Martha Bulloch
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Martha Bulloch Roosevelt (July 8, 1835 – February 14, 1884) was the mother of US President Theodore Roosevelt and the paternal grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was usually known as Mittie. She married Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and had four children.
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[edit] Childhood
Martha was born in Hartford, Connecticut on July 8, 1835 to Major James Stephens Bulloch and Martha (Stewart) Elliott Bulloch, where her mother was visiting her stepson James Dunwoody Bulloch at boarding school. After a few months in Hartford, baby Mittie and her mother returned to their home in Savannah where Mittie was first raised. [1]
When Mittie was five, Major Bulloch moved the family to Cobb County, Georgia and the new village that would become Roswell, Georgia. It was just north of the Chattahoochee River and Atlanta, Georgia. Major Bulloch had gone there to be a partner in a new cotton mill with Roswell King, the founder of the town. Major Bulloch had a mansion built. Soon after it was completed in 1839, the family moved into Bulloch Hall. Because it is a significant antebellum structure, it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This was a wealthy planter family, part of the elite of Georgia. In 1850 the Bullochs held 31 enslaved African-Americans, most of whom worked in their cotton fields.[2] Others were assigned to domestic production of cooking, sewing, and related work to keep the large household running. (Recent research in Bulloch records identified 33 slaves by name who were held by the family. They have been memorialized on a plaque on the mansion grounds. [3])
After Major Bulloch's death in 1849, the family's fortunes declined somewhat, but they nonetheless gave Mittie a grand party for her wedding. As was expected, Martha Bulloch's brothers, James and Irvine Bulloch fought in the Civil War as Confederate officers. [4]
[edit] Marriage to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.
Mittie married Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. on December 22, 1853 at the Greek Revival-style family mansion Bulloch Hall in Roswell, Georgia.
Mittie and her new husband soon moved to Manhattan. Shortly after, both her mother Martha and sister, Anna Bulloch, moved north to join them in New York. Mittie bore four children: Anna (1855-1931); Theodore (1858-1919); Elliott (1860-1894), the father of Eleanor Roosevelt; and Corinne (1861-1933), grandmother of Joseph and Stewart Alsop.
During the Civil War, Mittie hung a Confederate flag out of the second story of their house in Manhattan.
[edit] Death
Martha Roosevelt died of typhoid fever on February 14, 1884, aged 48, on the same day and in the same house as her son Theodore's first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, died of Bright's disease, and two days after the birth of her own granddaughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
[edit] Mittie described in Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography
Theodore Roosevelt, in his autobiography published in 1913, described his mother with these words, "My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely 'unreconstructed' (sympathetic to the Southern Confederate cause) to the day of her death." [5]
[edit] See also
- James Dunwoody Bulloch, half-brother
- Irvine Bulloch, brother
- Eleanor Roosevelt, granddaughter
- Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, daughter-in-law
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, granddaughter
[edit] Sources
[edit] Primary sources
- Roosevelt, Theodore. An Autobiography. (1913)
[edit] Secondary sources
- Beale Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956).
- Brands, H.W. Theodore Roosevelt (2001)
- Dalton, Kathleen. Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. (2002)
- Harbaugh, William Henry. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. (1963)
- McCullouch, David. Mornings on Horseback, The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (2001)
- Morris, Edmund The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979)
- Morris, Edmund Theodore Rex. (2001)
- Mowry, George. The era of Theodore Roosevelt and the birth of modern America, 1900-1912. (1954)
