It was perhaps the greatest American social event of the nineteenth century. Finally, a White House wedding was bursting forth in full glory. The walls and staircases and chandeliers were covered in a mass of lilies, tuberoses and spirea. Florida orange blossoms had been crated up and sent north.
The bride, Nellie Grant, was the eighteen-year-old daughter of an American icon, a war hero and the sitting president. One historian described her as “probably the most attractive of all the young women who have ever lived in the White House.” The groom, Algernon Sartoris, was a twenty-three year old member of the English “minor gentry.” They had met on a cruise across the Atlantic, courting in the moonlight and stealing “away to the darkened decks for kisses,” while Nellie’s chaperones lay moaning in their cabins with sea sickness. To the public it was an irresistible, romantic story. One newspaper carried a twelve page pictorial insert of the wedding, its presses running non-stop, unable to keep up with the insatiable public demand.
On May 21, 1874, “as the resplendent marine band played Mendelssohn’s Wedding March,” President Ulysses S. Grant escorted his daughter into the East Room. Nellie was radiant, wearing a white satin gown “trimmed in rare Brussels point lace” and reportedly worth thousands of dollars. The president “looked steadfastly at the floor” and wept. His new son-in-law would be taking Nellie to a life in England.
Nellie Grant, loved and doted on by her father for years, was the only daughter in a family with three sons. She had been a youthful thirteen when the Grants first moved into the White House. And so the decision had been taken to send her to a proper finishing school. The president himself made arrangements for the trip, escorting his Nellie to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, explaining that “Mrs. Grant will only cry and bring her back.” But by the time the President had finally done the deed and returned to the White House, there were three telegrams awaiting him, each from his distraught daughter and each proclaiming her despair. The stubborn hero of Vicksburg immediately relented, sending an escort to bring her back.
Nellie Grant was the first teenage girl in the White House since Abby Fillmore, and the nation was fascinated. Washington society professed shock when she danced the night away at a society ball. Grant said not a word of rebuke but, as Nellie turned sixteen and found herself being pursued by “half-grown admirers” all over town, he and Mrs. Grant decided to get her out of the limelight, even out of the country. A quiet trip abroad, surrounded by trusted chaperones, seemed to offer the right formula. It would be educational, as well as buy time for a sixteen year who was growing up much too quickly.
Nellie Grant’s trip to England was triumphant. It was not what her parents and chaperones had intended or expected. America’s first teen was received by Queen Victoria and feted at one garden party reception after the next. And on the voyage home, she had met Algernon Sartoris. (pronounced Sar-triss.)
According to some accounts, Sartoris was the heir to his family’s estate, a considerable fortune. The couple left the White House the afternoon of the wedding, boarding a special train for New York, pulling their private Pullman palace luxury car, made especially for the Vienna exposition and covered with British and American flags. The next day they sailed for England.
Nellie Grant, who had once begged to come home after only hours at Miss Porter’s school for young ladies in Connecticut, was brave throughout her experience in England. She had four children, who comforted her greatly. But according to family tradition, her husband was “a womanizer and a heavy drinker.” Nor did she ever really take to English society that from a distance had so impressed her parents. Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, the mother of the clan, who had for years held forth from her house in Park Place, London, entertaining Charles Dickens, Henry James and other stars in the English literary galaxy, retired to the country in the south of England where she took the American Nellie under her wing. When Henry James visited the family he described the dinner conversation as brilliant, but then added that “poor little Nellie Grant sits speechless on the sofa, understanding neither head nor tail”
By 1889, with Algernon’s drinking problem out of control, his esteemed family finally agreed that the daughter of the American president had suffered enough. Clearly, the famous storybook marriage that had charmed the public on both sides of the Atlantic was over. Nellie, who longed for a return to America, was not faulted. She was granted a divorce, provided a large annual income and finally allowed to take her children back to the United States, where a special act of Congress renewed her citizenship.
Her presidential father was gone now, having died of cancer in 1885. But her mother Julia, now wealthy from his book royalties, welcomed her and her children back home. For a time the public still attended her every move. Her wedding, whatever its outcome, had forever endeared her to the nation, who still thought of her as a young beauty. When Algernon Sartoris died at age forty-two, there was immediate speculation that Nellie would marry again. Prominent names were bandied about in new stories. But Nellie’s children needed her, and her youthful romantic experience had left her wary.
Finally, on July 4, 1912, her fifty-seventh birthday, Nellie Grant Sartoris surprised the nation by marrying her childhood sweetheart, Franklin Hatch Jones of Chicago. He was not of English nobility or even a lion of Washington society. Nellie, thinking of herself for a change, was returning to her roots to find happiness. But it was not to be. Three months later she became quite ill, developing a paralysis. She would remain an invalid the rest of her life. She died ten years later on August 30, 1922.
On that famous wedding day in 1874, after Nellie and Algernon had left the White House, Ulysses S. Grant had walked into his daughter’s empty bedroom, fell on the bed and sobbed uncontrollably. They were surely the tears of a sentimental, doting father, losing his only daughter and maybe something more. Grant may have wondered how the presidency and the demands on his time had impacted the life of his Nellie. Growing from thirteen to eighteen is quite a leap for any young lady in the best of times but, within the fulcrum of the White House, with its busy work and endless pressures, the months must have raced by. Grant may have been regretting what he had missed.
Then there were the demands on Nellie, herself. A girl of thirteen, only on the cusp of adolescence, had overnight become an adult public figure. Grant openly acknowledged his own inadequacy for the presidency; surely he superimposed those same feelings on his children. If he was not ready, how could they be ready?
And finally, there were the nagging doubts about Algernon Sartoris. Grant couldn’t know the future, but he knew that his new son-in-law had problems. While initially opposing the match, the Sartoris family had warned the president that their son was “a drinker.” Grant must have feared that news as only one could who was intimately, personally familiar with such an addiction. A hundred years later an historian observed that “Nellie was sold at a low price.”
(Photo courtesy: Library of Congress; Text excepts from Doug Wead's New York Times best seller, All The President's Children.)
Doug Wead is a respected presidential historian and New York Times bestselling author. He has been an advisor to two presidents and served on senior staff at the White House of George Herbert Walker Bush. Recent titles include The Raising of a President: the Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation’s Leaders.
