Theodore Roosevelt | Page 6

a lad from near Glasgow, who came hither a
couple of centuries ago, just as hundreds of thousands of needy,
enterprising Scotchmen have gone to the four quarters of the globe in
the intervening two hundred years. My mother's great-grandfather,
Archibald Bulloch, was the first Revolutionary "President" of Georgia.
My grandfather, her father, spent the winters in Savannah and the
summers at Roswell, in the Georgia uplands near Atlanta, finally
making Roswell his permanent home. He used to travel thither with his
family and their belongings in his own carriage, followed by a baggage
wagon. I never saw Roswell until I was President, but my mother told
me so much about the place that when I did see it I felt as if I already
knew every nook and corner of it, and as if it were haunted by the

ghosts of all the men and women who had lived there. I do not mean
merely my own family, I mean the slaves. My mother and her sister,
my aunt, used to tell us children all kinds of stories about the slaves.
One of the most fascinating referred to a very old darky called Bear
Bob, because in the early days of settlement he had been partially
scalped by a black bear. Then there was Mom' Grace, who was for a
time my mother's nurse, and whom I had supposed to be dead, but who
greeted me when I did come to Roswell, very respectable, and
apparently with years of life before her. The two chief personages of
the drama that used to be repeated to us were Daddy Luke, the Negro
overseer, and his wife, Mom' Charlotte. I never saw either Daddy Luke
or Mom' Charlotte, but I inherited the care of them when my mother
died. After the close of the war they resolutely refused to be
emancipated or leave the place. The only demand they made upon us
was enough money annually to get a new "critter," that is, a mule. With
a certain lack of ingenuity the mule was reported each Christmas as
having passed away, or at least as having become so infirm as to
necessitate a successor--a solemn fiction which neither deceived nor
was intended to deceive, but which furnished a gauge for the size of the
Christmas gift.
My maternal grandfather's house was on the line of Sherman's march to
the sea, and pretty much everything in it that was portable was taken by
the boys in blue, including most of the books in the library. When I was
President the facts about my ancestry were published, and a former
soldier in Sherman's army sent me back one of the books with my
grandfather's name in it. It was a little copy of the poems of "Mr.
Gray"--an eighteenth-century edition printed in Glasgow.
On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two
sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished in the
canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis
described in the /Potiphar Papers/. The black haircloth furniture in the
dining-room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on it.
The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of
gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available

only at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a
room of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday
evening or on rare occasions when there were parties. The Sunday
evening family gathering was the redeeming feature in a day which
otherwise we children did not enjoy--chiefly because we were all of us
made to wear clean clothes and keep neat. The ornaments of that parlor
I remember now, including the gas chandelier decorated with a great
quantity of cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing
peculiar magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily
grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in
the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found
out and convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood- carving
representing a very big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small
mountain, and a herd of chamois, disproportionately small for the
hunter and large for the mountain, just across the ridge. This always
fascinated us; but there was a small chamois kid for which we felt
agonies lest the hunter might come on it and kill it. There was also a
Russian moujik drawing a gilt sledge on a piece of malachite. Some
one mentioned in my hearing that malachite was a valuable marble.
This fixed in