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.”
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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.
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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!”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 280