Research Guides: First Ladies of the United States: Julia Grant

Research and Reference

Julia Dent Grant: National Park Service
Julia Dent was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 26, 1826. Although a typical woman of her era in some respects, she was extraordinary in many other ways. She had great strength of character, shared in the mixed fortunes of her husband Ulysses S. Grant, loved and cared for her family, and fulfilled her patriotic duty as First Lady. She captured many of her life experiences in writing The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant), the first memoir to be written by a First Lady.
Julia Grant: Credo Reference
Julia Dent was born on January 26, 1826, at White Haven Plantation, near St. Louis, Missouri, into a wealthy slaveholding family. Her father, Frederick Dent, was a farmer and her mother, Ellen Bray Dent, the daughter of Methodist missionaries. Julia was the fifth of eight children and the first daughter. She was largely educated at home or in a log cabin school nearby. She preferred the outdoors to study.
Julia Grant: White House Historical Association
O n January 26, 1826, Julia Dent was born to parents Frederick and Ellen Dent in St. Louis, Missouri. One of seven children, Julia grew up at her family’s plantation, White Haven. There, she interacted with and was served by enslaved servants.

Portrait

Julia Grant
Julia Grant
Brady-Handy Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Perspectives

The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant

Written in the early twentieth century for her children and grandchildren and first published in 1975, these eloquent memoirs detail the life of General Ulysses S. Grant's wife. First Lady Julia Dent Grant wrote her reminiscences with the vivacity and charm she exhibited throughout her life, telling her story in the easy flow of an afternoon conversation with a close friend. She writes fondly of White Haven, a plantation in St. Louis County, Missouri, where she had an idyllic girlhood and later met Ulysses. In addition to relating the joys she experienced, Grant tells about the difficult and sorrowful times. Her anecdotes give fascinating glimpses into the years of the American Civil War. One recounts the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Grant insisted she and her husband turn down an invitation to the theater. Her decision saved her husband's life: like Lincoln, he too had been marked for assassination. Throughout these memoirs, which she ends with her husband's death, Grant seeks to introduce her descendants to both her and the man she loved. She also strives to correct misconceptions that were circulated about him. She wanted posterity to share her pride in this man, whom she saw as one of America's greatest heroes. Her book is a testament to their devoted marriage. This forty-fifth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by John F. Marszalek and Frank J. Williams, a new preface by Pamela K. Sanfilippo, the original foreword by Bruce Catton, the original introduction by editor John Y. Simon, recommendations for further reading, and more than twenty photographs of the Grants, their children, and their friends.

Civil War Wives

Here are the life stories of three women who connect us to our national past and provide windows onto a social and political landscape that is strangely familiar yet shockingly foreign. Berkin focuses on three “accidental heroes” who left behind sufficient records to allow their voices to be heard clearly and to allow us to see the world as they did. Though they held no political power themselves, all three had access to power and unique perspectives on events of their time. Angelina Grimké Weld, after a painful internal dialogue, renounced the values of her Southern family’s way of life and embraced the antislavery movement, but found her voice silenced by marriage to fellow reformer Theodore Weld. Varina Howell Davis had an independent mind and spirit but incurred the disapproval of her husband, Jefferson Davis, when she would not behave as an obedient wife. Though ill-prepared and ill-suited for her role as First Lady of the Confederacy, she became an expert political lobbyist for her husband’s release from prison. Julia Dent Grant, the wife of Ulysses S. Grant, was a model of genteel domesticity who seemed content with the restrictions of marriage and motherhood, even though they led to alternating periods of fame and disgrace, wealth and poverty. Only late in life did she glimpse the price of dependency. Throughout, Berkin captures the tensions and animosities of the antebellum era and the disruptions, anxieties, and dislocations generated by the war and its aftermath.