#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 42 Proud: My Cousin the First Lady, Julia Dent Grant

After watching Grant on the History Channel this week, I was reminded that Grant’s wife Julia Boggs Dent, was a cousin of mine through my grandmother Elizabeth Dent,  so I would like to share something about her. 

Frederick Dent Sr.

Julia was the oldest daughter of Col. Frederick Fayette Dent and Ellen Bray Wrenshall, born in St. Louis MO 26 January 1826. Her grandfather, George Dent, fought in the Revolutionary War with the 3rd Maryland Battalion of the Flying Camp and was the Surveyor General of Maryland, who laid out the city of Cumberland MD, where he died in 1812.  

Like his father and grandfather, Frederick Dent was a surveyor.  In the early 1800's, Frederick left Cumberland where he was born and moved to Pittsburgh PA where he went into the mercantile business. There he married Ellen, the English-born daughter of Methodist preacher John Wrenshall.  

Dent, along with his brother-in-law, George Boggs, moved to St. Louis MO about 1815.  Frederick became the Surveyor General of Missouri and acquired Whitehaven plantation outside St. Louis, which stayed in the Dent family for three generations afterward. It was here that Julia Boggs Dent was born and grew up, enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle in the highly social environment of her father's plantation. Frederick Dent, active in politics and rabidly anti-abolitionist, counted explorer William Clark and Missouri Governor Alexander McNair among his close friends. 

From 1836 to 1844, Julia attended Miss Moreau's boarding school in St. Louis, where she enjoyed studying literature, but was not so keen on mathematics.  Here she developed a lifelong passion as a voracious reader of novels.  She was an accomplished pianist and enjoyed singing along to her own accompaniment.  She was also an avid horsewoman and loved riding and attending horse races throughout her life

Lt. Grant

Her brother Frederick, meanwhile was a cadet at West Point where he was a classmate of Ulysses Grant and his roommate during their last year.  He wrote to his sister how impressed he was with Grant: "I want you to know him; he is pure gold." When Grant was later stationed at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis, he naturally paid a call on his friend and as he noted in his Memoirs, "found the family congenial, so my visits became frequent."  Certainly 17-year-old Julia was a big part of the attraction.  Col. Dent disapproved of the match, believing that his daughter would not be able to endure the hardships that being married to a career Army officer might require. Nevertheless, they became informally engaged, and eventually Col. Dent gave his reluctant blessing to the marriage.  Grant's service in the Mexican War delayed the wedding until 1848 when they married at the Dent's town home in St. Louis. 

Grant's parents, Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson, extremely religious and vehement abolitionists, did not approve of their son marrying into a slave-holding family, and refused to attend the wedding. 

Captain Grant and his wife spent the first several years of their marriage in Army camps, stationed in Detroit MI and Sackett Harbor NY.  When Grant was sent to the Pacific Coast in 1852, Julia returned to stay with her family in St. Louis along with their two sons, Frederick and Ulysses. In 1854, depressed and drinking heavily, Grant resigned from the Army, and the family struggled financially as Grant tried farming and finally moved to Galena IL where Grant took a position in his father's tannery shop.  

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant determined to return to active military service.  President Lincoln commissioned him as a Brigadier General. Whenever possible, Julia joined Ulysses in camp, often volunteered as a nurse, and took over responsibility for managing the family finances.  Julia's father tried to induce Grant to join the Confederate Army, but Grant was committed to preserving the Union and most of Julia's family denounced her.  "If you are one of the accursed Lincolnites," one of her aunts wrote, "the ties of consanguinity shall be forever severed." Julia did manage to avoid an outright breach with her father, while maintaining her absolute loyalty to her husband. 

After his victories in the Western Theater at Vicksburg, Chattanooga and elsewhere,  followed by a hard-fought campaign in Virginia, Grant accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 and emerged from the Civil War as a great public hero.   Grant himself seemed somewhat embarrassed at his post-war honors, but Julia reveled in seeing him made a hero. When the Grant family arrived back home in Galena IL, the city presented them with a fine brick house that was their residence for many years. 

Julia was extremely protective of her husband's reputation and vehemently denied that her husband ever consumed excessive alcohol, whether because she believed that or was unaware of the extent of Grant's drinking.  She was also concerned about her own presentation to the public and being very sensitive about her crossed eyes, always had her picture taken in a sideways view. 

Five days after his victory at Appomattox, Grant attended a cabinet meeting in Washington, and was invited to join the Lincolns at Ford's Theatre.  At Julia's urging, Grant declined and boarded the train with Julia for their home in Philadelphia, thus avoiding a potential assassination along with Lincoln.

Following the impeachment of President Johnson, the Republican Party nominated Grant for president in 1868 and he was sworn in as the 18th President on March 4, 1869 and was elected to a second term in 1872. 

Julia Dent Grant exulted in her position as First Lady. (In fact, she was the very first to be called the First Lady.)  She cherished the adulation she received and happily embraced her public role. She ordered the Capital building open to the public once a week and encouraged working-class government clerks to feel comfortable attending her public receptions.  She put a great deal of effort into planning elaborate state dinners, hiring an Italian chef to create lavish 25-course feasts for her guests.  She helped expand the popularity of Victorian Christmas celebrations and was among the first to send out the newly popular Christmas cards. She encouraged the press to write about her and her events.  

One of her more ambitious projects was the refurbishment of the shabby public rooms of the White House.  With a $100,000 appropriation from Congress, she brought the rooms to the epitome of  Gilded Age style: heavily scrolled and crested furniture, elaborate chandeliers with multiple globes for gaslight. She even had the Army Corps of Engineers add Grecian columns to the façade of the building. The Grants' only daughter, Ellen Wrenshall Grant, was married in the newly redesigned East Room in 1874, making national headlines with images of the ceremony, the decorations and the clothing. 

Julia Grant enthusiastically encouraged her husband to seek an unprecedented third term in office and was devastated when he declined to do so. She cried as she left the White House.

Grants at Chinese Emperor's Palace

Within weeks, however, Julia and Lyss set off on an unprecedented and legendary two-and-a-half year world tour. They were feted through England, Scotland, Belgium, France, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Poland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, India, Singapore, Thailand, China, and Japan.  Julia wanted to experience every new thing on her trip. In India she rode an elephant; her appearance at the Paris Exposition of 1878 caused a sensation; in China she gamely tried eating with chopsticks; she rode donkeys up the Italian hillsides. 

The New York Tribune covered the trip providing a running chronicle of Julia's adventures that contributed to the public affection for her during the rest of her life. 

The Grants finished up their tour with a trip across the United States, finally arriving at their home in Galena in November 1879.

The Grants lived in New York after their return where Julia greatly enjoyed being at the center of the Gilded Age social life, appearing at theater premieres and subscribing to the Metropolitan opera. Julia held receptions for visiting celebrities in rooms decorated with relics of her husband's military  career and the lavish gifts presented to the Grants during their world tour. When the Grants lost most of their money in a ponzi scheme, they were rescued by financier Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Julia attempted to repay him by giving him their world tour gifts.  But Vanderbilt insisted that they should be left to the American people instead and so Julia donated Grant's Civil War memorabilia and state gifts to the Smithsonian. 

Grant hoped to restore the family fortune by writing and publishing his memoirs but was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.  At Julia's urging, he retreated to a cabin in the Adirondacks donated by a friend to work on his writing. Julia and their married children and grandchildren all took up residence. Mark Twain was among the visitors to the Grants. 

On July 23, 1885, just a few days after finishing his memoir, Grant died.  Julia was too devastated to attend what was the largest public funeral ever held in New York.  Julia insisted that the plans for Grant's Tomb include space for her as well. She was a central figure in the groundbreaking in 1891 and at the dedication in 1897.

Grant's memoirs were very profitable; Julia received the largest royalty check in history ($200,000) just a year after their publication. She invested well and was able to have a comfortable lifestyle in her widowhood.

As a presidential widow, Julia continued to maintain a high public profile and had close relationships with other first ladies. She was even captured in an Edison moving picture, the first instance of a First Lady being recorded in this manner. In her later years, she often made herself available to reporters and others seeking the likely viewpoint of the late president on various matters and began to write short articles for popular national magazines. She also wrote her own memoirs, but they were not published until 1973.

She traveled to California, to Europe and to Canada before finally settling in Washington DC with her daughter. She died there on December 14, 1902 at the age of 74 and was buried beside her husband a few days later. 

A Literary Digest reporter granted an 1896 interview by Mrs. Grant recorded that, “No married couple ever lived closer to each other than did the General and Mrs. Grant. She was, perhaps, his only real confidant. The two were one in almost everything, and their life was a most beautiful one.” Julia Grant claimed that any recognition she received was not due to her own accomplishments but a reflection of respect for her late husband, that “the light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me."  

For more detail on Julia, see the wonderful First Ladies site:

http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=19