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 Martenszen van 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 ea
ch 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 the census 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 C
hattahoochee, 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.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 279