My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt

by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

After graduating from our first Shetland pony, he provided us each with a riding-horse, and always rode with us himself, and a merry cavalcade went forth from our country home, either early in the morning before he started for the train or in the soft summer evenings on his return. When at one time we were living on the Hudson River, we had hoped one autumn afternoon that he would come home early from the city, and great was our disappointment when a tremendous storm came up and we realized that he would take a later train, and that our beloved ride must be foregone. We were eagerly waiting in the hall for his return and watching the rain falling in torrents and the wind blowing it in gusts, when the depot wagon drove up to the door and my father leaped out, followed by the slight figure of a somewhat younger man. As the young man tried to put up his umbrella it blew inside out and, like a dilapidated pinwheel loosened from his hand, ran round and round in a circle. The unknown guest merrily chased the umbrella pinwheel, and my mother, who had joined us children at the window, laughingly wondered who my father’s new friend was. The front door opened and the two dripping men came in, and we rushed to meet them.

I can see the laughing face of the young man become suddenly shy and a little self-conscious as my father said to my mother: “Mittie, I want to present to you a young man who in the future, I believe, will make his name well known in the United States. This is Mr. John Hay, and I wish the children to shake hands with him.”

Many and many a time, long, long years after, when John Hay was secretary of state in the cabinet of the second Theodore Roosevelt, he used to refer to that stormy autumn afternoon when a delicate boy of eleven, at the instigation of his father, shook hands with him and looked gravely up into his face, wondering perhaps how John Hay was going to make his name known throughout the United States. How little did Mr. Hay think then that one day he would be the secretary of state when that same little delicate boy was President of the United States.

My father’s intimacy with John Hay had come about through the fact of contact in the Civil War, when they both worked so hard in Washington together.

My father stands out as the most dominant figure in our early childhood. Not that my mother was not equally individual, but her delicate health prevented her from entering into our sports and unruly doings as our father did; but I have always thought that she, in an almost equal degree with my father, influenced my brother’s nature, both by her French Huguenot and Scotch blood and her Southern ancestry.

The story of her meeting with my father has a romantic flavor to it. My grandmother, Mrs. Stephens Bulloch, lived in an old plantation above Atlanta, on the sand-hills of Georgia. There, in the old white-columned house overlooking a beautiful valley, my grandmother led a patriarchal life, the head of a large family, for she had been as a young girl the second wife of Senator John Elliott, and she not only brought up the children of that marriage but the children and stepchild of her second marriage as well. My own mother was the second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Stephens Bulloch, but she never knew the difference between her Elliott half brother and sisters, her Bulloch half-brother and her own brother and sister.

In the roomy old home with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life, and the devotion of her children to my beautiful grandmother, as the many letters in my possession prove, was one of the inspiring factors in their lives, and became the same to our own childhood, for many were the loving stories told us by my mother and aunt of the wonderful character of their mother, who ran her Southern plantation (Mr. Bulloch died comparatively young) with all the practical ability and kindly supervision over her slaves characteristic of the Southern men and women of her time.

The aforesaid slaves were treated as friends of the family, and they became to us, her little Northern grandchildren, figures of great interest. We were never tired of hearing the stories of “Daddy Luke” and “Mom Charlotte.”

The first of these two, a magnificent Nubian, with thick black lips and very curly hair, was the coachman and trusted comrade of my grandmother’s children, while his wife, “Mom Charlotte,” was a very fastidious mulatto, slender and handsome, who, for some illogical reason, considered her mixed blood superior to his pure dark strain. She loved him, but with a certain amount of disdain, and though on week-days she treated him more or less as an equal, on Sundays, when dressed in her very best bandanna and her most elegant prayer-book in hand, she utterly refused to have him walk beside her on the path to church, and obliged him ignominiously to bring up the rear with shamefaced inferiority. Mom Charlotte on Sundays, when in her superior mood, would look at her spouse with contempt, and say, “B’ Luke, he nothin’ but a black nigger; he mout’ stan’ out to de spring,” referring to Daddy Luke’s thick Nubian lips, and pointing at the well about one hundred yards distant from the porch.

There was also a certain “little black Sarah,” who was the foster-sister of my uncle, Irvine Bulloch, my mother’s younger brother. In the old Southern days on such plantations there was almost always a colored “pickaninny” to match each white child, and they were actually considered as foster brother or sister. Little Irvine was afraid of the darkness inside the house, and little Sarah was afraid of the darkness outside the house, and so the little white boy and the little black girl were inseparable companions, each guarding the other from the imaginary dangers of house or grounds, and each sympathetically rounding out the care-free life of the other.