Theodore Roosevelt | Page 6

was born on
Manhattan Island." * For over a hundred years the Roosevelts
continued to be typical Dutch burghers in a hard-working, God-fearing,
stolid Dutch way, each leaving to his son a little more than he had
inherited. During the Revolution, some of the family were in the
Continental Army, but they won no high honors, and some of them sat
in the Congresses of that generation--sat, and were honest, but did not
shine. Theodore's great-grandfather seems to have amassed what was
regarded in those days as a large fortune.
* Autobiography, 1.
His grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, a glass importer
and banker, added to his inheritance, but was more than a mere
money-maker.
His son Theodore, born in 1831, was the father of the President.
Inheriting sufficient means to live in great comfort, not to say in luxury,
he nevertheless engaged in business; but he had a high sense of the

obligation which wealth lays on its possessors. And so, instead of
wasting his life in merely heaping up dollars, he dedicated it to
spending wisely and generously those which he had. There was nothing
puritanical, however, in his way of living. He enjoyed the normal,
healthy pleasures of his station. He drove his coach and four and was
counted one of the best whips in New York. Taking his paternal
responsibilities seriously, he implanted in his children lively respect for
discipline and duty; but he kept very near to their affection, so that he
remained throughout their childhood, and after they grew up, their most
intimate friend.
What finer tribute could a son pay than this which follows?
'My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or
cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he
made us understand that the same standard of clean living was
demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a
woman could not be right in a man. With great love and patience and
the most understanding sympathy and consideration he combined
insistence on discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but
he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.' *
*Autobiography, 16.
Thus the President, writing nearly forty years after his father's death.
His mother was Martha Bulloch, a member of an old Southern family,
one of her ancestors having been the first Governor of Georgia. During
the Civil War, while Mr. Roosevelt was busy raising regiments,
supporting the Sanitary Commission, and doing whatever a
non-combatant patriot could do to uphold the Union, Mrs. Roosevelt's
heart allegiance went with the South, and to the end of her life she was
never "reconstructed." But this conflict of loyalties caused no discord in
the Roosevelt family circle. Her two brothers served in the Confederate
Navy. One of them, James Bulloch, "a veritable Colonel Newcome,"
was an admiral and directed the construction of the privateer Alabama.
The other, Irvine, a midshipman on that vessel, fired the last gun in its

fight with the Kearsarge before the Alabama sank. After the war both
of them lived in Liverpool and "Uncle Jimmy" became a rabid Tory.
He "was one of the best men I have ever known," writes his nephew
Theodore; "and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how
good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible things they do
believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's
perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite
exceptional and nameless infamy in both public and private life."
Theodore Roosevelt grew up to be not only a stanch but an
uncompromising believer in the Union Cause; but the fact that his
parents came from the North and from the South, and that, from his
earliest memory, the Southern kindred were held in affection in his
home, must have helped him towards that non-sectional, all-American
point of view which was the cornerstone of his patriotic creed.
The Roosevelt house was situated at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, and there Theodore was born on October 27, 1858. He
passed his boyhood amid the most wholesome family life. Besides his
brother Elliott and two sisters, as his Uncle Robert lived next door,
there were cousins to play with and a numerous kindred to form the
background of his young life. He was, fortunately, not precocious, for
the infant prodigies of seven, who become the amazing omniscients of
twenty-three, are seldom heard of at thirty. He learned very early to
read, and his sisters remember that when he was still in starched white
petticoats, with a curl carefully poised on top of his head, he went
about the