Even in war, parents need their children as much as their children need them.
They stood together, the wife leaning close to her husband. Grasping his rough hand in hers, she begged him not to go. He was all she had in this world. All but their boy. Stay home, she pleaded, “[b]efore you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.”
Looking at the tears streaming down her face, the husband smiled gently. He had to fight. He would “die of shame,” he explained, if he failed to defend their home. And what if he did die fighting, he asked? Was that worse than failing to fight at all, laying down his weapons to watch his wife and son enslaved under a tyrant?
And then the man prayed, his wife still close against him, that of their son his countrymen would one day say, “He is a better man than his father,” and “a joy to his mother’s heart.” Still crying softly, the wife took the baby in her arms, and the husband softened, asking, “Why so much grief? No man will hurry me down to Hades, against my fate. No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward—it’s born with us the day we are born.”
This wartime couple is neither Union nor Confederate—they are Homer’s Hector and Andromache in the midst of the Trojan War. Hector’s fear that defeat would ensure the loss of all they held dear echoed throughout homes on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line during the American Civil War. Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades is the story of how American families endured that conflict. Hades shares the experiences of families unknown to most readers, while others will be quite familiar, though often with a twist. While there are tales riddled with grief, too much of that would belie mankind’s ability to find humor in the horrors that surround them, so there are accounts that laugh as well as cry with the veterans and the civilians at home. In the end, Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades is the story of American families who fought for a land free of tyrants who would enslave them and trembled as they faced the fate that, as Hector foretold, is “born with us the day that we are born.”
The following excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Hades, relating the exhaustion and determination of two of the war’s most famous families in the third year of the war.
Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Washington in spring 1864 with no one there to greet him. He was in town to meet with President Lincoln, who was about to promote him to lieutenant general, a rank previously held only by George Washington. The White House planned to have a committee to meet Grant at the station, but that fell through, and when he stepped onto the platform with his 13-year-old son, Fred, the quiet commander probably let out a sigh of relief that he would be able to avoid another speech demanded by another crowd of supporters.
They made their way to the Willard Hotel, where Grant almost managed to remain incognito until the desk clerk read “Ulysses S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” on the registry. He cast aside the only room he had claimed was available for the man in the crumpled linen duster and rushed to relieve Grant of his bag, taking him to the suite Lincoln had occupied just before his inauguration. Word spread quickly of their arrival, and when the Grants came downstairs for supper, they could barely start their meal before the dining room’s self-designated leader jumped up to lead the room in “three cheers for Lieutenant General Grant.” Fred watched as his father stood awkwardly, fumbled with his napkin, and nodded his thanks. Despite Grant’s best efforts to return to his meal, the stares and expectant grins from fellow diners became unbearably awkward and the quiet general was forced to return to his room.
If Grant thought he had escaped the limelight, he was mistaken. His victories in Tennessee and Mississippi during the previous two years had cemented his fame. He had given Northerners hope when they seemed to face one failure after another in the East. Even Union Maj. Gen. George Meade’s victory at Gettysburg the previous summer dimmed when he let Robert E. Lee’s army escape to Virginia to lick its wounds. In contrast, Westerners boasted, when Grant’s forces finally defeated the Confederates at Vicksburg, they captured General John Pemberton’s 30,000 officers and men, as well as all of their cannon and nearly 60,000 rifles and muskets. This was a man, Northerners proclaimed, who knew how to finish the job.
As Fred followed his father back to their suite that evening, he must have marveled at how quickly their lives, like their sleeping quarters, had changed. Just a year earlier, Fred had joined Grant in camp, resting his head on saddles or cane cots that sympathetic soldiers, likely missing their own sons, made for him. While the war was separating nearly every family, North and South, the Grants were unusually determined to remain together. They weren’t the first family to join a husband in camp during winter, nor was Grant the first officer to have a son serving on his staff. But few generals had a 12-year-old boy tagging along in 1863.
It wasn’t just the general who wanted Fred in camp; the boy’s mother understood the necessity of surrounding her husband with family. Grant was a good man with a strong work ethic. He was also a homebody who was never entirely at peace unless he was surrounded by the wife he adored and the children he spoiled. The determined commander who brought Mississippi to its knees had a soft heart and a far more reflective soul than many of his contemporaries realized.
By the 1850s, Grant had married Julia Dent, the sister of his West Point roommate. Stationed at forts too far from home, and desperately missing his wife and children, Grant could barely function in his misery. “You don’t know,” he confided to Julia, “how forsaken I feel here.”
For years, Julia moved from one fort to another with Grant, sensing from the start that her husband needed her nearby. And it was true. The moment Julia traveled home to give birth or whenever she remained with her family in St. Louis when Grant’s orders took him to forts too remote for her to safely join him, Ulys, as Julia came to call him, would slowly unravel. By 1852, he admitted to Julia that he was “almost crazy sometimes to see Fred,” his young son, and declared, “I cannot be separated from him and his Ma for a long time.” Rumors surfaced that Grant was drinking excessively, and then a brutally unfair and malicious commanding officer charged Grant with being drunk on duty. Rather than take the time to clear his name, Grant grasped at the fastest exit from the army and resigned in disgust.
It’s never been proved that he actually drank to excess, and Grant was hardly the only American man consuming alcohol in the 19th century. The accounts of abuse, modern biographers theorize, were likely tied to Grant’s tendency to appear intoxicated after just a few drinks. It’s far more likely that stories of his occasional drinks, consumed to self-medicate against debilitating migraines or loneliness, resulted in public intoxication and embarrassment. History will never truly know the details of Grant’s battle with the bottle, but it is clear that he and Julia understood his inability to either handle or process alcohol, and, consequently, they strictly limited its consumption. They also made sure that Grant always had with him the one thing he needed to succeed: his family.
That was how 12-year-old Fred Grant wound up on the banks of the Mississippi River in spring 1863 and in the dining room of the Willard Hotel the following year. When the war began, Ulysses had told his wife that he needed her to “be cheerful and try to encourage me,” insisting this was key to his success. That same year, he complained about a hasty letter she had mailed to him in camp, noting “this is my forty second birth day. Getting old am I not?—I received a very short letter from you this evening scratched off in a very great hurry as if you had something much more pleasing if not more important to do than to write to me.” Clearly, his melancholy was setting in, and Julia struggled to find ways for her and the children to be with him. When she realized visits would not suffice, that a member of the family needed to be his ever-present rock, she sent their oldest son, Fred, to join Ulysses as he trained his Illinois volunteers in 1861.
Grant seems to have enjoyed having his son with him in camp, but as the possibility of battle approached, he ordered Fred home. “We may have some fighting to do,” Grant explained, “and he is too young to have the exposure of camp life.” But Julia insisted, sensing that as the pressures of war increased, her husband would need his family more than ever. She had three other children at home to care for; Fred should stay with Grant despite his wife’s concerns about his safety: “Alexander was not older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.” But Ulysses refused to listen and sent the boy home.
By spring 1863, however, Grant had changed his mind. Perhaps the set- backs of the previous year shook him. Shiloh had brought a Union victory at tremendous human cost, and rumors circulated that Grant was to blame. Some said he’d been needlessly reckless, while others insisted he was drunk. Still others cited both reasons as they christened Ulysses “The Butcher.” As if this were not worrisome enough, when Grant had sent Sherman to break General Pemberton and his Confederates at Vicksburg at the end of 1862, his dear friend had returned in defeat.
As a fresh campaign season approached, Grant may have sensed that he needed the rock that his family always proved to be—at least his immediate family. His father-in-law continued to voice praise for the Confederacy and was known to walk the streets of St. Louis proclaiming his right to retain his slave property. Meanwhile, his wife’s brothers donned gray uniforms to defend their family’s beliefs. But Grant’s wife and children were constants, his foundation. When they left after a visit to his headquarters at Corinth, Miss., in August 1862, barely missing an engagement with Confederate forces, Grant complained that he and his entire staff missed Julia and the children, observing that “without Jess to stauk through the office it seems as if something is missing.” And so, in spring 1863, he wrote to Julia and asked if she would send Fred to join him at the front. The boy, they both knew, brought with him a child’s optimism and love, pure and uncomplicated, and his parents knew it would sustain Ulysses in the dark days that loomed ahead.
Of course, there was the challenge of having a small boy in headquarters with no tutor or staff officer assigned to protect him. Nor did Julia send any of her slaves; her beloved house servant, Jule, seemed to be Julia’s rock when Ulysses was gone, and she could not bear to part with her. Julia never mentioned the irony of owning slaves while her husband was fighting to liberate them. When Julia did travel to camp later that summer, Jule traveled with her and seized the opportunity to run away. Julia was frustrated, but Ulysses was relieved. He’d never entirely approved of his wife’s “property,” and refused to let anyone chase after Jule.
In his attempt to convince Julia to allow Fred to return to camp, Grant promised their boy would continue to “read and study his arithmetic.” From Julia’s own complaints about their boys’ campaign against their studies, it’s likely that she doubted Ulysses’ promise, but he needn’t have made it. He failed to realize that her primary mission was to provide him with whatever he needed to win the war. Julia had been her husband’s greatest champion from the day they married. Every setback had been not doom but a challenge on the journey to their bright future. He was her light, she was his, and together they would sustain each other through this dreadful war. It was that simple. They had survived a secret engagement while he served in Mexico, they had weathered the storm of his departure from the Old Army, and they endured one economic failure after another. Death and destruction came knocking in peace and in war, at home and at the front. If the years had taught them anything, it was that they could not avoid tragedy and that they fared better in every scenario when they stood together. Julia helped Fred pack and sent him to Ulys.
Fred arrived in camp at the end of March 1863, “happy as can be,” his father reported. “His age,” Ulysses observed, “enabled him to take in all he saw, and to retain a recollection of it that would not be possible in more mature years.” Having young Fred there throughout the campaign and siege “caused no anxiety either to me or to his mother, who was at home. He looked out for himself and was in every battle of the campaign.”
Indeed, their time together often sounded like a grand adventure as Grant wrote to Julia, boasting that they had just returned “from a trip of fifteen miles up the river where we had quite a horseback ride. He enjoys himself finely and I doubt not will receive as much perminant [sic] advantage by being with me for a few months as if at school.” Weeks later he told her that Fred “has heard balls whistle and is not moved in the slightest by it.” If such reports made her anxious, Julia did not admit to it. After all, the home front wasn’t much safer. A few weeks before Fred rejoined his father, Julia Grant’s sister, Emma Dent Casey, had been stopped by two Confederates near her home in Caseyville, Kentucky, and asked for a moment with her nephew Fred, who was visiting the Caseys. She managed to evade their questions and then sent word for Grant’s son to be placed aboard the next boat heading down the river to safety. “There is no doubt,” she admitted, “that they were looking for Fred, and had they found him they would certainly have dealt his father a hard blow.”
In April 1863, Fred was with his father as Grant and Admiral David Dixon Porter discussed their plans to run Union gunboats past the Confederate defenders at Vicksburg. Fred had been horrified by the damage already done to Porter’s crew in an earlier fight, and he admitted to being “sickened at the scene before me. The deck was covered with blood and pieces of flesh; several dead men, torn and lacerated, lay about us. Some of the gunners, with still bleeding wounds, were standing firmly by their guns.” As the men landed at Bruinsburg, Miss., young Fred sneaked ashore with them, where again he was horrified by the bloody carnage of battle.
During the campaign that followed, Fred watched as the U.S. colors were raised over the Mississippi capital of Jackson, was nearly killed when, alone again, he stumbled upon a house full of wounded Confederates, and, near Vicksburg, was nearly wounded when Confederate infantrymen began shooting at him from across the Big Black River. When a round hit Fred in the leg, he went white with pain. Colonel Clark B. Laglow, a staff officer, rushed to Fred’s aid and blanched when the terrified boy announced that he’d “been killed.” Laglow checked the wound and then exhaled with relief. It’s “all right,” he smiled, “you’re not dead.”
A t about the same time Ulysses and Fred Grant entered the Willard Hotel in early 1864, Varina Davis’s faith in Confederate victory, if she had ever had any, was collapsing. Even worse, she felt like her whole family was collapsing with it. That spring, the newspapers ran rumors of her husband, Jefferson, fathering children with women in Mississippi and Wisconsin, and some editors even insisted that his son born by a Mississippi slave was now serving in the Union Navy. Then, if anyone continued to doubt the ability of the Emancipation Proclamation to encourage slaves to fee to the freedom offered by the nearby Union lines, the stories of Varina Davis’ slaves escaping the Confederate White House convinced them. Escapees included Varina’s personal maid, Betsey, who took with her $80 in gold and more than $2,000 in Confederate bills, along with stories of the Confederate First Lady’s vicious and violent temper. Years later, Varina would insist that Betsey had confided in her that she was leaving and deny all the rumors, but her response at the time indicated only the shocked disappointment that echoed throughout the South as other Confederates discovered similar escapes.
And then, in March, she learned that a prewar acquaintance, Col. Ulric Dahlgren, had tried to assassinate her husband. His plan, likely drafted with U.S. Secretary of War Stanton, had been to launch a surprise attack on Richmond that would free Union prisoners from the jails, burn the city and murder President Davis and his Cabinet. Word of Dahlgren’s raid leaked before he reached the Confederate capital, and when he discovered this, he raced back toward Washington. Before he could cross into Union territory, Confederate soldiers caught up to Dahlgren and killed him, mutilating the man who had planned to wreak such destruction on Richmond and the Southern government, and then displayed his body in public as a warning to others. Varina was devastated. Ulric had been the fair-haired son of Admiral John Dahlgren, with whom the Davises had enjoyed many evenings before the war. It was the destruction of one more old friendship. Worse, Varina would argue, it was a violent betrayal.
Shaken from the particularly chaotic spring of 1864, Varina climbed into a carriage in the early afternoon of April 30 to bring lunch to her husband at the Custom House. While they chatted, a messenger dashed in, breathlessly reporting that there had been an accident at the White House. The Davis’ 5-year-old son, Joseph, had fallen from the balcony. As his parents arrived home, they found their boy’s breathing had slowed and far too much blood had spilled on the pavement where he lay Doctors were called and prayers were said, but in less than an hour of their reaching his side, Joseph was gone.
The past three years had brought one death after another, but this one came closest to breaking both of the Davises. That night, friends heard the president pace the floor, back and forth. Earlier that day, as Joseph faded away, they had heard him moan, “Not mine, oh, Lord, but thine,” and all night he seemed to be willing himself to accept the death of his young son while in another room Varina wept in inconsolable grief.
In the days that followed, Jefferson Davis occupied his mind with his work, touring the Confederate positions around the city as he and General Lee focused on the war that stubbornly continued. In a tangle of trees and underbrush so thick that locals had named the spot “The Wilderness,” Union and Confederate soldiers opened another campaign season one week after Davis had watched, tortured, as his son died in his arms. The armies fought there for three days, and then continued to Spotsylvania Court House, where battles raged sporadically for two weeks. After a brief break, the men rushed to kill each other again along the North Anna River and then again at a place called Cold Harbor.
While Varina mourned her son, tens of thousands of mothers discovered that they, too, had lost their boys, but on distant lands where mothers could not offer their arms or their prayers before their sons were gone. It created a scenario that horrified a generation that believed that a good death required a person to be at peace with God and with his life as he passed from this world. The Confederate First Lady seemed to embody the confused, grief-stricken nation as visitors found her “utterly depressed,” and “grey and forlorn” as summer approached. Eventually, melancholy evolved into chronic exhaustion and the desire to shut out the world. By the end of May, Varina admitted to her mother that her only solace came in finding a quiet room in the house where she could sit alone.
And then, on June 27, 1864, the anniversary of the battle at Gaines Mill that had saved the Confederate capital two years earlier, little Varina Anne Davis arrived. The baby did not erase her mother’s doubts about the Confederacy’s future, but she did save the First Lady from the depths and forced her attention to shift to the needs of the present. Nicknamed “Winnie”—Jefferson Davis’s pet name for his wife—the child pulled Varina from what she later called the “war’s darkest hour.”
Adapted from Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived It, by Susannah J. Ural (Osprey, 2013).
Originally published in the March 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
