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 to suggest 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 . . .”
CHAPTER THREE
Grand Tour
1
THE ROOSEVELTS SAILED the afternoon of May 12 on the Scotia, finest of the Cunard Line’s paddle steamers and still, in 1869, the fastest ship to Europe. With Mary Ann, the nursemaid, they made a party of seven and we may picture them coming aboard in the bright sunshine of a spring day in New York, the ship’s deck crowded with trunks and porters and several hundred other passengers, everybody looking exceptionally well turned out (the Scotia offered only first-class accommodations), and many, like the Roosevelts, traveling with children and servants. Among the familiar faces were Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Seligman and their three children; Mrs. Jesse Seligman and her daughter; the actor Lester Wallock, who was traveling with his wife and two young sons; the Egerton Winthrops and their three children. (Egerton Winthrop, a cultivated, superior-looking figure, was literally right out of an Edith Wharton novel: he was to appear in The Age of Innocence rather thinly disguised as the arch snob Sillerton Jackson, who carried between his narrow temples “most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society.”)
To be going abroad was not the rare thing it once had been. Americans were crisscrossing the Atlantic, resolutely “doing” Europe’s galleries and monuments, hiking the Alps, taking the waters in a dozen different spas, filling the best hotels, in numbers that would have been unheard of before the war. So near and commonplace had Europe become, announced the popular travel writer Bayard Taylor, that he would write no more on the subject. It was the year of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s often jeering declaration that a touch of Old World culture was neither beyond the ken of the ordinary citizen nor anything to be afraid of. “I basked in the happiness of being fo
r once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement,” Twain wrote of his sojourn abroad.
Those notable Americans discovering Europe as tourists that same year included such disparate figures as Jefferson Davis, who went for his health, and young Henry James, who was finding every other American he met “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” Numerous wealthy Americans, moreover, had happily taken up residence abroad as a more or less permanent thing, and among their offspring, contemporaries of the Roosevelt children, were little Edith Jones (the future Edith Wharton), John Singer Sargent, and Jennie Jerome (the future Mrs. Randolph Churchill).
Still, for the Roosevelts it was a momentous undertaking, a first complete break from the established pattern of their lives, a first adventure as a family. In part, of course, they were going because it was the thing to do—for the “cultural enrichment” of the experience. The children would “benefit,” young as they were. Mittie had never been out of the country. She wanted to see her brothers in Liverpool and to be shown some of what Theodore had seen in his own earlier travels. But they were going also for Teedie’s health. Grandfather Roosevelt, who came to see them off, later wrote the child a little rhyme:
We all shall gladly see you back
Again at your home,
And hope that sickness may no more
Compel your feet to roam.
They were to be gone a year, which to the children seemed like forever. On the ride from the house to the pier, Teedie had cried most of the way.
The first several days at sea were so calm and clear that even Theodore, a lifelong sufferer from seasickness, fared quite well. Not until the fourth day out, a Sunday, when the wind picked up, did he and Teedie take to their berths. “As it was a little rough and I a little sick and being down,” Teedie wrote in his diary. “I could not go to [church] service.”
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