CHAPTER TWO
1
THE BULLOCHS OF GEORGIA were nothing like the Roosevelts of New York. For several hundred years the good, solid Roosevelts had kept to their mercantile pursuits, content with the same horizons. Seldom had any of them ventured beyond the confines of Manhattan Island for reasons other than business, and never longer than necessary. They had lived and applied their renowned family acumen, met and married their Dutch wives, bred, prospered, and died, generation after generation, all within a radius of about three miles. “The Roosevelt stock,” observed the New York World, “has always been noted for a tendency... to cling to the fixed and the venerable.” A move from one Manhattan address to another was as serious a disruption of the pattern as a true Roosevelt cared to suffer in a lifetime. CVS had been born in Maiden Lane; the family business had been located in Maiden Lane since 1797. When, in the 1830s, CVS at last succumbed to the tide of fashion and built the house on Union Square, at 14th Street and Broadway, he did so with the consoling thought that by going that far uptown he had at least relieved his progeny for several generations from ever having to move again.
One searches the Roosevelt family history nearly in vain for a sign of daring or spontaneity or a sense of humor. The family reputation for probity in business and personal conduct demanded certain restraints, of course, and so much uniform absence of color may have been partly disguise, another bow to appearances. There were also exceptions. One Nicholas Roosevelt, an uncle of CVS, had an interest in steamboats early in the century and made the first descent by steam down the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. But he and a figure like Robert stand out against the rest of the line as conspicuous as mutations. It is said of James Alfred Roosevelt, for example, that if he ever had an unconventional thought in his life he kept it to himself. Of his private, domestic enthusiasms, it is recorded that he was inordinately fond of waffles.
About the only break Theodore had made from the established pattern was to leave the Dutch Reformed Church to join the Presbyterians; unless, of course, one considers his bringing Mittie Bulloch into the family.
The Bullochs, by contrast, were not only southern in background and outlook—antebellum slaveholding Georgia patricians—they were an entirely different breed, of Scottish blood mostly and “spirited,” as Theodore said of Mittie.
The first to reach the New World was James Bulloch of Glasgow, a scholar versed in Latin and Greek, who landed at Charleston, South Carolina, about 1729, which, as the Roosevelts measured such things, was rather late in the game, their own Claes Martenszenvan Rosenvelt having arrived in New Amsterdam in 1649. (All that is known of Claes Martenszen is that he was a farmer with a wife named Jannetje, and that he was called Kleytjen, which in the idiom of the day meant Shorty.) James Bulloch became a planter, married, and attained some standing in South Carolina politics before removing to coastal Georgia, where he received a grant of several thousand acres in the Sea Island district. His wife was Jean Stobo, also of Glasgow, who, with her mother and her father, Archibald Stobo, a noted Presbyterian divine, had set forth in 1699 as part of the ill-fated effort to found a Utopian Scottish colony in the jungles of Darién, on the Isthmus of Panama. The situation at Darién being hopeless, the expedition, a flotilla of three ships, turned back, and on the voyage home to Scotland the Stobos’ ship, Rising Sun, stopped at Charleston to take on water and supplies. The ship anchored outside the harbor, passengers remaining aboard, but the people of Charleston, hearing Stobo was so close at hand, requested that he come preach. So consequently, he, his wife, and daughter, Jean, were safely ashore the following day when a hurricane struck, sinking the ship and taking the lives of nearly all aboard. Stobo was at once offered a pulpit—the congregation being “obedient to the finger of Providence”—and in time he became a Charleston institution, his customary sermon running to such length that it was possible to leave in the middle, go home for a large midday meal, and return to find him still going strong.
Thus began the Bulloch line in America, the annals of which, by Mittie’s time, included one noted “radical,” several valorous soldiers, frontiersmen, politicians, young men who went off to sea, at least one scandal, a dozen or more handsome women, “even a French strain of blood.” Archibald Bulloch, a son born to James Bulloch and Jean Stobo, was the radical and a man of consequence in Georgia history. He was elected the first president of the Provincial Congress of Georgia and a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1776 he became the first president and commander in chief of Georgia, only to die suddenly and mysteriously, and the Savannah burial vault in which he was placed long remained a subject of gossip and speculation since it had no inscription, no identifying mark whatsoever except a snake carved in the shape of a circle.
Archibald’s wife, Mary de Veaux, was the daughter of James de Veaux, judge of the King’s Court of Georgia before the Revolution and a colonel in the Continental Army. Archibald’s son, another James and a captain in the Continental Army, married Anne Irvine, the daughter of Dr. John Irvine, head of the Georgia Medical Society; and they, in turn, produced still another James—James Stephens as he was called—who was Mittie’s father and who managed to complicate the Bulloch family tree in such a way as to leave many people wondering how it could possibly be respectable.
The situation was as follows:
As a young man James Stephens Bulloch married Hester Elliott, who was the oldest daughter of John Elliott, a United States senator from Georgia and a widower. That was in 1817. A year later, Senator John Elliott was himself married to Martha Stewart of Savannah, who was young enough to be his daughter and who at some point prior to 1817 had turned down a proposal from James Stephens Bulloch. It is said the marriage was arranged by her father, a legendary figure named Daniel Stewart, General Daniel Stewart, a Revolutionary War hero who had decided to push on to the Florida frontier and thought his beautiful daughter would be better off staying behind as the wife of his friend John Elliott. But whatever the reason for the marriage, it made Martha the step-mother-in-law of her former suitor.
One child, James Dunwody, was born to James Stephens and Hester Bulloch before Hester died; and with the death of Senator John Elliott, Martha Stewart was left a widow with three children of her own, Susan, Georgia, and Daniel. By the standards of the day, she and James Stephens were middle-aged when they at last married: she was thirty-three; he, thirty-nine. Among her Elliott stepchildren, some of whom were older than she, it was also thought scandalous that “Mother” should be marrying “Brother” James Stephens.
From this union came Anna, Mittie, and, finally, Irvine, who arrived twenty-two years after Martha Stewart’s firstborn, Susan. In the course of this extended life as wife and mother, Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch—she who became the Roosevelt children’s beloved Grandmamma—had to cope altogether with four categories of children: her Elliott stepchildren, her own Elliott children, her Bulloch stepson (who was also her step-grandson), and her own Bulloch children. The total came to fourteen.
Like his forebears, James Stephens was a low-country planter (cotton and rice), but also a banker, Deputy Collector of the Port of Savannah, and a director of the company that built the Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Savannah was his home and Anna and Mittie spent their first years there. Then about 1839, when Mittie was four, James Stephens moved his large, composite household about 250 miles inland, to Cobb County in northwest Georgia, to what a few years earlier had been Cherokee country. There, in a settlement called Roswell, among rolling green hills twenty miles north of Atlanta, Mittie did most of her growing up, never considering her family as anything other than perfectly normal, though apparently the infinite number of Stewart, Elliott, and Bulloch aunts, uncles, cousins close and distant—the whole geometric progression of the Savannah kinships—was something only her mother could make heads or tails of. “The relationships in Savannah are more bewildering than ever,” sister Anna wrote Mittie during a visit to the coastal city after they were both grown women. “I would not be at all surprised to find out that Miss Harriet Campbell was my sister.”
Roswell, forever “home” to Mittie, was a mere dozen or so buildings, some exceedingly impressive, strung along a hilltop close by the Chattahoochee River. A coastal Georgian named Roswell King—once manager of the Pierce Butler plantation on Sea Island—had found the site while exploring for gold, and with his son Barrington laid out a future community with wide streets and a park. The idea was to make it a summer colony for a few wealthy friends, a refuge from the deadly fevers that plagued Savannah and the coastal lowlands during the hottest months. The elevation was exactly one thousand feet. “Exposure to cold and rain is hardly ever attended by serious consequences,” declared one observer. “No case of consumption has ever occurred in the country. The summer diseases are bowel complaints, etc.”
With the water power available, the Roswell Manufacturing Company, a small cotton mill, was also established by Barrington King, this in the valley below town.
Six or seven prominent Savannah families joined in the venture, built houses and, as time passed, spent more of each year there, living quite handsomely on incomes derived from holdings on the coast, where by the mid-1840s the slave population had advanced to some twenty thousand. There was a Roswell general store, a small “academy” for boys, another for girls, a white frame Presbyterian church, and a graveyard. The Barrington King family (nine children and a tutor) occupied Barrington Hall, a columned Greek Revival mansion with the incongruous New England touch of a widow’s walk. (The architect-builder of the house, and much else in town, including Bulloch Hall, was a Connecticut man named Willis Ball.) Phoenix Hall was the home of the Dunwody family, Great Oakes, Roswell’s red-brick manse, housed the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt, whose wife was a King. Holly Hill belonged to a Savannah family named Lewis.
Bulloch Hall stood a few hundred yards west of the King place, on the gentle knoll that formed the highest point in town. Bulloch Hall faced east, its deep veranda supported by four massive Doric columns: a white clapboard Greek temple set among giant oaks and Virginia cedars, magnolias, mimosa—the quintessence of the Old Plantation, classic Greece by way of Thomas Jefferson as interpreted by the Connecticut Yankee Willis Ball.
For the Roosevelt children, stories of the life in this house, the parties, the games of tableaux vivants, the constant stream of friends, family, neighbors, servants, all the people, white and black, recounted by the hour by their mother, aunt, and grandmother, were as magical, as different from what they knew, as anything in books. Mittie herself, with her liquid southern-gentry voice, her everlasting interest in people, her gift for mimicry, her overflowing romanticism, could not have been more unlike the Roosevelts her children encountered if she had been reared in some distant foreign land. She adored to tell stories and, as Conie said, no one told them better. Also, she had very southern ideas about the meaning of manhood. Inherent to her stories was a great love of the heroic. It was “Little Mama,” so exquisite and fragile, who could fire the spirit of adventure—impart to a child a sense of bloodline kinship with real-life men of action. The ancestral feats of daring, the family heroes the children were raised on, were all on her side; they were not Roosevelts, they were “Mama’s people.” James Dunwody Bulloch, the older half brother, had gone to sea as a midshipman in the Navy, become a captain of a packet ship, later a Confederate admiral assigned to secret missions in England. It was James Bulloch who built the famous Confederate raider Alabama, and Irvine Bulloch, Mittie’s younger full brother who served on the Alabama, was said to have fired the last shot in the fight with the Kearsarge off Cherbourg.
There were stories of old Senator Elliott’s daughter Corinne, for whom Conie was named, who with her two children was lost at sea when the steamer Pulaski sank in 1838, while her rich husband escaped on a raft; of Grandfather Stewart, the Revolutionary War general who left Georgia to fight Indians in Florida, marching off with his six sons, all of whom were more than six feet tall; of Georgia bear hunts and a black slave named Bear Bob, so named because a bear once tore away part of his scalp. The stories were at once bizarre, scary, always long ago and far away, always exciting. At night, with the onset of stomach cramps or an attack of asthma, they could soothe and distract as could almost nothing else, as we know from Teedie’s diaries. “It was all so picturesque, so different from northern life, that it made an indelible impression,” Bamie would remember.
In 1849, when Mittie was fourteen, James Stephens dropped dead of a heart attack while teaching Sunday school, and from that point on, to make ends meet, family sojourns in Savannah were dispensed with and Roswell became the permanent home. In thecensus of the following year, the widowed Martha, aged fifty, listed herself as a farmer. Her new son-in-law, Susan’s husband, Hilborne West, came on from Philadelphia to help manage things temporarily, but for all practicalities it was Martha herself who was in charge of household, children, crops, and those referred to always as “the servants.” As an agricultural enterprise it was nothing much. To rank as a true planter, one was supposed to have land and twenty slaves. Her slaves numbered nineteen, eight of whom were children. Still, it was no small task for a woman and she faced it gallantly.
That her Grandmamma Bulloch had owned slaves, “and all that implied,” seemed incredible, Bamie said, but also, somehow, very special. Daddy Luke had been the coachman; Mom Charlotte, the head housekeeper and cook. Mittie and Anna had been served hand and foot by a nurse called Mom Grace, but each also had her own slave child, her little black shadow, as was the expression. Mittie’s was called Toy, Anna’s, Bess; and Toy and Bess slept on straw mats on the floor of the girls’ bedroom. Another black child slept beneath Grandmamma’s big four-poster, “to run errands for her in the night,” it was explained, which probably meant to empty her slop jar.
Half brother Daniel Stuart Elliott once had to be sent abroad for a year of travel, so full of remorse was he. In a fit of rage he had shot and killed his “little shadow,” who by then, like Daniel Elliott himself, was no longer very little.
Guns, violence, savage death, episodes that seemed more like the stuff of fable or fantasy, were all part of the world Mittie spun. Ellie spoke for all her offspring when he called her his “sweet little Dresden china” mother; she seemed so delicate, like an exquisite work of art, as Conie said. Yet she could portray in marvelous detail how a pack of bloodhounds pulled a cougar to pieces or describe the midnight death struggle between a cougar and a half-naked black man, one of great-grandfather Daniel Stewart’s slaves, a story the impressionable little Teedie would remember all his life. The black man, “a man of colossal strength,” had been cutting through a Florida swamp in the dark of night, taking a shortcut to “see his sweetheart.” His torn body was found the next day with that of the cougar lying beside him.
How much the Roosevelt children were told of the duel fought by Daniel Elliott we can only surmise. But in 1857, the year before Teedie was born, Daniel Elliott shot and killed the son of a prominent Savannah family, Tom Daniell, in a duel fought with rifles on a mud embankment beside the Savannah River. There had been an argument at the Chatham Club, where Savannah’s “young bloods” met for billiards and cards and a good deal of heavy drinking. Daniell had thrown a glass of wine in Daniel Elliott’s face, which by the code duello meant but one thing. Daniel Elliott, who was an expert shot, had been willing to accept a reasonable apology and forget that anything had happened, but Daniell refused. Seconds were named, the whole grim, stilted ritual was acted out at a chosen spot on the opposite shore of the river, in South Carolina, where dueling had yet to be outlawed. At the signal both men fired and Daniell dropped, a bullet through the heart. The news caused a sensation in Savannah society—Daniell’s father, William Coffee Daniell, was a leading physician and a former mayor of the city—and Daniel Elliott was in disgrace. When it became known a year later that he would wed Lucy Sorrel of Savannah, one eminent chronicler noted privately, “Were I a lady, I would certainly be very loath to marry one who had the guilt of homicide upon his skirts.”
The Roosevelt children never knew their Uncle Dan—he died of tuberculosis during the Civil War—but his widow, Aunt Lucy Sorrel Elliott, and her two children, cousins Maud and Johnny Elliott, had come on from Savannah several times to spend summers with them in New Jersey. Another vivid southerner, another effusively affectionate female presence, Aunt Lucy was the sister of Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, who had been a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia at the age of twenty-six and credited as “the best staff officer in the Confederate service.”
Everything recalled of the life at Roswell was utterly fascinating, we are told in Conie’s recollections. “In the roomy old home with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life,” she thought. Her mother described picnics and riding parties, a life spent almost constantly in the out of doors, in all seasons, in unspoiled open country, with sweet-smelling trees and flowers in bloom. A particular variety of blue violet grew beside the house and the view of the valley to the west was especially lovely in the late-afternoon light. And there was the looping Chattahoochee, which ran the color of heavily creamed coffee.
Uncle Dan, whatever his tragic failings, was “brilliant,” with a particular love of art and music. He played the flute and James Dunwody—Uncle Jimmie—played the violin. Mittie and Anna sang together, Mittie alto, Anna soprano. “They apparently none of them had any particular education,” Bamie said, “but all of them had the most delightful gifts. They were all good-looking, and all had entrancingly stormy love affairs, rarely marrying the people whose lives we adored hearing about.” Anna had been engaged for a time to Henry Stiles of Savannah, who rode a Morgan horse no one could handle; Mittie had a running flirtation with one of the Kings, Tom, who thought the world of her.
For her children to picture Mittie as she was when their father first arrived on the scene required no effort of imagination, for in appearance and manner she had aged hardly at all. At thirty-three she looked to be in her early twenties. She was really quite extraordinary. Small, scarcely over five feet tall, very slender, she had tiny, perfect hands, and extremely fine features, the eyes of a soft, clear blue. Hers was a flawless, delicate little face, the complexion “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and framed by a head of lustrous black hair that she and her French hairdresser could fuss over interminably. With company she was ever chattering, “bright and full of life,” “sweet and winning,” to quote some of her New York friends. She was “like some vision of exquisite beauty,” “so young, so beautiful and gentle, that she might almost have been a sister to her children.”
Many years later, in the early 1920s, in an altogether different time and world, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal drove out to Roswell to interview Mrs. William Baker, who had been Evelyn King in her youth, another of the nine King children, and who was still living, with one grandchild, in Barrington Hall. Mrs. Baker had been Mittie Bulloch’s closest friend and a bridesmaid in Mittie’s wedding. At eighty-seven she was the lone survivor of that whole generation in Roswell.
The reporter was a young woman who was then signing herself Peggy Mitchell; she was Margaret Mitchell, whose re-creation of the Old Plantation South in her Gone With the Wind would one day supplant all others in the popular mind. To what extent her book was fiction, how much she had based on actual people and places, were questions she would face repeatedly, once the book became famous, and her insistence that there was no real-life Scarlett O’Hara, no actual Tara to be found in the Atlanta vicinity, was no doubt sincere. Still, the combination of the beautiful dark-haired Mittie Bulloch with her tiny waist and perfect complexion and the aura of Bulloch Hall is remarkably close to what she created, in general outline and spirit if not in specific detail, and there is no question about the impress on the young writer’s mind of what she saw and heard at Roswell. She noted the “stately silence engendered by the century-old oaks,” the “atmosphere of dignity, ease and courtesy that was the soul of the Old South.” Walking through Bulloch Hall, she found the rooms “unbelievably” large and airy and tried to picture the bridal party that had once clustered on the main staircase.
“Weddings were great affairs then,” Mrs. Baker told her. People came from miles around and stayed for days in the big houses in the village. “Weddings were different from what they are now. The bride and groom didn’t rush off right after the ceremony. They stayed at home sometimes for a week or two, and everybody gave them parties.... Of course, Mittie Bulloch’s wedding was a very fine affair.”
The groom, however, had been an abolitionist from the North. “A very nice man he was, to be sure,” said Mrs. Baker. “But he was firm against slavery.”
2
Theodore Roosevelt went south to Georgia for the first time when he was nineteen, in 1850, prior to his Grand Tour. Mittie’s sisters husband, Hilborne West, had a sister who was the wife of Theodore’s brother Weir, and by this somewhat circuitous chain of communication, Theodore had picked up enough about the charms of Roswell and of the two beautiful Bulloch sisters to go see for himself. He sent a letter in advance, but somehow the letter did not arrive in time; so when he appeared at Roswell, arriving in the middle of the night, it was without advance warning and his knock at the door roused the whole house from a sound sleep. The first face he saw was Toy’s, peering through a crack in the door. He presented his visiting card, which she speedily delivered to the startled group upstairs.
He wound up staying several weeks and apparently for Mittie, too, it was love at first sight. She was then fifteen. A man who knew her at about this time in her life, a contemporary who became a prominent figure in Savannah, described her as a splendid horsewoman, as “full of spirit and courage as she was beautiful.”
She did not see Theodore again for nearly three years, not until the spring of 1853, when she came north to visit Susan and Hilborne West at their home in Philadelphia, and then to stay briefly with the Weir Roosevelts in New York, at which time she became tacitly betrothed. “Does it not seem strange,” she wrote Theodore soon afterward, “to think we should have met and become engaged, after having only known each other time enough to create a passing interest, then to be separated for almost three years. Sometimes when I think of it all I feel as though it were ordered by some high power.” Then, as an afterthought, she told him, “If I fail to please, and if ever you should fail, I might persuade Tom King to retire with me in the far West.”
Her mother approved the match. She had been “impressed favorably” by Theodore during his visit to Roswell. “I have never interfered with the matrimonial designs of my children,” she told him, “and never will when the object chosen is a worthy one.”
By early summer he was with Mittie once more at Roswell, promising as they sat alone one evening on the veranda to love her with all her faults, promising voluntarily, as she would enjoy reminding him. Once the engagement was formally declared and he had left for New York, she wrote:
Roswell, July 26,1853
THEE, DEAREST THEE,
I promised to tell you if I cried when you left me. I had determined not to do so if possible, but when the dreadful feeling came over me that you were, indeed, gone, I could not help my tears from springing and had to rush away and be alone with myself. Everything now seems associated with you. Even when I run up the stairs going to my own room, I feel as if you were near, and turn involuntarily to kiss my hand to you. I feel, dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I only live in your being, for now I am confident of my own deep love. When I went in to lunch today I felt very sad, for there was no one now to whom to make the request to move “just a quarter of an inch farther away”—but how foolish I am—you will be tired of this “rhapsody” . . .
Tom King has just been here to persuade us to join the Brush Mountain picnic tomorrow. We had refused but we are reconsidering.
She did go off to Brush Mountain, picnicked on chicken wings, bread and cheese, and had a “most delightful time.” Tom King built a bonfire as the sun went down and on the way home she rode with Henry Stiles.
I had promised to ride back with Henry Stiles, so I did so [she explained to Theodore], and you cannot imagine what a picturesque effect our riding party had—not having any habit, I fixed a bright-red shawl as a skirt and a long red scarf on my head, turban fashion with long ends streaming. Lizzie Smith and Anna dressed in the same way, and we were all perfectly wild with spirits and created quite excitement in Roswell by our gay cavalcade—But all the same I was joked all day by everybody, who said that they could see that my eyes were swollen and that I had been crying.
At a big family gathering in September she danced past midnight, as she told him. Another evening she and Anna put on a “grand supper party.” When one of her accounts of still another such occasion brought a piqued response from New York, she responded: “My dear Thee, I kiss a great many different people and always expect to. I cannot allow you a monopoly there. Why just think of what the world would be without kisses. I could not think of depriving my friends of that pleasure.”
They had agreed to a small wedding in November, but she changed her mind. She preferred December and she wanted to have bridesmaids, a decision he found mystifying. In the South, she informed him, a wedding was always done according to the wishes of the bride and her family; for a gentleman to interfere with the arrangements was quite unheard of.
Thee, I grant they may be different entirely, your northern customs, but will I ever be able to impress upon you the fact that it is a southern young lady and in a southern village that the wedding is to occur; consequently I must observe the rules and customs prevalent in that village. I cannot imagine you for one moment supposing I would take the step decided upon unless I had thought well of what I was doing.
“Capricious Mittie” she called herself. “How will you please me ever?”
She was having palpitations of the heart, which she thought “entirely nervous.” Under no circumstances was he to arrive any sooner than two days before the wedding. “It may be a southern idea, but remember it is a southern young lady,” she insisted still one more time. Then in mid-November, with only a month to go and feeling extremely agitated, she asked:
Dear Thee, how are you going to behave when we meet? If I see you first before them all, mind seriously please, don’t kiss me or anything of the kind. I would not let the brothers see you do so for worlds. I am in earnest. I would regard my affections as misplaced if you should take any liberties. Please read this carefully and act like a perfect gentleman.
She herself would be as dignified as possible in the presence of her bridesmaids, “so as to show them how to do the thing, particularly as I am much younger than any of them.”
The wedding took place at Bulloch Hall three days before Christmas—Thursday, December 22, 1853—the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt officiating. It was all she wished. The bridesmaids were sister Anna, Evelyn King, Mary Cooper Stiles, and Julia Hand. They were all in white, the bridesmaids in white muslin dresses with full skirts, Mittie in white satin with a long veil. “We carried flowers, too, and came down the wide steps of Bulloch Hall with the trailing clusters in our arms,” remembered Mrs. Baker. The ceremony was held in the dining room, the bridal party grouped at the folding doors. Fires burned in every fireplace; mahogany tables were crowded with hams, turkeys, “cakes of every conceivable kind.” Ice cream had been made with ice brought all the way from Savannah, a touch that especially impressed Theodore’s mother and father, who were the only Roosevelts present. “It was their first trip south,” said Mrs. Baker, “and like most northern people of that time, they were very ignorant about the South. Goodness only knows what they expected us to be like ...”
When it was time for dancing, brother Dan played the flute. (”That is the only music we can engage,” Mittie had explained to Theodore, “but he plays in such perfect time that it will be delightful.”) According to family tradition, brother Dan also fell head over heels in love with one of the bridesmaids who was already engaged to another and much older man, and who rode off leaving Dan broken-hearted. This romantic episode, it is further said, ended tragically in the girl’s unwilling marriage to the older man, to a duel and “much else that was unfortunate.” But since the only known duel in Dan’s stormy life, that with Tom Daniell, took place three years later and since Tom Daniell was both unmarried and Dan’s own age, the story is open to a good deal of question—unless, of course, an entirely different duel was fought earlier and did not prove fatal, in which case there would be no record of its ever having occurred.
The bride and groom stayed on at Roswell through Christmas and there were parties every night. Then they were on their way to New York. “Everybody packed up and went home,” Mrs. Baker said, “for it was all over and we were very tired.”
Mittie returned again to Roswell with Theodore a year and a half later, in the spring of 1855, bringing her new baby daughter. She had not been feeling right since the baby’s birth in January. Theodore worried intensely over her; she herself did not like the way she looked. “I do not think she will get strong until she breathes fresh air,” her mother had declared and Theodore emphatically concurred, as little as he happened to care for Roswell and the life there. His belief in the therapeutic powers of fresh air—country air, mountain air, sea breezes, almost any air other than that of the city—exceeded even that of his mother-in-law. He stayed in Roswell only long enough to pay his respects and see Mittie settled.
Mittie was in love as never before. “Darling, it would be impossible to tell you how I have missed you,” she wrote five days after he had gone. “I feel so a part of you I cannot do without you.”
... I do not know what I would not give to be in your arms, petted and loved. I love you inexpressibly ... I want to talk to you. I want to see you. I cannot live without you. . . . Write me everything about yourself and how you love me.
A day later she filled four pages with her love and longing: “You have proved that you love me, dear, in a thousand ways and still I long to hear it again and again.... darling, you cannot imagine what a wanting feeling I have.”
He was trying his best to feel at home, he wrote his first night back at East 20th Street. “It is of no use; everything is in apple-pie order but there is a kind of dreariness reigning everywhere, the one pillow on the bed positively gave me a shiver. I even handled the crib, which I used to regard as rather an encumbrance to our room, with a kind of reverence.”
Her brother Jimmie was in town and staying with him temporarily. They were greatly enjoying each other’s company, he told her, and “keeping late hours,” for which he was grateful. “Indeed, bed does not offer me the same inducements as of yore and I rather regret when the time comes for me to retire alone.”
He wrote nearly every day. May 13: “Everything begins to look like spring. . . . We have little glimpses of country over Mr. Goelet’s wall and the sounds of his numerous birds. ... It is just such a day as would give you a pleasant impression of a New York spring . . .” May 15: “I exerted all my taste to please you in the selection of my summer cravats this afternoon.” May 16: “You know how I love you, darling, and what an intense pleasure it would be now to carry you up to bed in my arms . . .” May 23: “I will be very glad to have charge of you again ...”
On May 24, in his last letter before leaving to bring her home, he told her he had bought a new felt hat especially for the trip, but that his mother had disapproved, saying felt would be out of place at Roswell. “If it must it must,” he told Mittie, “but I will first hear your opinion of it.”
As difficult for her as anything about her new life in the North was the separation from her mother and sister. She and Anna had been inseparable for as long as either could remember and the bond between them, they were both convinced, was of a kind others could never understand. If anything, Anna had suffered worse than Mittie in the time since the wedding. “If anyone mentions you rather suddenly I feel like screaming,” she wrote to Mittie. “I do not try to feel so, darling, but we were so happy together and it is all passed away.” She had thought they would never be “anything but Anna and Mittie, inseparable, always sewing, reading, walking, riding, talking incessantly together.” She consoled herself with the thought that at least they would be together in heaven.
But as things worked out they were all together again in less than a year. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna packed up and came north, moving in at East 20th Street to stay in 1856. So by the time the second baby arrived, the Roswell circle, or what remained of it, was happily reinstated under the same roof. Brother Irvine as well was an occasional member of the household, on vacations from the University of Pennsylvania.
Bulloch Hall, meantime, was left in the care of Daddy Luke and his wife.
Bulloch family finances appear to have been the real reason for this new arrangement. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna came to live with Mittie not just to be of help and comfort, but because they were extremely hard-pressed. To pay for the wedding and trousseau, for example, had required that four slaves be sold, including Anna’s own Bess. (According to one bill of sale, $800 was received from a John F. Martin for “one Negro woman named Bess, and her child John.”) “I hope that you will make so good a wife that Thee will never have cause to regret his not having married a girl with a fortune,” Mrs. Bulloch advised shortly before she and Anna moved in. Anna would be governess to Mittie’s children in return for her keep, and Mrs. Bulloch, it is known, received spending money from Susan West, to whom, on occasion, she wrote on cheap, blue-lined school paper, saying it was all she could afford.
The second baby arrived October 27, 1858, a Wednesday. Mittie had been feeling fine. After a morning’s shopping she had returned for lunch, then went to her room to rest, which is where her mother found her in great pain at about half past three. The house was at once in turmoil, servants flying off to find the family doctor, who, it turned out, was himself too sick to respond. Until another man was found, Mrs. Bulloch was “almost the whole time alone with Mittie,” as she told Susan. “Anna had taken Bamie over to Lizzie Ellis’—I sent over for her, but she was too unwell to come—I could not bear the idea of having no female friend with me, so sent for Mrs. Roosevelt and she came over.”
Mittie got “worse and worse” until quarter to eight that evening when “at last” the birth took place. As labor went, hers was, in her mother’s experienced eye, “a safe but severe time.”
No chloroform or any such thing was used, no instruments, consequently the dear little thing has no cuts or bruises about it. . . . Mittie has behaved throughout the whole time like a sensible woman, has objected to nothing that was right.
A few days later mother and child were doing splendidly. Mittie had no trouble nursing; the baby was in perfect health. “All quite well,” noted Mrs. Bulloch the morning of November 3, “. . . little Theodore is a week old . . . Mittie is quite motherly, likes to have him lying quite near her.” But it was not until December that Mittie came downstairs, which suggests she was suffering from depression, and it was then that Bamie was going through the worst of her ordeal with the back harness.
Two more pregnancies followed with little delay—Elliott was born in February 1860, a year and four months after Theodore; Corinne, in September 1861, a year and seven months after Elliott—which for Mittie meant three children in less than three years. And by the time Corinne was born, the Civil War had begun.
3
It was the great demarcation line in her life, the point at which her southern past was forever delineated as past and irretrievable. It put strains on her household, her marriage, her physical strength, and her emotions unlike anything in her experience. For her two oldest children, and for Teedie particularly, the war was the first news from the world outside to penetrate the secure haven of home and family. “Are me a soldier laddie?” he asked his Aunt Anna, as she tried to fit him for a little Zouave shirt the first year of the war. “I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain,” she told Mittie, “... this kept him still for a moment or two!”
The story that on the occasion of a Southern victory Mittie hung a Confederate flag from the house on East 20th Street is a story with no foundation in fact; it never happened. A gesture so flamboyant would have been out of character, furthermore, and publicly disrespectful of her husband, which was simply not in her. The story is appropriate, however, in that the staid Roosevelt brownstone with its three passionately loyal Georgian ladies did indeed remain a stronghold of Southern sympathy; the colors of the Confederacy flew in spirit, if not in fact, undaunted, from the start of the conflict until Appomattox. On the news that Port Royal had fallen, early in November 1861, Grandmamma Bulloch cried for three days. Like all true southerners, she said, she would rather be buried in one common grave than ever live again under the Yankee government.
As time went on, with Theodore away—only with Theodore away—Mittie, she, and Anna made up packages of flannel shirts, woolen socks, scarves, combs, toothbrushes, and boxes of soap to be sent secretly (by way of Nassau in the Bahamas) to family and friends in the South. One of Bamie’s most vivid memories of life in the 20th Street house was of “the days of hushed and thrilling excitement” when these bundles were being put together, she and Teedie, at first, understanding little of what it was all about, “except that it was a mystery and that the box was going to run the blockade.”
In contrast to the Roosevelts, not one of whom went to war, Captain James Bulloch, young Irvine, and Daniel Elliott were all three fighting for the Confederacy, each having joined the cause as rapidly as possible. Captain James, who had been in command of a merchant ship when the war began, first sailed back to New York and turned the ship over to the owners before going south to be assigned his secret duties in England. Daniel enlisted as a private in the Georgia Volunteers, and Irvine, at age nineteen, left the University of Pennsylvania to sign on as a midshipman in the Confederate Navy. Virtually every able-bodied man Mittie had known in Roswell or Savannah was in uniform—including six of the Kings and Henry Stiles. Both Tom King and his brother Barrington were to die in the war, and another brother, Joseph Henry, would never fully recover from his wounds.
The least scrap of news from someone dear on the other side was an enormous event. Early in 1862, for example, through contacts in Washington, Theodore learned that Captain Bulloch had successfully run the blockade, bringing a “cargo of contraband goods” from Nassau to Savannah. (Actually, it was a shipload of military supplies—munitions, some fourteen thousand Enfield rifles, perhaps the most valuable cargo to reach the Confederacy during the entire war.) Any letter that got through to the house in New York became a treasure of untold import. Its contents would have to be immediately shared, read aloud, then copied down and sent on to Susan. “The amount of it is that Providence is on the side of the right,” wrote young Irvine in one such letter; “... the life [at sea] is as hard as it is exciting, as painful to be away from home and family as it is pleasant to think I am doing my all for my oppressed country.”
Saturday dinners at Grandfather Roosevelt’s house, one of the iron-bound rituals in her married life, became such a trial for Mittie, the air so thick with the “fulminations” of her northern in-laws, that she could no longer bear to go.
Reminiscing about her mother and the Roosevelts long afterward, Bamie would remark, “I should hate to have married into them at that time unless I had been one of them in thought. They think they are just, but they are hard in a way.”
In Theodore’s presence Mittie kept her sentiments to herself, as did her mother and sister. The evenings he entertained Union officers, Grandmamma retired early. “You know he does not feel as we do,” she explained to Susan, “and it is his own house. It jars upon my feelings, but of course I keep my room. Mittie can’t do this, and it is to please him that Anna does not absent herself.”
For Theodore the approach of the war had loomed as a tragedy beyond compare. Joining with prominent New York business people, he appealed to Congress to do everything possible to prevent it. He signed petitions, helped promote a huge anti-war rally. When it came, the war presented him with the most difficult decision of his life. And though only twenty-nine at the time and in magnificent health as always, he chose not to fight, a determination dictated, it is said, by the “peculiar circumstances” of his marriage: he did what he did out of deference to Mittie and her feelings, for all that he himself felt about the Union and the evils of slavery.
Possibly the teachings of his Quaker mother also played a part. Nor can it be overlooked that few he knew of comparable social or financial position and none of his brothers or kinsmen fought in the war. The gentry of the city gloried in the power of Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn”; they founded their Union League Club, and equipped the first units of black soldiers; they cheered heartily the regiments of Germans and Irish, the upstate farm boys who marched down Broadway. But they themselves chose not to march. It was simply not done—any more, say, than one would go into politics—and though this may not necessarily have been a measure of Theodores convictions or innermost desires, it at least meant his decision, within his own social circles, carried no stigma whatever.
He avoided the war by hiring a substitute. He paid to have some other man go in his place, which was both legal and costly. The sum he paid is not known, but the going rate, once the draft was initiated in 1863, was about $1,000, a figure far beyond the reach of the ordinary wage earner (the dollar then having toughly ten to fifteen times its present value), and went appreciably higher as the war dragged on and casualty reports became more appalling.
The regulation in the Conscription Act that permitted such an arrangement was as blatant a piece of class legislation as could be imagined. In essence, as one angry senator charged, it exempted the rich entirely. By paying a $300 commutation fee a man could become exempt from a particular draft call, but was still subject to subsequent calls. Hiring a substitute, on the other hand, provided permanent exemption. Substitute brokers operated in every northern city and the substitutes they sent to the Army were a sorry lot, largely criminals and drifters, who would desert at the first opportunity. The ordinary soldier had only contempt for such men and so the onus of the system, while the fighting lasted, was on the substitute rather than on the civilian who hired him. And the fact that in less than a year more than $12 million poured into the Treasury in draft-exemption fees of one or the other kind gives some idea of how many were eager to take advantage of the arrangement. A list of those who thus stayed out of the war would include nearly all the financial and industrial tycoons of the postwar era, and a future President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, not to mention most of the masculine element of New York’s “best society.”
According to Bamie, in a private memoir written in her old age, her father regretted the decision to his dying day. He “always afterward felt that he had done a very wrong thing in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” Conie, for her part, would further contend that the decision had a profound effect on his older son and namesake, for whom it became the glaring single flaw in the life of an idolized father and one he would feel forever compelled to compensate for. Neither Theodore nor his sons ever discussed the subject that we know of, but there was no doubt as to which side little Teedie was taking at the time. In their pretend games played on a bridge in Central Park, Bamie was always the Rebel blockade-runner, Teedie the government boat. Once, kneeling at his evening prayers with Aunt Anna, he implored the Almighty “to grind the southern troops to powder.”
For Mittie the thought of Theodore fighting against her brothers was abhorrent in the extreme. Still, it must have been with some inner conflict that she saw him spared—saw herself spared so much that other women were going through—by a system that was the antithesis of every standard of patriotism and gallantry by which she had been raised. For her brothers, or for any of the men she had known in the South, to pay somebody else to do their fighting for them would have been inconceivable. Nor could anyone of conscience blink the injustice of the system. When the Draft Riots exploded in New York in July 1863, largely in reaction to this injustice, the Roosevelt family was safely ensconced at an oceanfront hotel at Long Branch. It was hoped that order could be quickly restored, observed Mrs. Bulloch in the quiet of her room overlooking the sea, “but really I do not wonder that the poor mechanics oppose conscription. It certainly favors the rich at the expense of the poor.”
But though he refused to bear arms in the great crusade, Theodore was also incapable of sitting idly by. As he told Mittie in a letter from Washington: “I would never have felt satisfied with myself ... if I had done nothing and ... I do feel now that I am only doing my duty. I know you will not regret having me do what is right and I don’t believe you will love me any the less for it.”
He and two other wealthy New Yorkers, William E. Dodge, Jr., and Theodore Bronson, had conceived a plan whereby soldiers could send home part of their pay on a regular basis and at no additional cost to them or their families. The three men drafted a bill for an Allotment Commission and after months of lobbying in Washington succeeded in getting both congressional sanction and the backing of the President. Then followed still more months in the field, since the idea—all quite novel—had to be sold to the soldiers themselves, which proved a slow and arduous task. Theodore was away from home nearly two years all told and approximately half that time was spent going from regiment to regiment, by train, boat, but mostly on horseback in all weather and seasons.
Like his Newsboys’ Lodging House or the Orthopedic Hospital, the allotment plan represented another determined effort to help the helpless, those innocent victims of the war for whom the government had been doing nothing, thousands upon thousands of women and children made destitute by the absence of husbands and fathers serving in the Army. It was the family of the fighting man that concerned him, rather than the fighting man himself who was being asked to sacrifice that part of his pay which customarily fell into the hands of sutlers and other traditional camp followers.
For his own family the months of separation seemed endless and especially the first long stretch when he was in Washington.
“Teedie was afraid last night that there was a bear in your dressing room,” Mittie wrote. “He is the most affectionate, endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require his papa’s discipline badly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”
One by one the children took sick. “You must not either get sick yourself or let the children do so,” he told her. Mittie had “her hands full with the fretful little sick things,” her mother noted; “. . . Thee has not returned . . . does not say when he will return.” Then Mittie was reporting Teedie “very unwell,” and though the word “asthma” never appears, it may have been at this point that the disease took hold. “I was up with him six or seven times during the night,” she wrote, saying little or nothing about her own health or what Conie was to call her “mental suffering.” Only once does she allow herself even a momentary flash of self-pity. It is night as she writes, that being the “only time unoccupied with the dear, troublesome little children deserted by their papa.”
She was constantly in his thoughts, she knew, from the letters that arrived, often several a week, which was more than she wrote to him.
Ever the man to take the direct approach, he had gone to the White House the morning he got off the train. “I obtained a room at Willard s,” he told her, “dressed myself and called upon Hay [John Hay, who was then Lincoln’s private secretary], explained my object in a few words and was immediately shown into the next room where the President sat.” Lincoln had listened “attentively,” read the few documents Theodore presented, “then at my request endorsed them.” Ten-year-old Willie Lincoln had come into the room “and the President’s expression of face then for the first time softened into a very pleasant smile.”
Mittie was instructed to address her letters in care of John Hay at the White House, for Theodore and the whimsical, boyish secretary had struck up the friendship that was to last a lifetime. One Sunday, in Lincoln’s absence, Hay invited him to share the presidential pew at St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square, and as the two walked down the aisle, many in the expectant congregation, seeing Theodore with his height and abundant whiskers, mistook him for Lincoln. Or such at least had been Theodore’s impression.
Mrs. Lincoln, who was of southern background, found him charming and included him in her circle, a somewhat ambiguous honor, given the variety of sycophants she chose to surround herself with. He was asked to accompany her on afternoon carriage rides and on one occasion she insisted that he go with her to shop for a hat. The night of her famous soirée in the newly redecorated White House, February 5,1862, he was among the select five hundred on her guest list and thus very pleased with himself. “I find that but six men under fifty are invited,” he told Mittie.
The party had come under severe attack in the press because of the expenses involved and the limited guest list, but for Mrs. Lincoln it had proved a social triumph—everybody who was invited came, “the largest collection of notables there ever gathered in this country,” Theodore crowed. “No one in the army lower than a division general, not even a brigadier, was invited. . . . Some complained of the supper but I have rarely seen a better and often a worse one. Terrapin, birds, ducks, and everything else were in great profusion.” It was called a ball and the Marine Band played in the vestibule, but at the President’s wish, there was no dancing, out of respect for “the national tribulation” and because upstairs young Willie Lincoln lay seriously ill. Theodore’s one criticism of the evening was of the number of police present.
He stayed the whole time at Willard’s Hotel, where in the bar and public rooms, amid clouds of blue cigar smoke, the endless dickering and dealing of war went on. (In his suite upstairs the pomaded Jim Fisk is said to have remarked, “You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you’ve got the guts to ask.”) Theodore was spending the better part of his time on Capitol Hill, “gaining experience daily in a political point of view.” Only after a month or more did his impatience begin to show. The problem, as his friend Dodge said, was “the utter inability of congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage.”
Waiting for Congress to act, with little or nothing to do but bide his time, he himself took sick; but then, amazingly, a week of continuous exposure in the field, standing out in the cold and damp while talking to troops, cured him completely.
His first real success selling his plan was with a New York regiment which, at first glance, struck him as the “scum of our city.” An adjutant assigned to help was so drunk he could barely speak and did nothing as he was supposed to.
The delays were so great that I stood out with one of these companies after seven o’clock at night with one soldier holding a candle while I took down the names of those who desired to send home money. The men looked as hard as I have often seen before in our Mission neighborhood, but after a little talk explaining my object and reminding them of those they had left behind them, one after another put down his name, and from this company alone they allotted, while I was there, $600. ... I stood out there in the dark night surrounded by the men with one candle showing glimpses of their faces, the tents all around us in the woods. One man putting down $5.00 a month said, “My old woman has always been good to me and if you please change it to $10.00.” In a minute half a dozen others followed his example and doubled theirs.
In one forty-eight-hour spate of activity in Virginia, in the vicinity of Newport News, he emerged unharmed and unshaken from a derailed train, rode twenty-five miles on horseback (”As I had broken my eyeglasses I had to trust entirely to my horse who jumped over the ditches in a most independent manner”), used both his French and his German to proselytize in front of one New York regiment, then rode another twenty-five miles to talk to an Irish regiment, after which he spent one of “the most thoroughly Irish” nights of his life drinking with the officers until nearly dawn. The ride to Fortress Monroe the next day was “delightful”—a favorite Roosevelt word—and following lunch there with the officers he was on his way by boat back to Washington. His co-worker Bronson, he told Mittie, was so “used up” by the experience that he was quitting and going home. “Of course this makes me doubly homesick but I must see it through.”
Once, writing to say he was on his way home for a visit, he told her not to expect him until very late and to leave the front door unlocked. “I hope you will take a good long nap in the daytime,” he added.
Early in 1862, Mrs. Bulloch decided she must get through to Georgia to be with her son Daniel, who, she had learned, was dying of tuberculosis. “I think I am required there,” she said simply. A pass was needed and so this, too, Theodore undertook, pulling what strings he could, something he pointedly disliked. The problem, he explained to Mittie, was greatly compounded by the family connection with Captain Bulloch, whose success in running the blockade had made the name anathema in Washington. But then in a letter from Baltimore he suddenly announced the arrangements were set. Her mother and Anna could both go, on the condition that they would not return. He himself strongly advised against it, but if such remained their wish they were to meet him the Friday following at Barnum’s Museum in Baltimore and he would go with them by boat from Baltimore to Fortress Monroe, where he would see them off under a flag of truce. “Write me what you think will be her determination even if she is doubtful.” But Mrs. Bulloch had backed down at the last. The mere mention of her leaving, she explained to Susan West, was enough to make Mittie break down in tears. When word came that Daniel was dead, she expressed the one wish that she would never live so long as to know that Irvine too was dead or that Richmond had fallen.
With his work in Washington drawing to a close, Theodore regretted he had not kept a diary. “All those whom I have seen in social intercourse day by day will be characters in history,” he surmised, “and it would be pleasant hereafter [to read] my own impressions of them and recall their utterly different views upon the policy which should be pursued by the government.”
Interestingly, his letters contain little or nothing of his feelings about the war itself or the direction it was taking. There is no sorrow expressed over the butchery and waste of it, nor any excitement over its pageantry. “Tell Bamie that the streets are all lined with wagons,” he writes, “... that I have a soldier who always rides behind me to show me the way . . . and that several times soldiers have pointed their guns at me to make me stop when I was riding through their lines.” But that is about as far as he ever goes tosuggest there is even a war in progress. It was his way of sparing Mittie, no doubt. The one note of tragedy in the entire picture he gives of wartime Washington is the death of the Lincolns’ son Willie.
On a Sunday in March 1862, with snow falling outside his hotel window, he seems to have been trying to boost both their spirits by telling her what several high-ranking officers had been telling him, namely, that the war would be over by May. Even so, he confessed to feeling very sad: “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country, but I know you cannot understand my feelings, and of course I do not expect it.” This is the one known mention of even the existence of an issue between them, and to judge by the remembrances of their children, it was as demonstrative on the matter as either ever became.
The war, of course, did not end in May, but ground on for another three years. The work for the Allotment Commission continued, principally in upstate New York, he, Dodge, and Bronson having been named by Lincoln as New York’s three Allotment Commissioners. In one two-month stretch Theodore spent, by his own reckoning, thirty-one nights sleeping on trains. “Thee,” remarked his mother-in-law, “is a good young man. I really think if anyone ever tried to do their duty he does.”
He received no pay for his efforts and the consensus was that he, as much as anyone, was responsible for the program’s success. The grand total of the money sent home to soldiers’ dependents as a result ran to many millions of dollars.
His family’s health remained a constant concern the whole while. Mittie’s troubles are never spelled out very clearly in the surviving record, but the summer of their stay at Long Branch she was being subjected to treatments with ether, treatments that greatly alarmed her mother. (”I think it was really running the risk of losing her life, or her reason.”) Teedie’s asthma, now spoken of by name, grew steadily more alarming, the “sweet invigorating sea breeze” of Long Branch notwithstanding. No sooner had the family arrived at the hotel than he was hit by an attack and had to be rushed back to a doctor in New York; then returning from the city he was struck a second time and so Theodore and Mittie took him off to Saratoga, leaving the others in the charge of Grandmamma.
Elsewhere we read that Bamie suffered with eyestrain, that Mittie was again having “palpitations” and “much pain about the region of the heart.”
Troubles or not, Mittie kept pace with her husband and in a style the long indestructible Grandmamma was beginning to find exhausting and a bit inappropriate. In November 1863, when the Russian fleet paid a ceremonial visit to New York, a grand ball was staged at the Academy of Music, the great Russian Ball as it was to be remembered. Theodore took a leading part, served as secretary, lent his name to the announcements. “Thee was anxious for Mittie to go for political reasons,” Grandmamma told Susan, “and Mittie would not go without Anna. So they both went.” Grandmamma was not pleased. Life was too precious to be squandered on “trifles.”
So much activity “confuses me,” she wrote again from East 20th Street at the close of the year. “I think it ought to be a calm time for reflection. . . . But alas, there is too much gaiety. . . . There is so ’much to do’ as to leave little time to think. Mittie and Thee give a large party New Year’s evening. All day they will receive visitors. Just imagine how tiresome it will be.”
“The reception is going on downstairs,” she continued the next day. “Mittie and Anna are dressed beautifully and I hear the carriages constantly coming to the door.”
4
Grandmamma died the following autumn, October 1864, at age sixty-five, and was buried across the river in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, that incomparable Valhalla of nineteenth-century New York wherein are to be found so many of the kind—unsavory political bosses, Plymouth Church abolitionists—that the proud old southern lady could not abide. The following spring, in the first week of April, Richmond fell and a week later came Appomattox. The war was over. On April 25, with the city’s church bells tolling, Lincoln’s funeral procession marched up Broadway, and a photograph taken as it passed the CVS Roosevelt house at Union Square shows the heads of two small children in an open window on the second floor. It is believed they are Teedie and Ellie.
Of Mittie’s original thirteen brothers and sisters four were still alive. Captain James Bulloch and brother Irvine had survived the war but, because of their involvement with the Alabama, were excluded temporarily from pardon and so took up residence in Liverpool, England. Susan remained in Philadelphia and Anna, the year following, 1866, was married to James K. Gracie, a New York banker, and moved to a home of her own. The house at Roswell, like the whole town, had been miraculously spared in Sherman’s sweep through Georgia, but the old way of life there was ended forever. House and property were sold off.
Yet for all this—or perhaps because of it—Mittie entered upon a new life, very much renewed in spirit. She became, in the years immediately following the war, a figure of real consequence, or at least within the limits imposed by gender and the social order. To her already stunning physical beauty was now added the luster of success. She became a personage, quite as much as her husband, one of the great ladies of New York and one to whom society could naturally turn for example and leadership. She, the southerner, the outsider, ranked with Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Lewis Rutherford, Mrs. Belmont, and the two Mrs. Astors as one of those “gentle-woman of such birth, breeding and tact that people were always glad to be led by them . .. whose entertainments claimed most comment, whose fiat none were found to dispute,” to quote a contemporary authority, Mrs. Burton Harrison.
The great failings of the era, Grandmamma Bulloch had lectured, were “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.” One must always choose the best in the way of furniture and the like but “avoid ostentation.” But now, with her mother dead, Mittie did over the house, brightened up the parlor with pale French wallpaper, reupholstered the furniture in sky-blue damask. Her teas were attended by decorous little maids in lilac print dresses, white caps and aprons, and she invariably held center stage. In the “graciousness of her manner and that inherent talent for winning and holding the sympathetic interest of those around her,” wrote Mrs. Harrison, “I have seen none to surpass her.”
The one great mystery to Mrs. Harrison, as to others apparently, was why such radiant beauty and charm had failed to reappear among her four offspring. “Why nature, having found such a combination, should not be content with repeating it!”
Other transplanted southerners were to attain positions of influence in the city’s postwar era, including such notable fellow Georgians as Charles C. Jones and John Elliott Ward, both attorneys, and the fawning Ward McAllister, whose social edicts held sway for more than a generation (it was he who invented the “Four Hundred”). But no southern woman had quite the presence of Mittie Roosevelt, or would be remembered so fondly for her irrepressible southern ways.
On an evening when he was a guest at dinner, John Hay happened to mention spending some time with his sister and, as Bamie recalled, Mittie suddenly looked at him in astonishment. “You have a sister?” she said. “Yes, I have a sister,” Hay responded happily, “and I had a mother and a father, though I have always realized that you thought of me as being like Melchizedek, without beginning or end.”
“Mother was embarrassed,” wrote Bamie, “because, with her little aristocratic, southern feeling she had always considered Mr. Hay’s family connection as entirely negligible.”
She remained immutably herself. “There is nothing more like a Roosevelt than a Roosevelt wife,” it would be said within the tribe, but in her case this was patently not so and never would be.
Neither the sufferings of the poor nor the call of the Christian faith touched her in the way they did her husband. She played no part in his good works, and those speculations on life in the hereafter or the status of one’s soul, speculations that appear in Theodore’s correspondence (as in a large proportion of private correspondence from that high-Victorian day), are not to be found in what she wrote. She was not an agnostic exactly. It was just that for her religion never became the central, pervading part of life it was for Theodore, or that it had been for her mother. (“If she was only a Christian, I think I could feel more satisfied,” Mrs. Bulloch had lamented near the close of her life.) When Mittie found exhilaration or beauty in a church service, it was nearly always from the music.
In time to come a good deal would be said and repeated in print about her inadequacies and eccentricities. In the reminiscences of Roosevelt descendants who never knew her, she would be compared to her husband, measured against his strength, his Christian spirit, and nearly always to her disadvantage. And thus in many published accounts she has been kindly but pointedly dismissed as decorative and inconsequential, lovable enough in her way, but without weight, a sort of chatty, indolent, cliché southern belle prone to sick headaches and silly about money. The picture is not only unfair and inaccurate, it is considerably less interesting than the truth. As her letters and the observations of innumerable contemporaries attest, including those of her children and husband, she was an exceptional person in her own right, and a large part of that aliveness, the feeling for words, the warmth of personality that were to characterize the most outstanding of her children came from her.
The stories of her eccentricities are nearly all based on a later time in her life and seldom take into account several important factors. She was, for example, enormously fond of the color white and dressed in white more than any other shade, even in winter. In later years, as a widow, she seldom wore anything but white, which, to be sure, set her off as something out of the ordinary. But then one also finds in Theodore’s correspondence that he greatly preferred her in white and liked to picture her in white whenever they were apart.
She wanted things in her life to be clean—clean house, clean clothes, clean children. Feverish bursts of housekeeping would leave her so exhausted she had to take to her bed. She bathed daily and always twice—the first time to wash, the second to rinse. She also had a stubborn reluctance to do anything on time. But considering her background, such behavior is not especially bizarre or incomprehensible and may perhaps be seen as very human responses to the two aspects of northern city life that distressed her most—excessive dirt and excessive hurry. Beyond her walls, and not far beyond, was a world of squalor and disease of a kind she had probably never imagined before coming to New York—families living in rat-infested cellars, people by the thousands packed into foul tenements. Smallpox and scarlet fever were rampant; typhus was worst of all. In one miserable house on East 17th Street there were 135 cases of typhus in the single year of 1869. For someone raised in Roswell, Georgia, it was no easy thing living with such realities, any more than it was to accept as axiomatic the idea that life must be played out according to timetables and the dictates of the clock.
As for the lavish expenditures, they too came later, when, as it happens, there was a very large amount of Roosevelt money with which to be lavish. If she was extravagant in Theodore’s eyes, he apparently never said so. Indeed, in another of his letters dating from this earlier day, he tells her that she, by nature, is more economical than he and better suited to look after the family finances.
That she was and remained chronically troubled by sick spells and mysterious upsets is indisputable. She would be hit by what she called “my horror,” violent intestinal trouble of some kind, perhaps brought on by a nervous condition, and perhaps not. She was put on restricted diets; she did retire to her room on occasion, not to return for hours. But this, it must be stressed, was not uncommon among women of her day and for someone of such exquisite, fragile beauty it was almost expected. Theodore worried incessantly over her health, even when she appears to have been perfectly fine. It was his way of expressing his love for her. She was his to protect and care for. “I have always been accustomed to think of you as one of my little babies,” he tells her at one point, and at another implores, “Do not become a strong-minded woman.” “My loving tyrant,” she called him.
Yet there is no evidence that her health ever kept Mittie from doing anything she wanted to do, and there was no complaining on her part. It was she, not Theodore, who liked to stay up late talking, writing letters, who could quite literally wear him out with her “gaiety.” On the first trip to Europe, as will be seen, she could keep a pace—set a pace—that would have left most healthy women her age exhausted.
Her children adored her and found her no less remarkable in her way than their father. “I have just received your letter!” Teedie once wrote. “What an excitement. . . . What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them.” She could quote Dickens, Shakespeare. She “rushed into conversation,” made conversation come alive. She was the first to see the humor in a situation. Teedie sternly praying that the Rebel troops be ground to powder had struck her as wonderfully funny, whereas Theodore, on hearing the story, had told him never to do it again. It was she who first insisted that Bamie be taken to the theater and to galleries, before the age when most children were permitted such things. It was she who induced Theodore to take them all abroad that spring of 1869.
Her “devotion wrapped us round as with a mantle,” wrote Conie; hers was “the most loving heart imaginable.” Yet “in spite of this rare beauty and her wit and charm, she never seemed to know that she was unusual in any degree . . .”