Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule (38 page)

Ulys came home despondent from an emergency meeting at No. 2 Wall Street. “I’ve made it a rule of my life to trust a man long after other people have given up on him,” he said dully as he sat in the library, with its shelves full of treasures from their world travels and expensive volumes donated by admirers from Boston. “I don’t see how I can trust any human being again.”

As the collapse of Grant & Ward and the failure of the Marine Bank shook Wall Street, the press began to speculate about Ulys’s culpability in the financial disaster. “Is Grant Guilty?”
The
New York Sun
queried in a bold, front-page headline. The
New York Post
savagely editorialized that “General Grant’s influence was used in some highly improper way to the detriment of the government and the benefit of Grant & Ward.” It was not true, of course, but to Ulys, who prized his honor above all else, the criticism was a heavy blow. He took Julia’s hands and solemnly vowed that he would repay every penny of the debt, and he would not rest until he found a new way to provide for her and the children.

“I know you will, darling,” Julia said soothingly, alarmed by his vehemence. “I’m not afraid.”

Ulys made no reply except to squeeze her hands once, quickly, and to retire to his study at the top of the stairs. There, with the same determination and resolve he had applied to planning military campaigns from his headquarters at City Point, he tallied his assets—their homes in Philadelphia and Galena, two parcels of undeveloped land in Chicago, and White Haven, which he had purchased several years before. He gathered his mementoes and prizes from the war—the jeweled sword he had won by popular vote at the great Sanitary Fair at Palace Garden, others equally ornate that had been bestowed upon him by the grateful citizens of towns throughout the North, the gold medals, gilded humidors, campaign maps, uniforms, and papers that might be of historic interest. He calculated their worth, and when he found the total insufficient, he and Julia gathered the treasures they had collected on their two-year world tour following his second term as president—teakwood cabinets, jade and porcelain given to them by Chinese statesman Li Hung-chang, an eleven-hundred-year-old gold-lacquer cabinet given to Ulys by the mikado, cloisonné from Japan, enamels and malachite from Russia, jeweled and gilded caskets containing scrolls representing the freedom of cities they had visited, Persian and Turkish rugs, a Bengal tiger skin, two elephant tusks given to them by the king of Siam, a Coptic Bible taken by Lord Robert Napier from King Theodore of Abyssinia, and every other precious memento.

For her part, Julia unclasped the chased gold locket with the daguerreotype of her beloved young lieutenant, which she had worn by its narrow velvet strap about her wrist every day since she and Ulys wed. “Every little bit will help,” Julia said. “A jeweler wouldn’t appraise it as highly as these other treasures, but it would surely fetch a fine price from one of your admirers for its historic and sentimental value.”

“But to us it’s priceless. Julia, I forbid you to give away my wedding gift to you.”

Quickly blinking away tears, Julia nodded and fastened the strap about her wrist again.

Though Mr. Vanderbilt thwarted Ulys’s every attempt to repay the debt, Ulys’s honor would not bear such generosity. When Mr. Vanderbilt departed for an extended European tour, Ulys and Julia turned over mortgages to their real estate and securities for the treasures to his lawyers, who agreed to present them to Mr. Vanderbilt upon his return.

Within a fortnight, police detectives traced Ferdinand Ward to his brother-in-law’s home in Brooklyn, and on May 26, he was arrested and indicted for fraud. Their silent partner, Marine Bank president James D. Fish, was arrested soon thereafter. Julia hoped that Ulys’s one hundred fifty thousand dollars could be recovered, but it was long gone.

“Never mind,” Ulys consoled her. “Our debt to Mr. Vanderbilt is satisfied, and the criminals responsible for our unhappiness will be brought to justice. All will be well.”

Upon becoming president, Ulys had retired his military commission to allow General Sherman and his other subordinates to be promoted, so he would not receive a pension from the army despite his many decades of distinguished service. Unable to pay the household bills, Julia had become quietly, frantically desperate when their good friend Matias Romero, the ambassador from Mexico, called to express his sympathies and secretly left behind a check for one thousand dollars. A day later, a gentleman they had never met from upstate New York mailed them a check for the same amount, folded within a letter that described the payment as “a loan on account of my share for services ending in April 1865.” Julia was grateful, but she knew they could not depend upon spontaneous acts of generosity over the long term.

At the end of May, the Grants closed up their New York mansion and retired to their summer cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey. The four-story, twenty-eight-room residence could not be lost to the bankruptcy because it was not truly theirs; George Childs, publisher of the
Philadelphia Public Ledger,
had purchased it during Ulys’s first term as president, with the understanding that Ulys should consider the idyllic retreat his own. Before long, their eldest son, Fred, who had lost nearly everything in the collapse of Grant & Ward, rented out his home in Morristown and moved his family in with them.

Ulys spent many hours gazing out at the sea, smoking and contemplating his options. At sixty-two, an age when he ought to retire and enjoy the rewards of a life well lived, he had been forced to start over.

A few days later, as the family lingered at the table after luncheon, Ulys took a peach from a bowl, bit into it, and started as if in great pain. “Oh, my,” he exclaimed, bolting to his feet. “I think something on that peach stung me.”

“Are you all right?” asked Ida. She remained as lovely, bright, and amiable as she had been on her wedding day, and she was devoted to Fred and their two darling children, little Julia, age eight, and Ulysses, three.

His hand to his throat, lips pressed together, Ulys frowned and shook his head. He paced the length of the room and out to the piazza, returning to the kitchen to rinse his throat again and again. “Water hurts me like liquid fire,” he said hoarsely when he returned to the table.

The sharpness of the strange, sudden pain diminished, but Ulys’s discomfort persisted, intensifying whenever he ate anything acidic. He accepted the soothing remedies Julia and Ida offered him but refused medical treatment. “I don’t need a doctor,” Ulys said, more curtly each time Julia suggested that he see a physician. “It’ll be all right directly.”

A week later, Ulys decided to break his self-imposed exile by speaking at a convention of army chaplains in nearby Ocean Grove. Fred, who had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel before resigning to accompany his parents on their world tour, escorted his father to the gathering, where the audience greeted Ulys with a standing ovation. Dr. A. J. Palmer, an old friend of Ulys’s, had introduced him, declaring, “No combination of Wall Street sharpers shall tarnish the lustre of my old commander’s fame for me.”

A few days later Ulys traveled to Brooklyn, where the Society of the Army of the Potomac elected him their president. The veteran soldiers’ faithful kindness worked wonders on Ulys; the strain left his visage, the tension in his jaw and shoulders eased. Once again Julia was moved to thank God for the valiant United States Army.

At the reunion, Ulys had enjoyed a cordial conversation with Richard Watson Gilder, senior editor of
The
Century,
so it did not come as a complete surprise when his colleague, associate editor Robert Underwood Johnson, called on Ulys at Long Branch to invite him to write a few articles for their magazine.

As the two men spoke on the piazza, Julia concealed her surprise as Ulys frankly acknowledged his financial troubles. “Despite my well-publicized need, I’m reluctant to accept your proposal,” he said, offering Mr. Johnson a cigar, which he declined. “I’m not a writer, and others have already written a great many articles and books about my campaigns. I don’t know what I could add to what’s already in print.”

“An article from the former general in chief of the Union army and United States president would inherently be more informative than anything previously written,” Mr. Johnson replied.

Julia felt as if she were holding her breath while Mr. Johnson suggested that Ulys write four stories, one each about the Battle of Shiloh, the Vicksburg campaign, the Battle of the Wilderness, and General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Each article would earn Ulys five hundred dollars, an extraordinary sum. When Ulys agreed, Julia clasped her hands to her heart and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

Ulys immediately commenced work on an article about Shiloh. To refresh his memory, he studied official reports, dispatches, and articles by witnesses, but sometimes he merely sat in quiet reflection, gazing out at the ocean and puffing on a cigar. He wrote every word himself, toiling about four hours every day throughout the month of June. On July 1, his handwritten manuscript arrived at the
Century
offices in New York.

Mr. Gilder promptly replied to thank him, and a few days later, he returned to Long Branch with the annotated manuscript in hand. Noting well Mr. Johnson’s careful praise and tactful suggestions, upon his departure, Julia detained him on the piazza. “I gather that the general’s article is not quite right for
The
Century,
” she said in an undertone.

Mr. Johnson hesitated. “It’s factual and clear,” he said, glancing past Julia to the doorway, as if wary that Ulys might suddenly appear. “But there’s no life in it, no sense of General Grant—what he felt, what he was doing or thinking. One might almost think he wasn’t there.”

“He’s written you a battle report, you mean.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Johnson, looking relieved. “That’s exactly it.”

Julia placed her hand on his forearm. “You should tell him what you want, as straightforwardly as you can. He’s a soldier. He can bear it.”

Mr. Johnson looked dubious, but he thanked her, and the next time he visited, she overheard him encouraging Ulys to add more personal anecdotes to his story—for that was what it was supposed to be, a story, complete with plot and characters. “What we need is for you to approximate such talk as you would make to friends after dinner,” he said, “some of whom would know a great deal about the battle and others who would know nothing at all. The people will be especially interested in your point of view—everything that concerned you, in what you planned, saw, said, and did.”

On subsequent visits, Julia observed Mr. Johnson asking Ulys about particular incidents from the war, and in his replies, Ulys chronicled events in rich detail and offered frank descriptions of his fellow officers and his feelings. “You should put that in the article,” Mr. Johnson would say after Ulys finished a tale, and Julia hid a smile when she discovered the editor’s trick to drawing out the recalcitrant general.

“If I had known what he wanted from the beginning,” Ulys remarked to Julia one day after Mr. Johnson departed for New York, “I would have given him that.”

“Think of these early drafts as your apprenticeship. Now you’re ready to begin your masterpiece.”

He gave her a wry look as if to say his intentions were not that grand, but he resumed his work with a new determination. She enjoyed sitting with him while he wrote, but she worried that he often grimaced and absently touched his throat, and that he ate and drank very little.

“Is your throat bothering you again?” she asked one afternoon when he refused the sweet, cool tea she had left on his desk hours before.

“It never stopped hurting entirely,” he replied, without looking up from the page. “It comes and goes.”

“I do wish you’d see a doctor.”

“I don’t have time. Johnson and Gilder want this article by the end of August.”

Julia knew that nagging him would accomplish nothing, but one day, when Ida summoned a doctor to the house to examine her feverish, coughing daughter, she persuaded Ulys to consent to a quick examination. Julia watched the doctor’s expression closely as he peered into her husband’s throat. “The back of your throat is quite inflamed,” he said, frowning. “You should consult your family doctor immediately.”

He wrote a prescription for a mild painkiller, and the moment he left, Julia declared, “You heard him. You must see Dr. Barker right away.”

“Dr. Barker is in Europe,” Ulys said. “I’ll schedule an appointment the day he returns.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes, my dear little wife,” he replied. “I promise, if you promise not to badger me anymore.”

Julia nodded her assent, knowing she had negotiated the best terms Unconditional Surrender Grant was likely to concede.

•   •   •

By the middle of August, Ulys had produced an entirely new version of his account of the Battle of Shiloh—and it was riveting. “You have a gift for clarity and simplicity of expression,” said Julia, “and a wonderful eye for detail. I felt as if I were there, riding along with you and your officers. If your letters home had been so terrifying, I might have begged you to resign your commission.”

As Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gilder eagerly prepared to publish the article, Ulys turned his attention to the Vicksburg campaign. But he had always resisted retracing his steps, and it proved to be a difficult task even with pen and paper. Fred—an accomplished author in his own right, having authored a book about his service on the Yellowstone Expedition with the Fourth Infantry—continued to be of great help, and Ulys soon recruited Badeau, author of a successful three-volume history of Ulys’s military career. They checked facts, verified dates, reviewed drafts, and often sat in on Ulys’s conferences with Mr. Johnson.

By early September, Ulys finished the first draft of his article on Vicksburg and commenced the first draft of a piece on the Chattanooga campaign. Soon after he began, Mr. Johnson arrived at Long Branch accompanied by Roswell Smith, president of the Century Company. Although the summer season had passed, the resort town was full of tourists enjoying the sunshine and balmy air, and Ulys often liked to write on the piazza, nodding cordially to passersby who waved as they strolled along the sidewalk between the cottage and the sea. Ulys’s voice was raspy as he welcomed the gentlemen, whose curious gazes lingered on the scarf Ulys wore around his neck despite the summer heat.