A MARRIAGE WORTH WAITING FOR

Eighteen-year-old Julia Dent, a beautiful society girl of St. Louis, thought herself too young to be married. But when the dashing twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant asked for her hand in 1844, she accepted before he returned to his regiment in Louisiana.

Grant waited until 1845 to ask Julia’s father for his blessing. Frederick Dent did not think Julia was suited to the life of a soldier’s wife. Grant immediately said he had been offered a professorship at a college in Ohio and that if his career was Dent’s only objection, he would resign from the military and pursue academia. Julia recorded in her memoir:

My father thought it best for him to stick to his profession. . . . [Grant] convinced papa that if the life did not suit me, he would make me happy. At all events, permission was obtained for us to correspond. If we who were so young should not change our minds in a year or two, he would then make no objection. This was satisfactory to both of us, and we considered the matter settled.2

The correspondence between Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent carried them through their engagement during the Mexican War. Though they would not see each other again for three years, their courtship never faltered.

After the war ended, the couple married on August 22, 1848. (No one there could have imagined that two of Grant’s groomsmen, Lt. Cad- mus Wilcox and Bernard Pratte, would later surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, ending the nation’s Civil War in 1865.3)

The love between Ulysses and Julia Grant has been hailed as one of the greatest recorded romances in history. They had four children, weathered the Civil War with Grant as the senior Union general, and then moved into the White House when Grant became the president of the United States from 1869–1877.

At Grant’s funeral in 1885, Bishop John P. Newman paid tribute to their marriage: “Husband and wife [were] the happy supplement of each other . . . She shared his trials and his triumphs, his sorrows and his joys, his toils and his rewards, . . and she shall share with him whatever homage future ages shall pay at his national shrine.”

Prayer: Lord, be glorified in my marriage.