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CHAPTER 1 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.
A   BOY  ARRIVES  AND  DISCOVERS  THE  WORLD
IN those days church spires were still the most conspicuous features in the skyline of New York.  Old Trinity still looked down upon the roofs of Wall Street, instead of craning its neck, looking up at them, as today.  Grace Church, huddled and hidden among dry-goods stores and glove factories at Broadway and Eleventh Street, in those days pleasantly dominated a dignified neighborhood of stately residences, where the "best families" lived on the borders of Washington Square. 

Canal Street was the northern boundary of the city's business section.  Ladies (in crinolines) went to Maiden Lane for their furs; to Park Row and Barclay Street for their dresses.  The newest hotel, the St.  Nicholas, gorgeous beyond description, according to the guidebooks of the time, stood at the corner of Spring Street and Broadway. 

"I remember," said the Garrulous Old Party we used to know "I remember when Gramercy Park was 'way up-town. "

That was in the 'fifties.   New York was in its 'teens in those days.  There were trees on Broadway, but no cable-cars.  There were not even horse-cars.  Those ambling conveyances, known grandly as the Harlem Railroad, were confined to the side avenues Third, Sixth, and Eighth.  Up Broadway and up Fifth Avenue lumbered innumerable omnibuses. 

It was a small New York compared with the metropolis of today.  But there were dust and bustle even then.  Old-timers complained that life was becoming all hurry and confusion, and indignant citizens wrote to newspapers, asking whether a fare on the horse-car did not entitle one to a seat.  The New York Fire Department about this time resolved, "if possible, to procure a steam fire engine" and to build an engine-house "somewhere between Bleecker Street and Fourteenth. "

New York was young, but it was beginning to grow up. 

The Republic, too, was young, for all its eighty years; but it, too, was growing and its growing pains were sharp.  The 'fifties were a tempestuous and bitter decade that began with Clay's Compromise, which was supposed to settle the slavery question but settled nothing, and ended with the election of Lincoln, which in due time settled a great many things.  Those intervening ten years were years of ferment.  There was gold in California; there were "Avenging Angels" in Utah; there was fire-and-sword in Kansas.  Everywhere was unrest.  Agitators abounded.  Abolitionists, woman suffragists, social reformers of every variety, preachers, lyceum lecturers, held forth as they never held forth before and have never held forth since.  Spiritualistic mediums flourished.  Fugitive slaves were snatched from their legal captors and spirited away with a blessing.  "Society," in New York, in Saratoga, in Newport, danced and dined with a reckless extravagance unheard of in this Puritan Republic. 

The 'fifties began with the hope, expressed by North as well as South, by Democrats as well as Whigs, that the slavery issue was settled, to be agitated no more.  But by 1854 the new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, had rekindled the sleeping fires.  On the plains of Kansas and in the halls of Congress the struggle drifted nearer and nearer civil war.  In the Congressional elections of 1858 came the first real test of strength of the Republicans' new anti-slavery party.  That summer, here and there through Illinois, Lincoln debated with Douglas, clarified the issues and, by skilful questioning, made Douglas commit himself to doctrines that turned the South against him without gaining him the support of the North. 

The campaign drew to a close.  On October isth Lincoln and Douglas, at Alton, held their last debate.  On the 25th, at Rochester, Seward made his famous "irrepressible conflict" speech. 

On October 26th, in New York City, Tammany Hall, as always on the wrong side, enthusiastically indorsed President Buchanan with booming of guns, music, a bonfire, and a half-empty house.  On the 28th Gen.  Jefferson Davis left Washington after an extended stay in the North, "charmed with his Northern tour," we read, "and with many of his ideas of Northern people changed. "

On the same day, or thereabouts, Grant, a failure and sick with fever and ague on his farm near St.  Louis, sold out his stock, his crops, and his farming utensils and gave up farming. 

On November 3d was Election Day. 
Meanwhile, in the midst of the shouting and the excitement of the last days of the campaign, on October 2yth, 1858, at 28 East Twentieth Street, New York, Theodore Roosevelt was born. 

The baby in Twentieth Street was two days old when a fusion meeting, of men of many parties opposed to the drifting policy of the Democratic Administration, was held, a dozen blocks south of where he lay, staring with curious eyes at the ceiling and four walls of the world he had just entered.  That meeting would have rejoiced his soul. 

Hear the words of the presiding officer: "Suffrage is universal.  The duty to exercise it is universal.  The consequences of neglecting it, by men of right principles, are bad government, dishonest and incompetent public men, general corruption of the public morals, and national disgrace.  In our elections neutrality and inactivity are a treason against popular government. "

They are ringing words, and it seems almost as though some spirit must have borne them from Astor Place to Twentieth Street and whispered them in the ears of the Roosevelts' new baby.  For they constitute, curiously enough, the very message which that baby, twenty three years later, and thereafter, in season and out of season, was to din into the ears of the American people. 

Whether a spirit actually did do anything as interesting and important as that, we do not know.  In any event, the baby showed no signs of it.  He looked around in what was to him the vvorld and, very much as other babies, began to take certain persons and certain landmarks into his consciousness. 

It is safe to say that for some time his mother engaged most of his attention.  She was a beautiful woman, a Southerner, whom Theodore Roosevelt the elder had married in Georgia four or five years before, when she was Martha Bulloch.  Her people had originally come from Scotland, though there was a strain of Huguenot and English blood in her veins, and had settled in Sunbury, Georgia, about the middle of the seventeenth century.  Theodore Roosevelt had met her at the wedding of a friend who had married her half-sister at Roswell, the Bulloch plantation and summer home, in the uplands near Atlanta.  He was himself as completely of the North as his wife was of the South, a member of an old Dutch family whose men had been bankers, aldermen, merchants, and solid citizens in New York City since the days when it was Nieuw Amsterdam and had five hundred inhabitants.  His ancestor, Klaes Martenszoon van Rosenvelt, arriving in 1644, had stepped into the middle of the colony's first political upheaval.  The burghers, it seemed, objected to the autocratic rule of Kieft, the governor-general, and wanted representation.  It is noteworthy that they got it.  In the veins of Theodore Roosevelt the elder flowed the blood of fighting freemen, not only Dutch, for there was a Puritan of Cromwell's generation among his ancestors, to say nothing of certain Welsh and English Quakers peace loving, but no pacifistsa number of Scotch-Irish, an Irishman or two, and certain Germans who fled to America in the latter half of the seventeenth century and founded Germantown-men and women, all of them, who loved liberty and refused to be oppressed. 

Theodore Roosevelt the elder had inherited a respected name, a certain tradition of public service, and a moderate fortune.  When his son Theodore was born he was already an established glass merchant in New York, with an office on Maiden Lane and a spacious house to live in a man who, in spite of his fortune and the extravagance and frivolity of the society into which he had been born, was, at the age of twenty-eight, already making a place for himself in New York.  He was a vigorous and courageous man, yet extraordinarily tender, gentle, and unselfish, with a gift for making friends and keeping them.  His range of friends was unusual, for among them were bankers and newsboys, ambassadors and down-and-outers, society folk who rode to hounds and little Italians who went to Miss Sattery's night-school.  At twenty-eight he already had, besides his business, endless interests, ranging from horses to philanthropy.  He entertained generously, though simply, for he himself loved good company, and his wife was an exquisite hostess and a witty and delightful companion.  He was a man who fulfilled his duties with the same zest with which he entertained his friends or drove a four-in-hand.  He took life with great seriousness, but he took it laughing, which means that to him all activity, however difficult, was a source of enjoyment; to him there was no such thing as a chore. 

Port Sumter was fired on when Theodore, Junior, was little more than a baby.  The war between North and South had been threatening for forty years, and yet, when it came, it came as a staggering surprise.  In the house on Twentieth Street the nation's tragedy was symbolized, for Theodore Roosevelt was as profoundly and whole-heartedly for the North as Martha Roosevelt was for the South.  Every fiber of him resented slavery and disunion; all her traditions, all her training, on the other hand, held her firmly to the belief that slavery was a sacred institution and secession a sacred right.  Her brother "Jimmy" and her brother Irvine, moreover, had both joined the Confederate navy.  Irvine was only sixteen when he went, and her mother, left alone at Roswell, had had to come North with her other daughter to live with her Northern son-in-law.  To Martha Roosevelt they brought the very heart and soul of the South with them to the house on Twentieth Street. 

It is a testimony to the strength and fineness of their spirits and the depth of the affection they held for each other that Theodore Roosevelt and Martha Bulloch should each have kept their own convictions without wavering, and yet should have been able to live harmonioush7 together and make a home for their children, which, from all accounts, was singularly happy.  They were both blessed with a sense of humor; both wholesome-minded; neither of them given to morbid brooding.  They accepted the tragic situation in which they were placed as they accepted every other challenge of life, and, without sacrificing a particle of their convictions, defied misfortune.  There was fighting blood on both sides, but these two chose to strive against mischance rather than each other. 

The war, which came so poignantly near to his father and mother, passed over the head of the younger Theodore Roosevelt like a thunderstorm in the night.  In a sense, he slept through it.  He was two and a half when it broke out, too young to be conscious of the tenseness and distress in the house in Twentieth Street or the excitement on the streets.  He probably saw the soldiers go down Fifth Avenue, but they left no impression on his mind.  He had an elder sister, and by and by he had a younger brother and another sister.  In a stately house at Broadway and Fourteenth Street he had a grandfather, and roundabout in the neighborhood he had certain cousins.  His mother's mother, "the dearest of old ladies," and his mother's sister Anna lived in the house on Twentieth Street.  With his father and mother, a sister, and certain fascinating uncles, these made up his world, and for the time being the things they did were of vastly greater consequence to him than what a man named Lincoln was doing in Washington or a man named McClellan was failing to do on the Potomac. 
The younger Theodore Roosevelt was joyously unconscious of the bitter business that was engaging his country; but his father was not.  His father was in the midst of the war activities from the very be-ginning.  He would have made a good soldier, possibly a great soldier; and the active, physical life unquestionably appealed to one who, in a generation that was not given much to violent exercise, was devoted to outdoor sports, and who, while advising caution in others, was rather fond of taking risks himself.  He did not become a soldier, for family reasons which seemed to his acute sense of duty unanswerable; but he worked tirelessly at home to help build that bulwark of public support which is as essential to victory as soldiers and munitions and food.  He helped raise and equip several regiments, among them the first regiment of negroes; he helped to organize the Sanitary Commission and later the Union League, an organization formed in the face of Confederate military successes and political disaffection in the North, to stimulate and focus patriotic sentiment; he helped to organize and to carry on the Loyal Publication Society, which from time to time issued pamphlets aiming to make clear the issues of the war. 

Theodore Roosevelt the younger, just turned three, saw little of his father that first winter of the war.  For his father, having done what he could to send soldiers to the front, had by that time turned his attention to the care of the families they had left behind them.  In many cases these families were starving, and the money they should have received from the husband and father was going into the pockets of the sutlers and hangers-on of the army camps.  Theodore Roosevelt went to Washington with a bill to establish "allotment commissions" to transfer to each soldier's family the money he could spare to send them.  Congress passed the bill after a three months' fight.  Theodore Roosevelt was appointed head of the commission from New York, and through the early months of 1862 went from camp to camp, visiting each of the eighty regiments New York had in the field.  There were no limousines in those days.  In storm and mud and cold, the commissioners lived in the saddle all day, and at times half the night, through that bitter winter.  They were jeered at in camp and opposed at home, but they succeeded.  The soldiers agreed to co-operate, and in New York alone millions were saved for women and children who otherwise would have starved. 

The war went on.  New Orleans and Antietam were won; Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were lost.  Victory came again with Gettysburg.  Slowly the tide turned in favor of the North.  And Theodore Roosevelt the younger, now aged four, underwent his first and only spanking. 

It happened this way.  For some reason or other not quite clear he had bitten his sister's arm.  This was a crime, he knew, and he fled forthwith to the back yard and thence to the kitchen, where the cook, who was Irish, was baking bread.  He seized a handful of dough (preparedness!) and crawled under the kitchen table.  A minute later his father entered from the yard, asking for Theodore.  The cook was warm-hearted, and compromised between "informing" and her conscience by casting a significant glance under the table.  The elder Theodore Roosevelt dropped on all fours and darted for the younger.  That fugitive from justice heaved the dough at him and bolted for the stairway.  He was caught halfway up and treated as on the whole he deserved. 

And with that important event Theodore Roosevelt the younger actively enters history.