Ulysses S. Grant Read Online Free PDF Page B

Grant was good looking, morally serious, and completely, if inarticulately, devoted to her. If ever two people qualified for the term “soul mates” they were Julia andUlysses. For the rest of his days his marriage to Julia would be at the center of his life, and he would be, even after his death, the center of hers. Perhaps only the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was as close and as satisfying to both partners—certainly the Grants would have one of the great marriages of the nineteenth century.
    Of course they had to get there first. Grant had few prospects—a second lieutenant’s pay was exiguous, and in peacetime, promotion was glacially slow—while Julia was, to put it kindly, “plain,” as even her nearest and dearest in the Dent family were obliged to admit. Indeed, “plain” seems like a generous description of Julia Dent. A photograph of her taken as a young woman, at about the time that Grant was courting her (or, to be more accurate, when she was courting him) reveals a lumpy nose, a strong chin, and what appears to be a pronounced squint in one eye, or perhaps, as McFeely suggests, strabismus, a weakening of the eye muscles combined with a squint (some people unkindly described her as wall-eyed), hair pulled back unflatteringly tight, and a compact, dumpy figure. The fashions of the times apparently do nothing to help her, and her expression in the photograph is severe, impatient, and unwelcoming. Although she was to come to think of herself as a Southern belle, a kind of border-state Scarlett O’Hara, Julia was by far the plainest member of the Dent family, and even the colored servants (slaves, of course) seem to have told her so.
    Neither the Dents nor the Grants were much pleased by the prospect of this union. Even allowing for Julia’s plainness, her father, Colonel Dent, no doubt hoped for something better for his daughter than a second lieutenant whose father was a moderatelysuccessful leather tanner in Ohio; and as for Jesse Grant, he thought his son was too young to marry—Ulysses was twenty-two and Julia seventeen when they met—and was anything but pleased at the prospect of a daughter-in-law whose parents were slave-owning Southerners. It appears, however, that Grant screwed up his determination, perhaps for the first and most significant time, and his determination was more than matched by Julia’s—throughout their lives, her willpower, ambition, and determination would far exceed his. In any event, their devotion to each other, as in good novels, was so strong and self-evident as to overcome all obstacles and objections.
    The British army had a saying that “A lieutenant must not marry, a captain may marry, a major must marry,” a rule that remained true until well into the twentieth century, but in the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, lieutenants married young, and it was generally considered to be a good thing. Given the godforsaken outposts in which army units were stationed, mostly on the frontier, in the middle of nowhere, a wife and children had a steadying effect on young men who might otherwise have taken to drink, whoring, or gambling to fill up the time. Grant would eventually fall prey to one of these vices himself, but it is worth noting that when he became engaged to Julia he was abstemious, and that later on he usually drank when he was separated from her or, as in Galena, when he was plunged so deep into misery, failure, and debt that not even she could talk him out of it.
    But that was in the future. The young people agreed, no doubt reluctantly, to a long engagement (it would last four years), but it must have been clear to everybody that however lengthy the engagement, nothing would change their minds about each other.There is a wonderful story—told in numerous versions—that when Grant rode out to White Haven from Jefferson Barracks to ask for Julia’s hand, he found a stream in full flood and was unable to ford it. Instead of turning back,