Bulloch Hall

"Much can be done by law towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with man including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property, and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as the man. Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly."

From 'An Autobiography'
by Theodore Roosevelt

Now, there's a man ahead of his time.


March 7, 2013

I went to the 1839 home of Teddy Roosevelt's maternal grandparents where this President's mother grew up.

The Greek Revival mansion named Bulloch Hall in Roswell, Georgia (just north of Atlanta) was the setting on December 22, 1853 of the wedding of Mittie Bulloch to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. The marriage was a gala affair with people coming for many miles and staying for a week.

 The newlyweds lived in New York City  
and had four children Anna, Corinne, Theodore, and Elliott.

Son Theodore became the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt's other son, Elliott, was the father of Eleanor Roosevelt who married Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt who had begun his presidency on reasonably good terms for a half-northerner president, had infuriated the South by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine in the White House. Consequently, he waited a few years until the episode blew over and finally saw Bulloch Hall for the first time while visiting the South in 1905. He was the first sitting President of the United States to visit the South since the end of the American Civil War.

 

This is a view of the slave compound from the porch of the mansion.

President Roosevelt and his wife Edith arrived in Roswell, Georgia on October 20, 1905. At Bulloch Hall, he spoke as follows:

"It has been my very great good fortune to have the right to claim my blood is half Southern and half Northern, and I would deny the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every Southerner than I feel. Of all the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who were born and brought up in that house on the hill there, my two uncles afterward entered the Confederate service and served with the Confederate Navy.

"One, the younger man, served on the Alabama as the youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one of her broadside 32-pounders in her final fight, and when at the very end the Alabama was sinking and the Kearsarge passed under her stern and came up along the side that had not been engaged hitherto, my uncle, Irvine Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the two last shots fired from the Alabama. James Dunwoody Bulloch was an admiral in the Confederate service. ...

"Men and women, don't you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the grey or whether they wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy the name feel an equal pride in the valor of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given to him to see his duty."

This is the view of Bulloch Hall from the garden on the side of the house.

The house was a headquarters for Federal soldiers during the Civil War's Atlanta Campaign. (Think 'Gone With the Wind')