatious Southern belle: “Oh, no, mamma would not approve of my accepting a gift from a gentleman.” But later she leaped to determined action to establish the relationship; after Grant had gone from her house but before she was certain he had actually left the post, she “felt very restless,” ordered her horse, and “rode alone toward the Barracks, not feeling afraid.” There, she wrote, “I halted my horse and waited and listened.” But Grant was indeed gone: “So I rode slowly and sadly home.”22
At home she found friends who had come to spend the night: “When we young ladies retired, Josephine S. and I slept in my new bed and, according to custom, named the bedposts, and of course my absent friend was not forgotten.” Seventy years later, D. W. Griffith, as innocent of Freud as Julia had been, used this same image—the grasping of a stout tall bedpost—for Lillian Gish’s declaration of sexual arousal in Birth of a Nation; nineteenth-century life anticipated twentieth-century art. That earlier night, as Julia remembered it, “I did dream of Mr. Grant.”23
When Grant returned from his brief leave in Ohio, he found that his regiment had left for Louisiana. He immediately headed for White Haven. The Gravois Creek, which he had to cross, usually had less water in it than it takes “to run a coffee mill,” but it was now swollen from springtime rains. Grant’s recollections of that day reveal not only his ardor for Julia but a fundamental philosophy that goes far in explaining the Grant of Vicksburg and Petersburg—and of Appomattox and the gaining of the presidency: “One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go to places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side. So I struck into the stream….”24
The water stood higher than his horse, but Grant’s control was firm. As the animal swam, Grant headed him toward the opposite bank, and once the horse gained solid ground, he rode on to White Haven. There the young man borrowed clothes from his future brother-in-law, and when Julia came down, Grant in civilian clothes—not in the role of the dashing lieutenant—was the man she wanted. She told him she had dreamed he would come back this way; she told him, too, that her bedpost carried his name. He spoke of marriage. At nineteen, Julia claimed, she was too young, and she requested that he not ask her father for her hand. However, she did now accept his class ring (“and wore it until he replaced it by the little band of gold I have worn so long”). She both did and did not want to be engaged.25
Although she was forced by her upbringing and the age she lived in to speak in the most sentimental of tongues, Julia was as tough and determined as a person could be. She and Ulysses Grant were of equal strength, not only in the figurative sense of having a similar balance of positive and negative elements of character but also in the literal sense of having equivalent physical capacity. Julia was a strong woman. There is a legend in the family that one day, while Ulysses and Julia were sitting on the porch at Long Branch, their son Buck ran out of the house and ignoring the porch stairs, hopped the railing. Amused, the general asked his wife what she would do if there were a fire and the railing ran clear around the porch. Without a word, Julia got up, walked to the railing, grasped it with both hands, and vaulted to the ground below.26
The story is believable. The countless photographs of Mrs. General Grant stuffed into silk and seemingly immobile say more about the clothes than about the woman who wore them. They were designed to demonstrate that the social goal of uselessness had been reached, that the general’s lady was important enough not to have to do anything. But the woman who wore them was sturdily healthy. There is evidence of only the most transient and minor illness in her lifetime; she bore four children with no record of difficulty, and lost none. She lived for seventy-six years. When as tourists at the Paris exposition in 1878 the Grants tested an elaborate scale that was on display, Ulysses weighed 165 pounds, Julia 175 pounds. By then she had to watch her weight if she were not to make a mockery of the chat about fashion and fabrics that filled her letters to relatives. But what all that stuff strained to contain was a body of considerable power. There was a will to match. She was known in the family as “the boss.” Behind the façade of a demure, diffident helpmate was a person of great determination, resolved to make much of her life even if the vehicle for the effort was a not very promising husband.27
And so Ulysses Grant was going to marry up. He sought in a new family the strength he had not felt in his own. He had not found in his father or mother “the influence,” the power and direction he needed. He could not articulate it alone; he needed to find some way to be himself—some path of action that expressed Grant. In the Dents he saw, he thought, a family sure of itself. He liked Fred Dent, he was impressed by old Colonel Dent, he was welcomed by Mrs. Dent. Julia embodied all that these people offered and, of course, more. There is every suggestion that over the years theirs was a close and rich sexual relationship. Ulysses was an attractive man physically, and graduation from West Point had given him (as it had Fred Dent) a certain importance that compensated for lack of money. Julia probably would have married him for his given name alone, but luckily, her family found him worthy of a woman whose family’s social ledgers contained both legends of ancient Maryland and actualities of prosperity in Missouri. The young lieutenant would do for the energetic but unlovely Dent daughter. But from the time of their engagement it was up to Ulysses to prove that Julia Dent had not made a mistake.
Once engaged, Julia and Ulysses still had to do a good deal of waiting before the marriage took place. Their courtship continued by correspondence for four years, while he was stationed in army posts in Louisiana and Texas, and with the invading American forces in Mexico. However, this long period in their lives was not a void. The eroticism of hesitation was a vital component of protracted Victorian engagements. Julia’s letters do not survive, but from Ulysses’ responses, which do exist, we can see that she teased him with talk of other suitors. He in turn sent her precise descriptions of the intriguing people he met, as in this account of his first trip up the Red River: “The boat was quite small and considerably crouded with passengers and they not of the most pleasant sort; a number of them being what are usually called Black Legs or Gamblers; and some of them with very cut throat appearances. There was some of them that I should very much dislike to meet unarmed, and in a retired place, their knowing I had a hundred dollars about me….” Grant’s evocations of place were richer than his character studies; of the same trip up the Red River he wrote, “The first hundred miles looks like a little deep and winding canal finding its way through a forest so thickly set, and of such heavy foliage that the eye cannot penetrate.” He shared his new worlds with Julia, but his letters were given over less to such descriptions than to pleading that she gain her parents’ consent to their marriage even though he was on active duty in the army.28
To overcome parental objections to Julia’s living on army posts, he offered to resign from the army and take an instructorship in mathematics in a college or work for his father in the new leather-goods store and distribution center in Galena, Illinois. Grant was a determined lover and overcame Julia’s sometimes flagging interest with no-nonsense reminders of the times they had spent together: “But why should I use to you here the language of flattery Julia, when we have spoken so much more plainly of our feeling for each other?” It was not his fault that their marriage was long delayed. When—to get ahead of the story—he came home from the Mexican War, he went to St. Louis to see Julia and then after a brief visit to his own family returned, without either of his parents, for the wedding. Julia Dent and Ulysses Grant were married on August 22, 1848, not in a bower at White Haven, but in the Dents’ house in town.29
The couple were seldom again apart. Only in 1852–54, when Grant was stationed on the West Coast, were they once more separated as they had been in the long engagement years. They could not endure this separation, and for the rest of their lives—including the years of the Civil War—they were rarely apart for more than a few weeks. Already in the correspondence of their courtship, Grant expressed not only his need for Julia but his dependence on her. From New Orleans in 1845, just before he went off to Mexico and his first war, he wrote, “You can have but little idea of the influence you have over me Julia, even while so far away. If I feel tempted to do any thing that I think is not right I am shure to think, ‘Well now if Julia saw me would I do so’ and thus it is absent or present I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.”30