The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS285 year old Jefferson Davis, her maturation took place as a wife and mother. The urge to reach beyond the domestic sphere led her to perform all sorts of administrative chores when he was a United States senator, and to take an active part in political decisions when he was president of the Confederacy. At 63, after Davis's death, she built a career of sorts as a writer for the New York World, and lived until eighty, much praised for the brilliance of her conversation. As a person whose fate was inextricably blended with that of the Confederacy , as a mother five of whose six children died in her lifetime, she was victim of far more than her southern lady upbringing. Yet the evidence of her last seventeen years suggests that she might have been a far more balanced personality with a modicum of freedom from the bonds of social custom. A final chapter recapitulates the general experience of southern women of all classes during the war, and will make a useful assignment in a variety of history courses. The important contribution of this volume, however, is the considerable light it throws on the social consequences of narrow sex role definitions. Anne Firor Scott Duke University The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant) Edited by John Y. Simon. Introduction by Bruce Carton, with a preliminary essay by Ralph G. Newman. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975. Pp. 346. $12.50.) Rarely does the wife of a famous man emerge from her husband's shadow. (Seldom does a Dolly Madison, Eleanor Roosevelt or Jackie Kennedy appear.) Often the wife is known only for her part in helping her mate become famous. Legend has a cruel way of obscuring the wife as a distinct personality. The Grant legend unfairly casts Julia Dent Grant in the role of keeping her husband away from the bottle at crucial times during the Civil War, especially in the Petersburg struggle. . Her Memoirs dispel some of the mists of myth that surrounded Julia Grant during her lifetime and in the three-fourths of a century since, allowing her to come through as a lively, likable human being. She began setting down her recollections in the "very dreary" years after General Grant's death (1885). It was a time when she believed "my life had been lived, for we had been inseparable." "Reluctantly at first," she says, she began, "but soon I became an inveterable scribbler. I preferred writing to eating. ... I was living again with the aid of my fancy and my pen, the life that had been so sweet to me." The General's Personal Memoirs may have been an inspiration, too. Grant had told his own story—but only what he thought would in- 286BOOK REVIEWS terest the reading public—his early years and the war years. Reticent by nature, he said little of his marriage, wife, and family, and nothing of his Presidency and later. Julia Grant's Memoirs complement the General's, supplying what he left unsaid. The first quarter of her work treats her own family, her meeting with and courtship by Grant, their wedding in 1848, the children and family life during the discouraging 1850's. The middle part continues with the family life residences in Philadelphia and Burlington, N.J., goings and comings during the war, with a large segment on the War's closing months, the relief of Appomattox and the post victory parades, celebrations, acclamations that she shared with "Ulys" with so much pleasure. Social aspects of life in the White House are given a fair space. But she is at her happy best in the volume's final third, describing the rather haphazard, but redcarpeted trip around the world—every minute of that two and a half years she savored to the full. At points she illuminates Grant's attitude at crucial historical moments . For example, while publicly loyal to his superiors in the postwar Reconstruction, he confides that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton should have been fired "long ago" by President Johnson for "hectoring and thwarting him [Johnson] in every possible way." Grant's frequent and intense headaches...