Julia, Who Saw Future Things Through Permanently Crossed Eyes
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Julia with her children.
It is not uncommon for people to insist that their picture be taken in such a way as to avoid capturing a flaw that they feel insecure about. Julia most often did. Not needed! She was a pleasant enough looking woman, many thought. And charming.
Julia Dent was born in the state of Missouri on January 26, 1826, west of Saint Louis in the countryside at a place called White Haven Plantation. She was born very cross eyed! Doctors said that this could be fixed with a simple enough surgery, but she never in her lifetime chose to undergo this procedure. She was the fifth child of eight, seven of whom lived to adulthood. She was the daughter of Colonel Frederick Dent, the 850 acre White Haven plantation's owner, who had married Ellen Wrenshall. They were a pretty well to do Christian family and her childhood was a fond memory for Julia throughout her life. She grew up among her brothers and sisters and the children of about 30 black slaves who worked the plantation. When young, the slave children were sometimes her playmates. When older, they were at times her servants. It was a paradox of the times. She called her childhood "one long summer of sunshine, flowers and smiles..." That is certainly a childhood to be envied.
Attending nearby boarding schools for well to do young ladies, she became well educated and also spent time mastering the piano, becoming an excellent horse rider. Growing to womanhood she declared to her friends that she would one day marry “a soldier, a gallant, brave, dashing soldier.” Of course, when she declared a thing would come to be true one day it was a little different than when other women did so, because there was an oddity about some of the Dent women: both she and her mother, for instance, experienced well documented occasional episodes of 'second sight' or 'prophetic utterances'.
Julia reached marriage age and one day her military school trained brother, also named Frederick like her dad, wrote that he was bringing by a former classmate, now a young military man, whom he referred to as "gold", to White Haven for a visit. The brother did bring the friend, who seemed a good sort but from a lower economic background than the Dents. The young man took a great shine to Julia, charming, talented, cute, cross eyed Julia and he soon visited White Haven regularly. Julia's parents did not find him a particularly good match for their daughter because of his poorer and less educated background, but she did seem to like him, and he adored her they could see. One day he asked Julia to marry him, but settled for leaving her a promise sort of ring as he had to go off to the Mexican American War which had started. She missed him greatly, but then had a dream which she told everyone about in which he was to return unexpectedly in only about a week, but not in uniform. This seemed unlikely. Yet, in a few days he did return and got to stay for about a week. He had shown up I borrowed civilian clothing having ruined his military uniform with so much mud that he didn't want to arrive at her family's door looking like that. Unfortunately he then had to go to fight in the war and he was mostly gone for about 4 years during which they mostly wrote caring letters to keep their love alive. He missed her greatly...this would always be the case when they were separated. In fact, he was always quite lost without her.
She had another dream about him once...a frightening one...in which she saw only his upper body and he seemed to be riding on horseback though she only pictured his head and shoulders. He was in action and under great stress, but gave her a most serious look in the dream. He confirmed in a letter, responding to her dream, that he had been in action and fearing for his life at that exact time, and it was urgently on his mind at that life and death moment that he might never see his dear Julia again.
He developed the habit of becoming depressed, after they were married and had children, if he was stationed far from her for very long. He would drink too much. When she was at her family home in Missouri and he in the North West, it came to a head and he was told to resign from the army or be discharged for alcohol abuse. He resigned and returned home, in shame and with a drinking problem. She was just glad to have him back despite her family clearly being disappointed with the man she had married. They barely got by in those years. He even got to the point where he chopped fire wood and sold it on the street corners to earn the extra little bit that they desperately needed to live. Yet, she remained his cheerful supporter and told her doubting family and acquaintances that no matter how bad it seemed now, she knew that he would one day be the foremost man of the land. She called him a great man. Big words for the wife of a washed out soldier selling wood on a corner, but she was a Christian believers who stood beside her husband through thick and thin. These years were part of the 'thin'! It almost reminds a person of the Biblical Sarah, wife of Abraham, called her husband her Lord even when he was a homeless sheep herder who lied about her and even got her kidnapped, in fact! But she kept her faith in Jesus and her husband.
It got so hard for them financially that they moved from Missouri to Ohio to live near her husband's family at the family hide tanning business. He may have been on his way to being the most prominent man in the land, but he was on the slow boat! He had bigger dreams for himself, and his wife made him believe in himself, but his prospects appeared grim.
A war broke out...a civil war. Her husband saw it as an opportunity, applied for and received an officer's commission, going off to fight, leaving his cross eyed Julia behind. She made the best of it, worrying about him and their family's future. He missed her. They wrote heart felt letters.
To the surprise of many he made a name for himself, smart and brave, and as the war went on...even a great name for himself. Soon he was the greatest general on their side of the conflict, going head to head against the insanely admired and highly acclaimed greatest general of the opposing side. Yet news of heart husbands exploits began to pour in. He was a butcher! He let his men die by the tens of thousands and seemed not to care. He would not retreat when any rational general would, and his soldiers paid the price. The news papers of their side of the war ridiculed him horribly, and she could only keep believing in him...she had to.
Yet a thing was noticed: while he had lost more men in the first two battles than his adversary had by far, yet he had remained determinedly on the battlefield each time...depleting his enemy's forces also. And both times it was this highly heralded and greatly feared 'greatest commander of the age' who had been forced by attrition and depletion of supplies to leave the battlefield. And the soldiers were beginning to rally behind their stubborn General, this husband of Julia's, this little lion that would run from no man, all 5'8'' 135 pounds of him.
Yet as the battles between these two titans continued, Julia continued to pray and cheer him on with all of her faith and strength, and her husband only gained in victories. There was great hope that he would be the man who would lead them to victory. While Lee did seem to be the more brilliant in a battle, it was her husband who seemed more able to mentally grasp the needs that would lead to an overall victory in the war. He seemed to be almost as good on any given battlefield (and better supplied!) but able to grasp the big picture of the entire war more clearly. Yet he had a problem: he was away from his wife and the deep depressions and the over-drinking was raising its head again in his life. Her husband became depressed to the point that it began to frighten his subordinate officers. They even wrote their President about it. This man could fight...but he couldn't go long without his wife before he sank into terrible morose depressions. When she came to briefly visit, or he her, then he would recover his animation and charm and spirit. But it didn't last too long after she left. The fate of a nation, and in fact the fate of a new and promising form of government upon the Earth, seemed to oddly hang up on the proximity that this man had with his proud, uplifting, sensible, cheering little sometimes prophetic cross eyed bride.
Wives weren't usually allowed near the battlefield for long, but it was decided by the movers and shakers of a desperately imperiled nation at war that without this general they were lost, and without his wife he was lost, and so...the wife must be allowed to stay at the edge of the theater of war whenever humanly possible, and they would just have to allow her to be in that risk, and they all somewhat secretly agreed to make out to her husband that this seemed perfectly reasonable and normal to them, and that there was no reason at all that she shouldn't stay near him for long periods of time there at his battlefield headquarters (though it certainly wasn't normal, and it certainly wasn't really safe for her! In fact, she was almost captured by an unexpected enemy advance at one point!)
But Julia's husband had his stabilizing better half with him, and he kept his head in the game, and there came a day when the war was one. Her husband received the surrender of the world's most vaunted general, and...it was over. Her husband could return home. And, then, in the warmth of hard earned victory, they were invited to attend Ford's Theater with the grateful and deeply obliged President and his wife. But...though her husband wanted to go, Julia felt a foreboding about it and pressured him to decline. He loved her, and he declined on their behalf. They headed out of town and that night the President was assassinated in the theater. Her husband would have been sitting right by the President, and would quite possibly have been shot also. He certainly would have been a prime target. So once again, her crossed eyes had somehow seen more clearly.
Her husband, Ulysses Grant, was elected President only a few years later and she, Julia Dent Grant, became the first lady of the land. Her husband, the lowly fire wood seller on the street corner under the dismissive gaze of her friends and family, had become a chief man in all of the land just as she had proclaimed in the darkest of times that he would be. It seems unlikely that that prophecy did not come from God!
She would go on to be a healing force in a nation licking its wounds from a deeply painful civil war; in her later years she even publicly became pretty close friends with Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, who had been the First Lady of the Confederacy during its years of existence. Both women wanted national healing and forgiveness. (Ironically, both first ladies had been maligned for their appearance by some. Varina was so darkly complected she was called a mulatto by many in the Confederacy, and she had always personally been against slavery and had let it be known. She wasn't the most popular first lady! Julia was 'cross eyed', and had paradoxically come from a slave owning family. Her family had even sold them a slave to be their servant at one early point in their lives. Her husband Ulysses had officially granted the person, William Jones, his freedom after about one year, in 1859, before the war, as his conscience got the best of him. The Grants were very poor that year, but he freed his slave rather than selling him. Yet...it's the truth that he did have a slave for a year. His family, the Grants he worked for then, were strongly anti-slavery in their beliefs it has been written. There were a lot of complicated family dynamics on both sides of the chains, I guess. )
Julia Dent may have gotten a strange 'worldly' reward from God at the end of her life. God did not give up on this woman who never gave up on her family! A bad investment had left her husband and her nearly penniless at the end of their life, and her husband, Ulysses, tried to finish his wartime memoirs before he died of throat cancer there at the end of his life, so that his loyal and devoted love and wife Julia would not live a wretched life as his widow. He finished the memoirs only a few days before he died. They were astoundingly popular! Mark Twain himself made sure of the publishing for Julia, and soon enough she received the largest royalty payout of any book up to that time in the USA: $450,000.00 dollars...around $15,000,000.00 in 2025 A.D. dollars. It was enough of a fortune to keep her very well attended to for the rest of her days. She was the first First Lady to write her own memoirs and the first to ever be filmed. She had instituted the State Dinner. She was an important social figure and communicated with other First Ladies quite a great deal, often organizing their communal events. She was quite active as a private person, and influential. She was no slouch!
Julia Dent had unusual eyes and an unusual life and an unusually sustaining and building sort of Christian spirit. It cannot at this time be known by us if Ulysses S. Grant could have held himself together enough to beat the amazing battlefield commander Robert E. Lee without her comforting and by all reports quite steadying presence near his side. It is not known if Grant would have been assassinated at Ford's Theater had he been there that night. It's not known if his ego could have survived his days of having to sell fire wood on the corner just before the Civil War and his rise to fame and prominence. There are a lot of 'what ifs'. What is known is that concerning the stature of her husband, she could make a mountain out of a mole hill, and do it with her eyes crossed! And she was pretty impressive all by herself as well. Julia seems to have been an imperfect yet worthy tool in the hands of her Maker, as was her husband. And how many US First Ladies may have been among the prophets, in a way?