“I do have one condition.” Jesse shifted in his chair, his gaze darting to Julia before fixing squarely on Ulys. “Julia and the boys will remain here with us, or go home to Missouri and her own people.”
“Why,” asked Ulys, carefully measuring his words, “would you require me to leave my wife and children behind?”
“You’ll learn your new occupation faster without distractions.” Jesse frowned and jerked his head in Julia’s direction. “And your wife will benefit from time with us. Julia’s too extravagant with your money, but we’ll teach her economy. From the cradle she’s lived on a lavish scale at the expense of other human beings, but with us she’ll learn a different way.”
Quietly, Julia drew in a breath. She wanted to flee the room, and yet she could not move. Jesse and Hannah were studiously ignoring her, awaiting Ulys’s reply.
“You leave me no choice, Pa,” he said evenly, rising. “I must refuse your generous offer, but thank you all the same.”
Hannah sighed and shook her head. As Jesse’s brow knit in consternation, Ulys held out his hand to Julia. “Come on, darling,” he said, helping her to her feet. “We have to finish packing.”
As he led her from the room, Julia murmured, “Ulys, if you think—”
“What I think is that we must forget everything my father just said.” He halted at the foot of the stairs and kissed her, firmly. “I’ll forgive him for his obstinate foolishness if you’ll forgive me for subjecting you to his unreasonable demands.”
“I will.”
“Good. Then we’ll never speak of this again.”
“But, Ulys—” She wanted to speak of it, if only long enough to ask him if he had been tempted, even for a moment, to accept his father’s proposal. “I can’t promise to forget.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.” He kissed her again, tenderly, and led her upstairs.
• • •
Ulys, Julia, and their sons spent the winter at White Haven, where only the discordant notes of Papa’s barbed criticism for Ulys spoiled their perfect harmony. Papa’s every glance declared that he had hoped for so much better for Julia than an aimless husband who, at thirty-two, had abandoned his profession and had scarcely a dollar to his name.
When spring arrived, Ulys, Julia, and their sons moved to Wish-ton-wish, her brother Louis’s charming cottage three miles from Julia’s sixty acres, which Ulys had begun to clear, felling trees and selling the cordwood. There, on July 4, 1855, Julia gave birth to their third child, a beautiful little girl with blue eyes, a sweet rosebud mouth, and soft, dark hair. Ulys wanted to name her Julia, but Julia insisted upon calling her Ellen, after Mamma, and the nickname “Nellie” was bestowed upon her soon thereafter. All of the servants declared that she was the prettiest baby they had ever seen, and Jule remarked that she resembled her namesake—high praise indeed, for Mamma had been a great beauty as a young woman and was still strikingly handsome at sixty-two.
When little Nellie was not quite a year old, Julia helped Ulys select the perfect place for a home of their own on her sixty acres, a sunny clearing in a grove of young oaks near Gravois Creek. The neighbors came to the house-raising, bringing delicious covered dishes to pass and putting their servants to work on constructing four ample rooms around a central hall. The walls were strong and straight and the roof as tight as a drum, but the cabin remained rustic and homely beneath Julia’s quilts and curtains and wedding china.
“A frame house would have gone up twice as quickly at half the expense,” Julia told Ulys one evening after they had put the children to bed and they were sitting close together in the parlor, amusing themselves by providing names for the quirks and knots and patterns they discovered in the log walls.
“Maybe we should call this place Hardscrabble,” Ulys joked, and Julia laughed and agreed that they should.
When Ulys hauled wood into St. Louis, he was aware of the hard stares and curious whispers of residents who remembered that the man in the faded army coat, battered hat, and muddy boots had once worn a smart officer’s uniform of blue wool and gold braid. Once Ulys ran into tall, affable Major Longstreet—Cousin James, to Julia—while delivering a load of firewood to the Planters Hotel. Major Longstreet, enjoying a furlough from his frontier post, invited Ulys to join him and his companions in a game of cards; later, when Ulys tried to give him a five-dollar gold piece to repay a longstanding debt from their Mexico days, the major shamed him by adamantly refusing it. “Sam, you’re out of the service,” he protested. “You need that more than I do.” His words only made Ulys more determined to repay the debt, and Major Longstreet eventually took the coin to spare him further embarrassment.
On another occasion, Ulys returned from a trip to St. Louis with a curious expression on his face. Julia waited patiently for him to confide in her, and later, as they sat quietly outside the cabin watching the children play, he said, “I ran into Sherman in the city this morning.”
“Captain Sherman?” Julia asked.
“Old Cump hasn’t been a captain in more than three years.” Ulys picked up a stick and scraped mud off the heel of his boot. “He’s living with his wife’s family in St. Louis until his prospects improve. He told me he’s concluded that West Point and the regular army aren’t good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants, or mechanics.”
Julia nodded to conceal her disappointment. An old friend like William Tecumseh Sherman ought to be more encouraging. “And what did you reply?”
“I said I was inclined to believe him, but nonetheless I’m holding out hope for both of us.”
Mamma knew Ulys’s true worth, and Julia adored her for it. “My daughters, listen to me,” she had said one summer evening a few weeks before, having joined them in the parlor after leaving the gentlemen of the family to their pipes and cigars. Her diamond ring sparkled on her finger as she pointed to each of her three daughters in turn, as if the gesture would engrave her words upon their memories. “Someday that man will rise to a higher place than we can yet imagine. His light is presently hid under a bushel, but soon his worth and wisdom will be shown and appreciated. You’ll all live to see it, but I will not.”
“Mamma, don’t say such a thing,” Julia admonished. “You’ll live for ages yet.”
“Do you mean my husband, Mamma?” asked Nell.
“I mean Captain Grant,” she replied. “I’ve been sitting on the piazza for the last half hour listening to the men talk about the political divisions in our country, but Captain Grant, in a few sentences, made the subject so clear and our duty so plain that I must pronounce him a philosopher. He will be a great statesman someday.”
• • •
Mamma’s faith in Ulys’s potential for greatness sustained Julia through many an uncertain hour, but as autumn faded into winter, cold and gray, Mamma fell terribly ill. Julia and her sisters desperately tried to nurse her back to health, unable to contemplate how they would manage without her—bereft of her practical wisdom, her gentle diplomacy, her kindness, her inexhaustible love.
But despite their tireless efforts, before the return of spring, Mamma passed away.
Weakened by grief and exhaustion, Julia suffered a lingering affliction of the chest, and Papa a deep despondency. Ulys tended the farms at both Hardscrabble and White Haven, and the crops thrived throughout the summer. Their hopes for a profitable harvest rose until a panic swept through the nation, bankrupting businesses and sending food prices plummeting. By the onset of winter, with Julia expecting another child, the situation had become so desperate that Ulys asked his father for a loan. When he was rebuffed, he pawned his gold hunting watch and chain for twenty-two dollars to buy Christmas presents for the children.
In February Julia gave birth to a son, whom she and Ulys named Jesse Root Grant after his grandfather. Soon thereafter Papa and Emma moved into the Dent family’s St. Louis residence, and Ulys leased out Hardscrabble so he could devote himse
lf to White Haven, planting potatoes, corn, oats, and wheat, as well as clover and Hungarian grass to feed the livestock.
“I believe this harvest will turn everything in our favor at last,” Ulys told Julia, but in midsummer an epidemic of typhoid fever swept through the Gravois Creek settlement. Fred became deathly ill, and Nell, and her two-year-old son, Alex. Slave cabins throughout the county were rife with sickness, and even as Julia and Jule nursed the afflicted back to health, Ulys fell ill with malaria.
“I’ll write to my father again,” said Ulys. “I’ll explain that illness obliges me to give up farming, and I’ll ask for a place in his business.” He took pen in hand, trembling with fever and ague beneath the quilt she had made for him when they were betrothed, when all she wanted in the world was for the war to end so he could come home and marry her. In her innocence she had believed that she would always be perfectly content if only those wishes were granted, but marriage and motherhood had brought with them a host of new concerns, new sources of perpetual worry—for her family’s health, their comfort, and their future prosperity.
When Ulys’s father again rebuffed him, on the first day of 1859, Ulys entered into a partnership with Julia’s cousin Henry Boggs, who ran a small real estate, loan, and rent-collection firm on Pine Street. Julia, the children, and Jule remained at White Haven while Ulys established himself, but when spring came, Ulys rented a small frame house for them at Seventh and Lynch Streets down by the river, far from the fashionable neighborhoods Julia had known as a young belle.
Soon after the family was reunited, Julia discovered that Ulys was not thriving in his new profession. The business was faltering and discord flourishing between Ulys and Henry, their estrangement worsened by rising tensions in the office that mirrored the mood of the country. Cousin Henry and several other employees emphatically sympathized with the South, while Ulys and William Hillyer, an energetic young lawyer from Kentucky, supported the Republican cause. Most of their debates were friendly, but as disagreement over slavery threatened to divide the nation, their arguments became more contentious.
Julia had always known that Ulys found slavery distasteful, but she did not realize how strongly opposed to it he had become until, without giving her any warning of his intentions, he freed his only slave, earning himself fresh recriminations from his father-in-law. “I would free your slaves too, were they mine,” Ulys told Julia.
“Fortunately, you can’t,” she retorted indignantly. Although as her husband Ulys controlled her property, Papa retained legal title to her slaves, so Ulys could not force her to give them up.
“Most of the farmers around White Haven employ paid labor,” Ulys reminded her. “Your father’s insistence upon keeping slaves has made him unpopular.”
“Papa is good to his slaves,” Julia protested. “As am I, and I’m certain Jule and the others would not thank me for casting them out and forcing them to fend for themselves.”
“Why don’t you ask them and see?”
• • •
Holding her breath, scarcely daring to move lest they hear her, Jule froze in the hallway outside the couple’s door, awaiting Julia’s answer. Gabriel placed his faith for deliverance from slavery in themselves and in the Lord, but Jule had placed hers in Julia and her abolitionist husband. Would Julia call his bluff? Would she seek out her slaves, one by one, and ask them if they would prefer freedom to servitude?
Jule already knew how she would reply if asked. “You’ve been as kind to me as any mistress could,” she would say gently, but with unmistakable certitude. “Given the choice, though, I’d like to make my own way in the world.”
She and Gabriel could be free at last. He could minister to colored folk from a pulpit instead of preaching around a campfire. She could dress the hair and beautify the skin of the ladies of St. Louis, white and colored alike, and maybe someday count herself among the Colored Aristocracy like Madame Pelagie Rutgers. All Julia had to do was accept Ulys’s challenge, step out into the hallway, and ask.
But instead Jule heard her mistress say, “I refuse to discuss this anymore.”
Heartsick, Jule silently retraced her steps and stole away, down the hallway and outside, where she gulped air and fought back sobs of grief and frustration. Julia, the curious, questioning girl she had known in the days of ginger and cream, had grown into a woman who accepted things the way they were for no better reason than that they had always been that way.
“We could run,” Jule told Gabriel the next time the Grants visited White Haven. She lay in his arms in the hayloft, having slipped away after putting the children down for their naps. “I have money saved up, not enough to buy us free but enough to get us north.”
Gabriel was silent, thoughtful. “If we got caught,” he eventually said, “after they brought us back, they’d be likely to sell one of us, or both. They wouldn’t keep us together and risk us trying again.”
“So we won’t get caught.” She rolled onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows to study his expression, her heart thudding with fear and hope. “I’m tired of living like Dinah, jumping at shadows and being grateful things ain’t worse. Let’s take a chance on a better life.”
“Let’s think about it,” he said, pulling her down beside him again.
Frustrated, she bit back her protests and let him hold her. Their moments together were too few to waste in argument.
Upon the Grants’ return to their rented home in St. Louis, Jule missed Gabriel terribly, though she supposed she should have grown accustomed to his absence long ago, so often had they been forced to live apart. In their reduced circumstances, Julia paid few calls and attended even fewer parties, so Jule spent more time caring for the children than tending to her mistress’s hair and dress. Almost every night after Jule put her young charges to bed, she overheard Julia and her husband discussing their prospects in hushed voices, their words often inaudible, but their tension and worry evident. The partnership of Boggs and Grant had dissolved, and stray glances at papers left on desktops told Jule that Mr. Grant was writing letters to apparently almost every gentleman of his acquaintance, hoping someone would recommend him for a position.
One morning, Julia was quiet and pensive as Jule dressed her for another worrisome day. “I had the strangest dream last night,” she said, her voice subdued. “Mr. Grant was working in his father’s tannery, cleaning rawhides by scraping off the flesh with a long, curved, double-handed knife. He was smiling, talking with his father, and making jokes with his brothers, thoroughly content.”
“I thought you said he hated his father’s trade,” said Jule. “He swore he’d never work in the tannery.”
“He did. That’s what makes the dream so bewildering.” Julia sat motionless as Jule brushed out her long, dark hair, as smooth and glossy as mink thanks to Jule’s concoctions. “He was not only satisfied with the work, but proud and happy.”
Jule wound Julia’s hair into a smooth chignon. Jule had her own opinion about the significance of the dream, but she asked, “What do you think it means?”
“That he should go to Kentucky and see his father.”
“What does Mr. Grant think?”
A flush of embarrassment crept into Julia’s fair cheeks. “I haven’t told him about the dream yet. His father’s offers of help always come with conditions, and some of them—some of them I couldn’t bear.”
Jule fastened the chignon in place with a mother-of-pearl comb. “I don’t think any good would come of ignoring a prophecy dream.”
“No, neither do I.” Julia sighed, resigned. “I suppose I must tell him.”
She did so, as Jule knew she would. Later that afternoon, Julia instructed Jule to pack Mr. Grant’s satchel for a week’s journey. He would set out for Covington on the first steamer of the morning.
Mr. Grant’s first letter home arrived within a week, and a second, more earnest dispatch quickly follo
wed. “Ulys’s father has offered him a position in the family business,” Julia said softly, as if thinking aloud.
“Tanning hides?” asked Jule, astonished.
“No, not that.” Julia turned her head this way and that, trying to focus on the page, which trembled in her hand. “It’s a job at their retail store in Galena, in northern Illinois.” She fell silent, reading. “This time there are no conditions, no demands that he leave me and the children behind.”
Jule understood the great significance of the offer: Mr. Grant would have work and the family could stay together, as long as Julia agreed to leave her beloved Southern home and follow her husband again into the North.
That was what the opportunity meant for the Grants. Jule dreaded to learn what it meant for her.
PART TWO
Honor
Chapter Six
MAY 1860–APRIL 1861
You couldn’t possibly send our faithful servants to live with strangers,” Julia protested when Papa told her about the advertisement he had placed in the St. Louis papers.
“You can’t take them with you,” said Papa, annoyed. “Not into northern Illinois. They’ll run away.”
“My servants would never leave me. They’ve always been loyal, and where would they go?”
“No servants are so loyal that they won’t walk off if they get the chance. Grant agrees with me that they should stay behind.”
“But for entirely different reasons,” said Ulys, who would probably be perfectly content to sit back with his pipe and wave farewell to their servants should they all decide to pack up and leave one fine morning. “The citizens of Galena are likely to regard slave-owning neighbors with contempt and distrust. I don’t think that’s the impression we want to make.”
“Let me take Jule along, at least,” Julia implored, looking from her husband to her father and back. Her heart sank with dismay when she realized they were adamant. The best she could do was to make Papa promise that he would place Jule and the others with respectable people who would treat them kindly.
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