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 anyon
e 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 sp
ent 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.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 281