Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Read Free Page B

Lieutenant Richard Ewell finishing the last of the departed regiment’s paperwork before following the unit down the Mississippi. Ewell readily wrote out a few days’ extension of Grant’s leave, and Grant found a horse and set out for White Haven that evening. Normally the Gravois Creek was shallow, but a placid stream was not what he encountered that night: “On this occasion it had been raining heavily, and when the creek was reached, I found the banks full to overflowing, and the current rapid. I looked at it a moment to consider what to do. One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished … So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current.” With Grant hanging on to the horse’s mane as the animal swam through the foaming water in the darkness, both horse and man reached the opposite bank. When he arrived at White Haven, drenched and dripping, little sister Emma was right there, and her memory for such matters later enabled her to render this account of that moment:

    We all enjoyed heartily the sight of his ridiculous figure with his clothes flopping like wet rags around his limbs, and none laughed more heartily than my sister Julia. Lieutenant Grant took it all good humoredly enough, but there was a sturdy seriousness in his usually twinkling eyes that must have suggested, perhaps, to Julia that he had come on more serious business, for the teasing did not last long. [Older brother] John carried him off to find some dry clothes, and when he returned the usually natty soldier looked scarcely more like himself … John was taller and larger than Grant, and his clothes did not fit the Lieutenant “soonenough.”Of course, this roused more laughter, which the soldier took in the same good part, but those rosy telltale cheeks of his reddened, as usual with him when the inward state of his feelings did not agree with his outward composure.
     

    Grant held his fire until a day soon thereafter when several of the Dents set off to attend a friend’s wedding, with Grant included in the group. He arranged matters so that he and Julia were alone in a buggy, with him at the reins. As they approached a little wooden bridge across the still-turbulent Gravois, which had a torrent of water roaring just beneath the wooden planks, Julia began to worry about the safety of crossing.

    I noticed, too, that Lieutenant Grant was very quiet, and that and the high water bothered me … He assured me, in his brief way, that it was perfectly safe, and in my heart I relied upon him. Just as we reached the old bridge I said, “Now, if anything happens, remember I shall cling to you, no matter what you say to the contrary.” He simply said “All right” and we were over the planks in less than a minute. Then his mood changed.
     

    As Julia put it, he used her statement about clinging to him to ask her to cling to him forever. Grant’s only recorded comment on his proposal was, “Before I returned I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks … Before separating it was definitely understood that at a convenient time we would join our fortunes, and not let the removal of a regiment trouble us.” Julia told her “Ulys,” as she had taken to calling him, not to ask her father for her hand in marriage just then; she was his, but she did not want an engagement to be announced.
     
    During the next four years, the couple saw each other only once, when he returned from Louisiana on a brief leave before his regiment was sent into the Mexican War. On that visit, he received Colonel Dent’s permission to marry his daughter, despite the colonel’s dislike of what he knew of the conditions that army wives often encountered. From