page_title: Julia Sand
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Julia Sand / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: A portrait of Chester A. Arthur located inside the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: Julia I. Sand was an American woman who corresponded with the American President Chester A. Arthur, beginning in late August 1881. Arthur saved twenty-three letters, all of which were discovered in 1958 after his grandson, Chester Alan Arthur III, sold his grandfather's papers to the Library of Congress. The last surviving letter is dated September 15, 1883. It is not known whether Arthur ever wrote back as no letter from him has ever been found. Sand often referred to herself as the President's "little dwarf", an allusion to the idea that in a royal court, only the dwarf would have the courage to tell the truth.
context_section_description: Julia Sand was the eighth daughter of a German emigrant named Christian Henry Sand who became President of the Metropolitan Gas Light Company of New York. She lived in Brooklyn until her father died in 1867, at which point her family moved to New Jersey. By 1880, they had settled at 46 East 74th Street in New York City. One of her brothers died in the American Civil War, which may have inspired her interest in politics.
  Sand was educated, read French, enjoyed poetry, and travelled to fashionable Saratoga Springs and Newport. At the time she began writing to Arthur, she was bedridden due to spinal trouble, lameness, and deafness.
  Most of what is known about Sand comes from her surviving letters to President Arthur. "I am a poor little woman who has always been the youngest of her family, who, consequently, if she lives to be fifty, will always be treated like a child – who would have no comfort in life if she could not occasionally scold some very big man." (Letter of September 28, 1881).
  She may have also been an artist, since she once asked Arthur for permission to paint him in watercolors.
caption: U.S. President Chester Arthur
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