by Ron Chernow
At this point, Grant had no notion that St. Louis might form the backdrop of pivotal moments in his life. The city already ranked as a major port, its crowded wharves swarming with river captains, traders, fur trappers, miners, and merchants who supplied pioneer families. French and English were still spoken on its streets, reflecting its colonial roots. As a border state that permitted slavery, Missouri threw into dramatic relief the tensions roiling the country prior to the Civil War. From his growing liaison with the Dents, Ulysses S. Grant would be forced to straddle two incompatible worlds: the enterprising free labor economy of the North and the regressive world of southern slavery. An influx of liberal German immigrants had introduced into St. Louis a sizable community of small farmers with an abolitionist bent, sharpening tensions with large planters over slavery.
Poised on a hill, amid a grove of lofty trees, the main house at White Haven was tan-colored, with dark-brown edges, giant stone chimneys at both ends, and a two-story verandah in front. It boasted a barn, a lime kiln, an ice house, a chicken house, and other amenities. The Dents had moved out from St. Louis, making this their primary residence to escape pollution and disease prevalent downtown; with prices still affordable, they had amassed 850 acres of deeply rolling woodland. The Dent daughters always viewed White Haven through the softening haze of nostalgia. “Our home was then really the showplace of the county, having very fine orchards of peaches, apples, apricots, nectarines, plums, cherries, grapes, and all of the then rare small fruits,” wrote Julia.43 And Emma: “The farm of White Haven was even prettier than its name, for the pebbly, shining Gravois [Creek] ran right through it, and there were beautiful groves growing all over it.”44 The breathless prose thinly disguised the brutal reality that the Dents owned thirteen slaves—the figure would rise to thirty within a decade—who grew the cash crops of wheat, oats, corn, and potatoes that formed the basis of the family wealth.
Not until February did Grant meet Julia Dent, four years his junior, who had just wound up seven years at a tony finishing school in St. Louis. Elegance, taste, and refinement always qualified as magical words in Julia’s lexicon. Never a highly motivated student, she was nonetheless a voracious reader and well educated by the standards of her day. She loved the Iliad and the Odyssey and anything that savored of mythology and history. Her literary tastes ran the gamut from Samuel Johnson to Lord Byron to Victor Hugo. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, she claimed she had told her classmates of her wish to find “a soldier, a gallant, brave, dashing soldier.”45 She had spent the St. Louis winter with her parents’ friends, the O’Fallons, who had introduced her into local society, where she was courted by a steady procession of eligible young officers from Jefferson Barracks.
Both as a young girl and as a mature woman, Julia had a penchant for viewing the world through rose-colored spectacles. Late in life, when writing her memoirs, she depicted her girlhood in the flowery prose of a romance novel, allowing no shadows to tinge her past. The daughter of “noble, brave, true and loving” parents, she had been born after four boys and was thus “a veritable queen in our household,” a spoiled pet.46 “The first, ripest, mellowest of apples, peaches, and pears were mine, as also the brightest of flowers, all of which I owed to my brothers.”47 She presented her childhood as the picturesque saga of a southern belle pampered by adoring slaves. The “dear old black uncles always brought to me pet rabbits, squirrels, and all the prettiest birds’ eggs they found . . . 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.”48 In Julia’s view, the Dent slaves were all “very happy. At least they were in mamma’s time, though the young ones became somewhat demoralized about the beginning of the Rebellion, when all the comforts of slavery passed away forever.”49 It is not surprising that Julia Dent grew up seeing her girlhood in these storybook terms. It is surprising that when she wrote her memoirs as an elderly woman, the Civil War and Reconstruction had done so little to temper these retrograde views.
When Julia returned to White Haven that February, she had heard flattering descriptions of Grant from her mother and knew her sister Nellie already angled for his affection. Grant was about to ride off after a visit when he turned and saw Julia. The beardless lieutenant, young and inexperienced, made an immediate impression on Julia Dent. According to Emma, Grant told her “it was a case of love at first sight . . . that he had never had but the one love affair, but the one sweetheart in his life. Not even the boyish amours that usually precede a young man’s real passion had ever been his.”50 But it took time for Grant to fathom the depth of his attachment to Julia, and she was also slow to acknowledge the growing amorous nature of their mutual attraction.
Grant repaired to White Haven up to four times weekly to the point that he and Julia grew inseparable. He loved her spunk, gumption, and resolutely upbeat personality. Whether strolling by Gravois Creek or taking long rides down country lanes, they were totally comfortable with each other and fell into easy conversation. Grant delighted in teasing her affectionately, often playing practical jokes and showing a whimsical wit. When Julia’s pet canary died, Grant crafted a tiny coffin for the bird, painted it yellow, then coaxed eight young officers into attending a mock funeral. Even though Grant did not dance, he and Julia became fixtures at military balls. When Grant failed to show up at one, another officer inquired of Julia: “Where is that small man with the large epaulets?”51
By Julia’s own admission, she never counted as a stunning beauty. “It is needless to mention what everyone knows, that Dame Nature was most chary of her gifts to me, no single special talent did she bestow, and of personal charms she was simply miserly.”52 As a young girl, she worshipped an elusive beauty that she could never quite possess. “I used to cry when I was a little girl because I was so ugly,” she confided to a friend. “‘Never mind, Julia,’ my dear mother would say, ‘you can be my good little girl.’ I used to wish I could ever once be called her ‘pretty little girl.’”53 On some level, Julia seemed as famished for love as Grant.
Julia’s most glaring defect was a congenital lazy eye, a so-called strabismus, which meant that one eye turned inward. (One story claims that she suffered a childhood eye injury when an oar struck her in a boating accident.) This problem shadowed her life and surgeons repeatedly urged her to repair it. “I had never had the courage to consent,” she said. Her vision would worsen with the years, making it difficult to concentrate for sustained periods when reading or writing. Ulysses or a companion often read aloud to her. Julia was so self-conscious about the wayward eye that, even in the White House, she preferred to pose for photographs in profile.
Although Julia stood just five feet two inches tall and grew stout and homely with the years, she was a dainty adolescent with many attractive features. “I can only remember my abundance of soft brown hair, a fair complexion, and every one told me my feet and hands were fairy-like.”54 There was something captivating about her personality, with a zest, a warmth, and an animation that must have been balm to Grant’s soul after his parched Methodist upbringing with its legacy of stifled feelings. However plain others found her, for Grant she stood forth as the perfection of womanhood. From his reaction to Julia, one can see how much he secretly yearned for open displays of affection and needed the emotional outlet she so abundantly provided.
For Julia, Grant descended like some heavenly apparition in uniform. “I thought he was a Knight from one of the romances that I used to read . . . He entirely enchanted me . . . He was handsome, kind, honest, brave, he was scarcely real to a little girl like myself.”55 She loved his graceful form in the saddle, his sly humor and facetious quips, his shyly boyish manner. Julia sensed a decency about Grant that set him apart from other young soldiers. She was the first to discover that the supposedly silent lieutenant was a riveting raconteur, always ready with a rich treasury of anecdotes. But to her dismay, when others stopped by,
Grant tended to clam up. “I finally said, ‘Ulys! I told these people you were a fascinating and wonderful conversationalist. I think they have gone away disappointed. Why can’t you be as interesting to them as you are to me?’”56
Julia was destined to be the bedrock of Grant’s life, and he was a hero in her eyes long before he became a national hero. They formed the deep bond craved by bashful men who need the unconditional devotion of one loving, loyal woman. In the face of whatever doubts beset Grant, Julia offered implicit faith in his ability to succeed—a faith that endured even amid catastrophic failure. She was the first to divine the special qualities that lay behind his modest exterior. From early on, she believed in him more than he believed in himself and was more ambitious for him as well. She bolstered his confidence, soothed his wounds, and pierced through his shyness until he learned to count on her constant strength. Whatever her feminine charms, she had a core of steel, a will so fixed that family members nicknamed her “the boss.”57 In future years, Grant would seem adrift when Julia was not around.
As the cosseted eldest daughter, Julia grew up with an idealized picture of her father, Colonel Frederick F. Dent, who pumped her full of expectations that squared with his preferred self-image as a patrician planter. The colonel title was purely honorific. “He was one of the most prominent citizens of the State,” Julia said, insisting he had been “the kindest of masters to his slaves, who all adored him.”58 She went so far as to say that he “was most kind and indulgent to his people [i.e., slaves], too much so perhaps.”59 Clad in a long back coat, Colonel Dent often sat on the front porch, puffing his pipe and flipping through newspapers. A photo of him presents a fiery, pugnacious man, who directly confronts the camera. He has a bulbous nose, bushy eyebrows, wispy gray hair, and a sour, unfriendly expression; his hooded eyes stare back warily at the viewer. He was ferociously reactionary, loved to curse, and was unapologetic about the slaveholding South. Dr. William Taussig, a local mayor, remembered him as a hot-tempered character who feuded with neighbors and brooked no opposition. “He was a gentleman of considerable energy, masterful in his ways, of persistent combativeness, of the grim, set purpose peculiar to the Southerners of the old generation and was, where foiled, inclined to be vindictive.”60 “Old man Dent was a man without tact or respect for anybody,” a Grant friend recalled. “He was a fat old man, [who] drank a good deal.”61 Colonel Dent could be cordial until the talk turned to politics and then he grew dogmatic. Endowed with the entrenched prejudices of the planter class, he was fond of saying commerce had been ruined by Yankees who came west and “reduced business to a system.”
Although he identified with southern gentry, Frederick Dent was a Maryland native who made his earliest money performing road surveys and trading fur on the eastern seaboard. He married the beautiful young Ellen Bray Wrenshall, who was born in England, grew up in Pittsburgh, and was educated in Philadelphia. Around 1816 they struck out for the frontier and moved to St. Louis. Julia cherished the family legend of how they had lashed logs together to form a flotilla of three rafts, with little wooden cabins set on each raft, then floated from Pittsburgh down to Illinois before completing the final stretch by carriage.
Ellen Dent had all the sweetness and none of the vinegar in her husband’s dyspeptic nature. Pretty, demure, with a kindly nature and delicate health, she remained homesick for the refined life she had left back East. “She was a small, slender woman with rather serious gray eyes, a smiling mouth, and a gentle voice,” wrote daughter Emma. “I remember that she wore snowy caps and dainty kerchiefs on her head, as I have occasionally seen very old-fashioned old ladies do since.”62 Ellen Dent read aloud to her children, encouraged them to play music, and fostered the stimulating cultural atmosphere of the household.
It is a striking feature of Grant’s early life that women spied his hidden potential and forecast great things for him, whereas men counted his gentleness against him and overlooked his virtues. Ellen Dent immediately took a fancy to Grant, charmed by his unspoiled nature and quiet demeanor and his common sense in political discussions with the Colonel, a Jacksonian Democrat. Often, after Grant returned to Jefferson Barracks, she declared, “That young man will be heard from some day . . . He will make his mark.”63 As with Julia, Ellen’s premonitions only grew more pronounced with time. “She prophesied that he would rise to the highest seat in the government,” Julia wrote.64
Unfortunately, Colonel Dent governed his daughter’s fate with an iron fist and made no bones that he opposed her marriage to the young officer. With Grant he feared Julia would relinquish the style of life to which he had accustomed her. “Old man Dent was opposed to him, when he found he was courting his daughter, and did everything he could to prevent the match,” recalled Mary Robinson, one of the Dent slaves.65 The problem was not one of personality—Colonel Dent found Grant pleasant enough—but hardheaded money concerns. He took a dim view of army life and the economic austerity that accompanied it. “My father knew how arduous, pinched and restless was army life and how it provided few of the home comforts and opportunities for the care which a woman in delicate health might require,” explained Emma.”66 On the other hand, Julia was a young woman of rare determination and Grant a young man soon renowned for his tenacity.
Grant hardly needed another despotic father figure in his life, but that is exactly what he got. It did not help matters that the abolitionist Grants came to detest the slave-owning Dents and vice versa, leaving Julia and Ulysses caught in a cross fire that lasted for decades. It could only have damaged Grant to be at the mercy of both an adoring but overbearing father and a hypercritical future father-in-law who thwarted his desire to marry for several years. Trapped between these two men, the young officer was condemned to experience a prolonged adolescence in which he could never fully assert himself without getting slapped down.
That spring, Grant learned his infantry was being shipped to Louisiana. For Ulysses and Julia, the looming separation revealed the degree to which their emotions had been knotted together. Seizing the initiative, he decided to propose to her and ventured out to White Haven on a stormy night that tested his youthful mettle. When he reached Gravois Creek—which ordinarily lacked enough water “to run a coffee mill,” Grant joked—he encountered a churning, foaming river swollen by torrential rain. Throughout his life, he had a superstitious dread of turning back—a perfect metaphor for his bullheaded determination—and dove into the overflowing creek on horseback, turning up soaked at White Haven. “We all enjoyed heartily the sight of his ridiculous figure with his clothes flopping like wet rags around his limbs,” said Emma. Julia’s brother John, who was taller than Grant, gave him dry clothes that only made him look more laughable.67 Aware of his comical appearance, Grant blushed furiously.
During a weeklong stay at White Haven, Grant waited for a private moment with Julia and found it when, driving her by buggy to a St. Louis wedding, they paused on a bridge over a ravine. “On this ride, he declared his love and told me that without me life would be insupportable,” Julia recorded. “I was surprised at his telling me this, for although I was just eighteen, I was very young for my age and very shy indeed. When he spoke of marriage, I simply told him I thought it would be charming to be engaged, but to be married—no! I would rather be engaged.”68 Her reluctance upset Grant, but he realized he must tread carefully and exercise patience with this sheltered girl, especially when she pleaded with him not to tell her father about their engagement. Before leaving for Louisiana, he invited Julia to wear his class ring. “Oh, no,” she objected, “mamma would not approve of my accepting a gift from a gentleman.”69 In the end she wore the ring. Unaware of this secret engagement, Ellen Dent hoped the relationship would prosper. Colonel Dent hoped that with Grant packed off at a considerable distance, Julia’s emotions would cool off, she would come to her senses, and she would enter into a suitable match with a more affluent man.
CHAPTER THREE
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; Rough and Ready
WHEN ULYSSES S. GRANT joined his regiment in May 1844 at a place called “Camp Salubrity,” outside of Natchitoches in western Louisiana, his life suddenly meshed with a watershed moment in American history. A month earlier, President John Tyler, a Virginia slaveholder, had presented the Senate with a treaty to annex the independent Republic of Texas. Because Texas had legalized slavery, the treaty spurred impassioned debates between North and South, flaring into a national referendum over the westward spread of slavery. Speaking in upstate New York, William Seward articulated the Whig contention that Texas annexation would provoke an “unjust war” with Mexico “to extend the slave-trade and the slave-piracy.”1
Grant’s regiment camped near the Texas border as part of the Army of Observation. Its ostensible purpose was to deter American filibusters into Texas, but the unspoken agenda was to warn Mexico, which regarded the breakaway republic as renegade Mexican territory, against meddling in the proposed annexation. In his Memoirs, Grant blasted the Texas scheme as an imperialist adventure, pure and simple, designed to add slave states to the Union. “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”2 He always said he never forgave himself for going into the Mexican War.3 If Grant thought this way at the time—and some contrary evidence exists—he certainly was not outspoken about it. However wicked the war, he “had not moral courage enough to resign” and felt an overriding duty to serve the flag.4