Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule (11 page)

Five months had passed since Jule had last seen Gabriel, and she felt herself as insubstantial as the breezes that carried the fragrances of spring blossoms and horses past the door of the kitchen house where she slept on a pallet on the hard earth floor, longing for the comforts of Gabriel’s hayloft. Mrs. Slate had restored Jule to her marketing duties, and on one sunny May morning, her head aching from hunger, Jule took a precious coin from the dwindling stash tied up in Julia’s handkerchief. She had stolen a crumpled sheet of paper and a discarded stub of a pencil from Mr. Slate’s wastebasket, and after she bought something to eat, she would have enough pennies left over to post a letter to Galena, Illinois. She could no longer wait for Julia to return to St. Louis and reclaim her, and she had abandoned hope that a prophetic dream would alert Julia to her misery. Writing to plead for help would reveal Jule’s crime of literacy, but Julia was complicit in that too, and Jule knew she had no other choice.

She was so intent on her mission, clutching her market basket in both hands and feeling the condemning letter like a heavy weight in her pocket, that she only gradually became aware of a stir of apprehension in the air, the worried expressions of passersby. Then she heard it—the sounds of hundreds of men marching in the streets. Heart thudding, she drew back until she stumbled against the brick façade of a dry goods store. There she watched, stunned, as hundreds of secessionist militiamen—angry, resigned, defiant, scowling—marched past under guard by Union troops clad in the uniforms of the regular army and newer garb that marked the German Missouri Volunteers.

“They’re the secesh General Lyon captured at Camp Jackson,” Jule overheard a young gentleman tell a companion. “Since they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States, he’s marching them through the city to the arsenal, and once there he’ll parole them and order them to disperse.”

“He could’ve paroled them at Camp Jackson,” the other man replied. “This display is humiliating.”

The first man grinned wolfishly. “It’s meant to be. They should’ve taken the oath when they had the chance.”

As the men strode off, arguing, Jule realized that all around her, disgruntled murmurs were turning into angry shouts—directed not at the rebels, but at the soldiers guarding them. “Damn the Dutch!” a voice rang out, and others quickly took up the refrain. More harsh insults followed, and soon men and boys began hurling rocks and bottles upon the Union troops from the sidewalks and second-story windows. As Jule watched, horrified, a drunken, disheveled man stumbled into the path of the marching troops, shouted a hoarse stream of oaths, and fired a pistol into their midst. Women screamed as a captain in the Third Missouri clutched his abdomen and collapsed. Immediately other soldiers halted and opened fire, first above the heads of the civilians and then into the crowd.

Instinctively Jule threw herself to the ground and covered her head as screams and cries and gunfire erupted all around. A store window shattered above her, showering her in fragments of glass. She gasped in pain as a man stepped on her leg as he fled, and as more shots rang out, she scrambled on hands and knees into a doorway. Terrified, she closed her eyes, steeled herself with a few deep breaths, bolted to her feet, and ran—ran as fast and as far away from the escalating riot as she could.

When the screams and gunfire faded behind her, she slowed to a walk, gasping for breath, shaking, a painful cramp stabbing her beneath her rib cage with every step. Men and boys, wild-eyed and eager, streamed past her heading in the direction of the violence and madness. Unsteadily Jule made her way back to the Slate residence, realizing only when she stumbled into the kitchen house that she had somehow held on to her basket, but the letter to Julia was no longer in her pocket.

As the terrified Slate ladies queried her about what she had seen, Jule’s thoughts were with the missing letter. She could only hope that someone would post it unread or that it would be destroyed in the chaos. If someone recognized Julia’s name and gave it to the old master instead—not even Julia could protect Jule from the consequences.

When Jule served breakfast the next morning, she listened, heart in her throat, as Mr. Slate read aloud bits from the paper to his frightened family. Twenty-eight people had been killed in the furor, including women and children, and some fifty more had been injured. In a shaking voice Mr. Slate ordered the family and servants to remain indoors as several days of rioting followed, with most of the secessionist hatred and violence directed toward German immigrants and Union soldiers. Civilians shot at soldiers from the windows of their businesses and homes, and troops once again fired upon throngs of angry rioters in the streets. Martial law was imposed, but the uproar was subdued only after troops from the regular army arrived to replace the German volunteers.

Jule waited in dread for news of her letter, but nothing good or ill ever came of it. She dared not write another.

•   •   •

“I’ve decided to offer myself for national service,” Ulys said to Julia, shifting restlessly in his chair during a long-awaited leave of absence from the state capital. “Stuck in the adjutant general’s office, I feel as if I’m neglecting a duty that’s paramount to any other duty that I ever owed.”

“Then I wholeheartedly agree that you should,” Julia said, managing a tremulous smile, “though I’ll be very sorry indeed to be parted from you again.”

“We’ll be together as much as we can,” he said. “You, me, and the children. We’ll find a way.”

Julia nodded, though she knew it would not be easy—but what was, in those unprecedented times?

In late May, Ulys wrote to Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas detailing his past military experience and offering his services. “I feel myself competent to command a regiment if the President in his judgment should see fit to entrust one to me,” he said, with the characteristic humility Julia usually found endearing but worried was not, perhaps, quite the tone to strike in such circumstances. But she would never ask him to be a lesser man than he was, a braggart and boastful, so she said it was a fine letter and the adjutant general would be foolish not to respond with a commission. Ulys returned to his post in Springfield, and the weeks passed, and other, less-qualified men were named colonel while he was overlooked. The adjutant general not only did not reply as Ulys wanted, but he failed to respond at all.

In early June, Ulys wrote to Julia that he no longer expected a reply from Washington, but undaunted, he had decided to pursue another course. General George B. McClellan, whom Ulys had known at West Point, in the Mexican War, and at Fort Vancouver, had established his headquarters in Cincinnati. Ulys had secured another week’s furlough to visit his family in Covington, and while there he intended to call on the general and offer him his services. “While I am gone,” he asked in closing, “please open my letters, and if any are important, forward them to me.”

Julia waited anxiously for word from Covington, praying that Ulys’s interview with General McClellan would meet with success. She dreamed of Ulys every night, sometimes as the young lieutenant she had known at Jefferson Barracks, often as the sun-browned captain who had returned to her from the war, but forebodingly, never as a colonel leading Illinois troops into battle. What she did dream, curiously enough, three distinct times in a single night, was that she had received an unusual package in the mail. When she opened it, a small item wrapped in tissue paper tumbled out. Removing the wrappings, she discovered a familiar, cherished ring that had belonged to Mamma, and as she admired it, the diamond refracted a circle of bright stars of light upon the paper.

The dream brought Julia great satisfaction, for as the eldest daughter she had always believed she would inherit Mamma’s favorite ring upon her death. Nell had claimed it, and at the time, Julia had been too overcome with grief to object. The dream gave her the reassuring sense that what she had long desired would soon be hers. “I will surely receive the ring before the week is over,” she wrote to sister Emma. “Nell will remember it was supposed to be mine and send it to me.”

For several days thereafter, Julia awaited the mail, her faith in her dream unshaken by the failure of the peculiar package to appear. Then, only days after she wrote to Emma, an envelope arrived, addressed, “Colonel U. S. Grant. Official Business.”

Her heart leaping at the unexpected title, Julia opened the envelope and withdrew a sheet of vellum covered with tissue paper. As she drew the tissue paper aside, her gaze fell upon on the great seal of the State of Illinois in the masthead—encircled by stars, just like the lights cast by the ring in her dream, the ring Mamma had worn that long-ago summer evening when she declared Ulys a great statesman and predicted that his worth would someday be known to all.

Julia’s hands shook and the paper and vellum fell to the floor, but she quickly snatched them up again. She scanned the page and discovered that she held the commission of U. S. Grant as a colonel and commander of the Illinois Seventh Congressional District Regiment.

Thrilled, she shared the letter first with the children and next with their bustling housemaid, and then she hurried across the street to tell her friend Emily Rawlins, who congratulated her with genuine warmth, lamenting that she was too ill to rise from her bed and celebrate properly. Returning home, Julia took pen in hand and made a copy of the commission to send to Jesse and Hannah Grant and all the family in Covington, and then, prompted by a perverse streak of mischief, she made one for Papa too.

She assumed that Ulys had already learned of his appointment through other channels, and his next letter home confirmed this. General McClellan deserved no credit for the commission, he wrote, for although Ulys had called at the general’s headquarters twice, he had not been granted an audience. Instead, while traveling back to Springfield, he had received a telegram from Governor Yates offering him the command. Shortly after accepting the post, Ulys learned that when the regiment had first formed, the soldiers had elected as their commander an amiable and popular but very young and inexperienced fellow from their hometown. Later, when confronted by the reality of following an untested officer into battle, the soldiers had urgently demanded that someone more qualified be appointed in his stead. Ulys was that replacement.

Julia didn’t care what unusual circumstances had brought about Ulys’s appointment, only that it had come at last. She needed but a moment to count back the days and confirm her suspicions: Ulys had learned of his commission on the same day she dreamed of Mamma’s ring, the long-awaited treasure, the circle of stars.

•   •   •

In the last week of June, Ulys managed a quick visit home to see Julia and the children and to collect supplies—namely, a horse and a uniform. When Ulys had formally taken command of his regiment three days before, he had found the men in a demoralized condition, wholly undisciplined, lacking tents, uniforms, and in many cases, weapons. “They weren’t terribly impressed at the sight of me in my civilian clothes,” Ulys said, “but they came around quickly enough once I began drilling them.”

Julia glanced up from sewing the badges of his rank on his new uniform. “They’ll need your firm hand.”

“They’ll get it.” Ulys shook his head as he leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. “My predecessor did his best to develop their recklessness. He even went so far as to occasionally take the guard from their posts and go with them into the nearby village, where they’d all make a night of it.”

“Goodness! It’s little wonder the men didn’t want him to lead them into battle.”

“Most of them realize they badly need discipline.” Ulys grinned as Jesse ran into the room, whooping with delight, and launched himself at his father, who snatched him up and flung him over his shoulder. “I’m sure that with the application of a little regular army punishment, I’ll get as much discipline from them as I could possibly want.”

During his all too brief furlough, Ulys spent every possible moment with Julia and the children, as if their company and laughter were water he must store in vessels for a long desert crossing. Eleven-year-old Fred was always by his side, engaging him in serious discussion about the soldiers’ weapons and the enemy’s positions, poring over maps he had drawn himself, proudly demonstrating how well he marched. “You should let me come with you,” he often remarked, feigning nonchalance, as if his wild suggestion were so undeniably reasonable that he need not beg. “I’m old enough, and I could be a big help to you.”

On the last night, after putting the children to bed, Ulys mused, “I’m of a mind to grant Fred’s wish.”

They were sitting on the front steps, savoring the cool night breezes. Seated two steps below Ulys, Julia had closed her tired, strained eyes and was resting her head on his knee, but at that her eyes popped open and she sat upright. “Take a boy into battle?”

“Not into battle, only so far as Springfield. Seeing the encampment might satisfy his appetite for the army life—”

“Or whet it.”

Ulys nodded, acknowledging the possibility. “The excursion would teach him responsibility and discipline, and I would surely welcome his company.”

“That would make Fred immeasurably happy, I know—but Ulys, think of the danger.”

“If we’re ordered to march on the Confederates, I’ll send him home.”

The regiment was unlikely to run into real danger in Illinois, Julia silently conceded, and everyone believed the whole conflict would be settled within a few months. “I suppose that would be fine,” she said. “As long as you keep him out of danger, it should be a very pleasant summer outing for you both.”

Ulys smiled and drew her close for a kiss. She recalled, as she often had throughout that frenzied spring, the overwhelming, almost debilitating homesickness that had overcome him when he was stationed in Oregon Territory. If Fred’s company would spare Ulys that melancholy, how could she let her motherly fears keep her son at home?

Little Buck, naturally, was terribly jealous when Fred proudly departed with their father the next morning, his knapsack on his back, his attire as much like a soldier’s as Julia had managed to put together on such short notice. “I want to do my part,” Buck said after they left, and when Nellie chimed in that she did too, Julia told them they could help best by remembering their father, their brother, and all the other brave Union soldiers in their prayers every night.