1821

__________ 

“They have claims on the magnanimity and, I may add, the justice of this nation which we all feel.” 

President James Monroe

__________

March 5: In his second inaugural, President Monroe speaks of the failed policy of the U.S. government, regarding the indigenous tribes: 

The progress of our settlements westward…has constantly driven them back, with almost the total sacrifice of the lands which they have been compelled to abandon. They have claims on the magnanimity and, I may add, the justice of this nation which we all feel. We should become their real benefactors; we should perform the office of their Great Father, the endearing title which they emphatically give to the Chief Magistrate. … Their sovereignty over vast territories should cease, in lieu of which the right of soil should be secured to each individual…and for the territory thus ceded some reasonable equivalent should be granted, to be vested in permanent funds for the support of civil government over them and for the education of their children, for their instruction in the arts of husbandry.

 

Ammon explains: 

This rather innocuous scheme of “civilizing” the Indians and ending their tribal organization was not approved by Congress or by the public, for it meant positive guarantees of Indian land titles. Americans much preferred to maintain the fiction that Indian tribes were independent nations, because as such they could be assumed to have the power to cede all their lands.

Photo taken by the blogger.
Feel free to use any pictures, unless otherwise noted.

 

The U.S. Navy schooner Alligator, under the command of Lt. Robert F. Stockton, carries New Jersey physician Eli Ayres of the American Colonization Society to the western coast of Africa. 

 

“Not only unenticing but insulting.” 

Stockton drops anchor off a rocky headland known as Cape Mesurado. He and Ayres go ashore to negotiate a deal to purchase a small tract, estimated now to have been about 140 acres. 

Payment would come in the form of trade goods – including guns, gunpowder, tobacco, rum, tableware, utensils, shoes, hats, umbrellas and mirrors (together worth roughly $7,000 in today’s money). Both parties also pledged “to live in peace and friendship for ever.”

 

The Colonization Society was then five years old – including slaveholder members, who feared increasing numbers of free blacks in the South were undermining the “Peculiar Institution.” 

This signing marks the first foundation of the nation that came to be known as Liberia. 

Liberian flag. The capital is Monrovia, after President James Monroe. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think you can assume your students have never heard of this effort, nor will they understand how Liberia ended up with a flag modeled on our own, or a capital named Monrovia.

 

As Smithsonian magazine notes, the most skeptical “antislavery activists,” regarding this effort, tended to be native-born black Americans, who had never laid eyes on the continent of Africa.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Black Americans were faced with a fraught choice. Most, like abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, found the prospect of emigration not only unenticing but insulting. As Douglass would later put it in an 1852 newspaper editorial, “There is no sentiment more universally entertained, nor more firmly held by the free colored people of the United States, than that this is their own, their native land.”

 

Still, plenty of African Americans decided to seek a different destiny in Liberia. Once the first few dozen settlers left Sherbro Island for Cape Mesurado in April 1822, the colony quickly expanded, and the ACS negotiated further land transfers with local leaders. By 1838, tens of thousands of free Black American repatriates were living in the city that would become Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, named after President James Monroe, who backed the ACS and had been in office at the time of the Cape Mesurado purchase.

 

Some who made the journey were idealists of one sort or another. Take Lott Carey (or Cary; sources differ), who had purchased his freedom in Virginia around 1813 and left with the first group of colonists because he hoped to spread Christianity in Africa. “If you think of coming out you need not fear,” he wrote a friend back home, “for you will find as fine a spot as ever your eyes beheld.”

 

As Smithsonian notes, Robert E. Lee freed most of his slaves before the Civil War, and offered to pay their way to Liberia. Emigration dropped off sharply after war exploded in 1861. 

Sadly, the American settlers often discriminated against the indigenous people. Liberia itself was riven by civil war, starting in 1980, as the wider population rose up against the elites, mostly descendants of American settlers. 

1835

__________ 

“There are but two parties, … founded in the radical question, whether People or Property shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people … aristocracy implies a government of the rich.”    

Thomas Hart Benton

__________

EARLIER EXPLORERS had been reporting grim conditions beyond the Mississippi. Zebulon Pike suggested that the banks of the Kansas, Platte and Arkansas rivers would “admit of a limited population.” West of Council Bluffs, he warned, the land “is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by people depending on agriculture,” and the region beyond the Rockies was “destined to be the abode of perfect desolation.” 

    On maps, the “Great American Desert” appears. It covers most of what is now Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and parts of Texas, Colorado, and South Dakota. 

    One geographer declared, “a large part may be likened to the Great Sahara or African Desert. (97/275-276)

* 

IN 1835, “the Governor of Alabama went so far as to demand that New York should turn over to his State for punishment the publisher of the Emancipator, an antislavery paper, on the ground that he had disseminated seditious articles.” (56/343)

* 

AFRICAN AMERICANS who are free have voted in North Carolina since 1776. That right is now taken away. The original North Carolina Constitution, written in 1776, did not include race as a qualification for voting. It did, however, restrict the right to hold office to “Protestants” only. A constitutional convention was called for and narrowly adopted in 1835. Changes included relaxing the limitation on office-holding, with all “Christians” henceforth eligible. At least if they owned property. 

The new Constitution still continued a requirement to own property in order to vote or hold office. 

As for people of color, their right to vote was taken away. 

 

* 

VIRGINIA ELIZA CLEMM, age 13, marries her cousin, Edgar Allan Poe, age 27.

 

* 

WHITTIER publishes the poem,

 

The Hunters of Men 

HAVE ye heard of our hunting, o’er mountain and glen,

      Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men?

      The lords of our land to this hunting have gone,

      As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn;

      Hark! the cheer and the hallo! the crack of the whip,

      And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip!

      All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match,

      Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.

      So speed to their hunting, o’er mountain and glen,

      Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men!

 

      Gay luck to our hunters! how nobly they ride

      In the glow of their zeal, and the strength of their pride!

      The priest with his cassock flung back on the wind,

      Just screening the politic statesman behind;

      The saint and the sinner, with cursing and prayer,

      The drunk and the sober, ride merrily there.

      And woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid,

      For the good of the hunted, is lending her aid

      Her foot’s in the stirrup, her hand on the rein,

      How blithely she rides to the hunting of men!

 

      Oh, goodly and grand is our hunting to see,

      In this “land of the brave and this home of the free.”

      Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine,

      All mounting the saddle, all grasping the rein;

      Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin

      Is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin!

      Woe, now, to the hunted who turns him at bay

      Will our hunters be turned from their purpose and prey?

      Will their hearts fail within them? their nerves tremble, when

      All roughly they ride to the hunting of men?

 

      Ho! alms for our hunters! all weary and faint,

      Wax the curse of the sinner and prayer of the saint.

      The horn is wound faintly, the echoes are still,

      Over cane-brake and river, and forest and hill.

      Haste, alms for our hunters! the hunted once more

      Have turned from their flight with their backs to the shore

      What right have they here in the home of the white,

      Shadowed o’er by our banner of Freedom and Right?

      Ho! alms for the hunters! or never again

      Will they ride in their pomp to the hunting of men!

 

      Alms, alms for our hunters! why will ye delay,

      When their pride and their glory are melting away?

      The parson has turned; for, on charge of his own,

      Who goeth a warfare, or hunting, alone?

      The politic statesman looks back with a sigh,

      There is doubt in his heart, there is fear in his eye.

      Oh, haste, lest that doubting and fear shall prevail,

      And the head of his steed take the place of the tail.

      Oh, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then,

      For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men?

 

As the Gutenberg Project explains, “These lines were written when the orators of the American Colonization Society were demanding that the free blacks should be sent to Africa, and opposing Emancipation unless expatriation followed.” 

So, “woman” in the poem can ride for the “good of the hunted,” on the grounds that in reality they want to kick the freed African Americans out. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I doubt most students have ever seen the Liberian flag or realize that the capital of the country is Monrovia.

 

* 

SEN. THOMAS HART BENTON sums up the problem he believes lawmakers in Congress must address: “There are but two parties, … founded in the radical question, whether People or Property shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people … aristocracy implies a government of the rich.”

* 

November 29: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife, Mary, dies. The New Yorker had a good review of a book about the poet. In that article, we learn about his background. At fifteen, he had gone off to college, at Bowdoin. 

Even at a young age, he had aspirations: 

“I hardly think Nature designed me for the bar, or the pulpit, or the dissecting-room,” he informed his father. In a subsequent letter, he added, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.” This got a predictably lukewarm reception from the elder Longfellow, who had himself trained as a lawyer and doubted whether his son could make a living as a writer. “There is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men,” he replied.

 

So a compromise was fashioned, presumably with familial help. Longfellow, who had just graduated from Bowdoin at eighteen, was offered a chair at the college in modern European languages.

 

The fruits of nepotism did not end with the gig itself. To prepare his son for the job, Stephen Longfellow stepped up to finance a lengthy trip to Europe. Henry crossed the Atlantic in 1826 and made his way straight to Paris, where he procured a claret-colored waistcoat and various other dandyish accessories. From there he travelled to Spain, Italy, and Germany. He spent more than three years abroad, assuring his increasingly skeptical parents that he was learning loads. … he returned home in 1829 with a remarkable command of French, Italian, and Spanish. …

 

Longfellow was bored at Bowdoin, where he taught for the next six years. He cranked out textbooks on French and Italian grammar and despised his life in the sticks. “I suppose you think I am dead,” he wrote to a friend. “But it is not so; I am only buried – in Brunswick.”

 

In 1835, he was offered a job teaching modern languages at Harvard, a far more exciting prospect. By that point, he had married Mary Potter; but he would need to return to Europe to polish his German. The young couple made the journey. Mary was pregnant, miscarried, and died of infection. 

Her final plea to her husband: “Henry, do not forget me.” 

As James Marcus writes, the grieving widower “numbly went about his appointed task, vacuuming up more languages (he came to know fifteen).” 

“There are wounds which are never entirely healed,” Longfellow himself wrote his sister-in-law.

 

* 

December 28-31: Ridpath offers up this less-than-sympathetic telling of the Seminole War:

The difficulty in this case was much more serious and resulted in a bloody war. The question involved was the right of the government to remove the Seminole nation to a new domain beyond the Mississippi. This measure the Indians resisted. In 1835 hostilities broke out and continued with little interruption about four years. The chief of the Seminoles was the famous Osceola, a half-breed of great talents, warlike ambitions and audacity. He, together with Micanopy, another chieftain of the nation, declared that the treaty by which the Seminole lands had been ceded to the government was invalid; that the fathers could only quit-claim their own rights and could not alienate the rights of their descendants.

 

At first these protests were made openly and peaceably to the agents of the government; but General Thompson, who represented the United States, offended at the haughty bearing of Osceola, ordered his arrest and put him in irons. While thus confined the chief dissembled his purpose, gave his assent to the old treaty and was set free. As might have been foreseen, however, he immediately in revenge formed a conspiracy against the whites.

 

In anticipation of difficulties, the government had sent General Clinch to Fort Drane, in the interior of Florida. The Indians gathered in the same vicinity in such numbers as to threaten the post. Major Dade, commandant of a station at the head of Tampa Bay, set out with a hundred and seventeen men to the support of Clinch. For this force the Indians lay in ambush, fell upon them [on December 28], and slaughtered them all except one man. On the same day Osceola made a sudden attack upon the quarters of General Thompson, only fifty yards distant from the garrison, and killed and scalped the General and his nine companions. General Clinch issued from Fort Drane, and on the 31st of December fought a hard battle with the Indians and repulsed them on the Withlacoochee. The whites, however, were obliged to fall back again to Fort Drane. (1219/324)

 

Oddly enough, the picture that accompanies the text, showing the death of General Thompson, is in error.

* 

December 28: A second description of the defeat of Dade and his men goes into a little more detail and included an unhealthy dose of racism.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It would work easily, to have three students take on the roles of one Seminole in this fight, one escaped slave, allied with the tribe, and the one soldier who escaped. They could tell their stories.

* 

Death of Sally Hemings. 

THE FOLLOWING DETAILS on the life of Sally Hemings come from The New York Times Book Review (10/5/08) 

    The Hemingses of Monticello – begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735, daughter of an African woman and white sea captain; she had at least 12 children, six by an unknown black man, six by John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. Sally Hemings was half-sister of  Martha Wayles, Jefferson’s wife (d. 1782).

 

    Elizabeth died in 1807, age 72, leaving eight children, more than 30 grandchildren and at least 4 great-grandchildren. “Initially because they were related to Jefferson’s wife and later because of his own connection with Sally Hemings, the family was treated quite differently from other slaves at Monticello. The women worked as house servants, never in the fields, the men as valets, cooks, and skilled craftsmen.  Jefferson paid some of them wages and allowed a few to live in Charlottesville or Richmond and keep their earnings.”

 

    “In 1792, at her own request, Jefferson sold Sally’s older sister Mary to Thomas Bell, a local merchant, who lived openly with her and treated their children as his legal family. Three years later, Jefferson allowed their brother Robert to work out an arrangement with a white resident of Richmond to purchase and free him.”  James Hemings followed Jefferson to Paris and studied cuisine. He was to have his freedom – after he trained his replacement; but he later committed suicide.

 

    Sally was 14 when she went to Europe and pregnant and only 16 on her return.  Her son Madison later said his mother and father agreed to a “treaty” and that she was the president’s “concubine.”  The sons were Thomas Eston Hemings, after Jefferson’s cousin, James Madison, and William Beverley.  Harriet, 21, and Beverley, 24, were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822.  They passed thereafter as white people.  On his death Jefferson freed Eston and Madison, and three of their relatives – only the four children had survived.  Sally, herself, was allowed to move to Charlottesville, where she lived as a free person until her death in 1835. 

 

Madison Hemings’ sons fought for the North during the Civil War. One died in the hellhole of Andersonville. 

* 

THE COTTON CROP harvested in the United States in 1835, totals 500 million pounds, an increase of 42.9% in just four years.

1853

 

__________ 

“And if men cannot cope with women in the medical profession let them take a humble occupation in which they can.” 

Sarah Hale, arguing in favor of allowing women to study medicine.

__________

 

VICTORIAN ERA thinking begins to take hold in America (this date is not hard and fast, but an approximation).

 

    Ruth Finley, writing in 1931, characterizes it this way:

 

Prudery – a modesty so false as to discourage women’s acceptance of masculine medical aid.

 

Piety – not religion, but a dogged adherence to such outworn dogma as that which fought anesthesia.

 

Sentimentalism – most apparent in the overwhelming flood of emotional writing.

 

Hypocrisy – manifested by an artificiality of manners, by an assumed, though of course never actual, suppression of natural instincts.

 

    These four pretenses, breeding inhibitions that hampered in both their observance and their breach, are the “absurdities and errors” – so antagonistic to present-day realism.

 

    Finley sees the queen’s own parental background as illustrating the “debauchery” her era was called upon to correct. Of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, she writes: “The Prince Regent’s private life does not adapt itself to detailed description. He had but a dull mind at best; yet he really was interested in three things, though only three – women, wine and revelry.” (117)

 

* 

“Prejudice in Women Themselves.” 

    Hale repeatedly stood up for the idea that women could enter professions heretofore closed to them. In an editorial in January 1853, she defended the idea that women could be doctors. Male writers posed all sorts of questions, and Hale lost patience: 

    Another says, “You will…drive men out of the medical profession, and even those now in it will starve.”

 

    They may as well starve as the women. And if men cannot cope with women in the medical profession let them take a humble occupation in which they can. (101)

 

    Finley writes, that in this endeavor to change minds, “the lady editor faced an obstacle very much resembling a stone wall.” (103) 

    Her most difficult task was to overcome prejudice in women themselves. Other than for such superficial elements as “megrims” and “vapors,” women as a whole had little recourse to doctors. Home remedies, handed down from mother to daughter or exchanged by neighbors over the back-yard fence, were the housewife’s stand-by. Nauseous, indeed, where the doses thus concocted – “sulfur and molasses,” “lard  and turpentine,” “boneset tea.” There was no community but that boasted at least one woman reputed wise in the art of healing, and, in truth, not infrequently she was more to be trusted than the doctors, whose endless “bleeding” and “cupping” were prescribed for everything from a fractured skull to typhoid fever. There was some excuse for women shying away from medicine as it was then practiced.

 

    In addition to this distrust, there prevailed an attitude of false modesty utterly incomprehensible to the modern mind. It is best expressed in the words of a physician of the times, Professor Meigs of the staff of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

 

    “The relations of the sexes,” he said, “are of so delicate a character that the duties of the medical practitioner are necessarily more difficult when he comes to take charge of any one of the host of female complaints. … So great indeed is the embarrassment that I am persuaded that much of the ill success of treatment may justly be traced thereto. … nevertheless I am proud to say that in this country generally … women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored. I say it is an evidence of a fine morality in our society.” (102-103)

 

    In 1850, Dr. Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard convinced the faculty to admit women to the medical school. The undergraduates overruled the decision. Their resolutions were published in the Boston Transcript, copied widely, and “hailed with wide acclaim.” 

    Resolved that no woman of true delicacy would be willing, in the presence of men, to listen to the discussion of subjects that necessarily come under the consideration of students of medicine;

 

    Resolved that we are not opposed to allowing woman her rights, but we do protest against her appearing in places where her presence is calculated to destroy our respect for the modesty and delicacy of her sex. (103)

 

    The Female Medical College of Philadelphia did open that year. Godey’s also hailed the work of Florence Nightingale and urged opening of nurses’ training schools for women. Not until 1873 were the first nursing schools established. As late as 1890, Finley writes, there were only 471 graduate-nurses in the United States. (105) 

    Hale also published a new novel in 1853, titled Liberia. As Finley explains, Hale 

set forth her idea of the solution of the great problem, which was first education of the slave for the responsibilities of emancipation, and then purchased freedom, the price to be paid either by the United States government or earned by the slaves themselves. Finally these freed exponents of a Christian civilization were to be sent to join the African colony of Liberia, that historic experiment, as benevolent as it proved impractical, which had been started by the American colonization society as early as 1820. Up to the Civil War itself many people hoped Liberia might solve the problem of “the African who,” to quote Mrs. Hale, “among us has no home, no position, and no future, since two races who do not intermarry can never live together as equals.” (176)

 

    Finley’s use of “negro,” with a small “n” is telling in itself. Nor does she seem to question Hale’s premise.

The Liberian flag today clearly indicates American roots.

 

* 

A NEW YORK convention of women was broken up by hoodlums who shouted, “Sit down,” “Get out,” and barked like dogs at Ms. Anthony. 

    Anthony encouraged one desperate mother to kidnap her own daughter when her husband cruelly denied her any contact with the girl…completely legal in that era. 

    “You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world,” a friend once explained to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 

    Susan B. Anthony remarks: “One half of American women are dolls, the rest are drudges, and we’re all fools.”

 

* 

February 21: Joaquin Murrietta and his gang attack a ferry crossing the Stanislaus River, in California. Eight Chinese are massacred. Murrietta’s “killing spree put such fear into the Chinese prospectors of Calaveras County that an undetermined number of them quit their claims and moved to cities.” 

    In a new book, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrietta, the author John Boessenecker calls into question the way the California bandit was once portrayed. 

    As one reviewer explains,   

    The popular image of Murrieta, a product of fanciful 19th-century artist renderings and adventure fiction, is a vivid one. He wore silver-buttoned calzoneras (split-leg trousers) and rode like the wind, his long black hair swirling. He moved so fast, draped in a thick serape, as to seem bulletproof to hapless pursuers. He was charming and debonair; the vilest murders associated with him were actually the work of a sadistic henchman known as Three-Fingered Jack. 

 

    Boessenecker paints a more realistic picture, more Billy the Kid, less Zorro. As a reviewer notes, “Three-Fingered Jack (a.k.a. Bernardino Garcia) was indeed a bloodthirsty goon, but Murrieta (who didn’t even have black hair) did plenty of his own killing, too.” 

    As far as the idea that he liked to “taunt his pursuers with handwritten witticisms,” that was the work of storytellers. 

    The real bandit was illiterate.

 

    In the old legends, the bandit leader is an honest man, done wrong by racist white settlers. It is said that he was attacked repeatedly by rowdies, and his bride, Rosa, was assaulted. 

    Murrietta, then, “developed a profound hatred” for the new owners of California. 

But although Murrieta’s depredations against white men generated contemporary outrage, he also targeted fellow Mexicans and Californians of Mexican ancestry, and nearly half of his gang’s murder victims were Chinese Americans, who rarely used guns or horses. 

 

    California was a wild place in those days. “The annual homicide rate in present-day Chicago is around 20 per 100,000 people. In 1850 alone, 19 murders were committed in Sonoran Camp – population, 5,000.”

 * 

May: A YELLOW FEVER outbreak in New Orleans, lasting into October, kills 9,000. A British paper makes report of the disaster: 

The most deplorable havoc is being made in New Orleans by the yellow fever. Thousands have been carried off by its ravages, and every day adds 200 more to the ghastly record. The dead are buried in trenches by chain gangs of negroes, hired at a guinea an hour. The New Orleans Crescent, after describing the horrible system of burial adopted adds, “The stoical negroes, too, who are hired at 5 dollars per hour to assist in the work of interment, stagger under the stifling fumes, and can only be kept at their work by deep and continuous potations of the fire ‘water.’...And thus, what with the songs and the obscene jests of the gravediggers, the buzzing of the flies, the sing-song cries of the huxter-women vending their confections, the hoarse oaths of the men who drive the dead carts, the merry whistle of the boys, and the stifling reek from the scores of blackened corpses, the day wears apace, the work of sepulture is done, and night draws the curtain.” In the meantime, amusements, regattas, balls, &c. are proceeding as usual, as if no such appalling pestilence were in the doomed city. 

 

Acquired immunity helped many African Americans survive – with a death toll from the fever of only 0.2 percent. For whites it was 7.4 percent. Newly arrived Irish immigrants, with zero immunity, were hit the hardest.

 

*

 

ON A POSITIVE NOTE, at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, a culinary revolution is brewing. George Crum (born George Speck), an African American cook is fuming.

 

    Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, has sent back a plate of food, complaining that the fried potatoes he ordered are too thick. According to Smithsonian, “Crum sliced some potatoes as thin as he could, fried them to a crisp, and sent them out to Vanderbilt as a prank. Rather than take the gesture as an insult, Vanderbilt was overjoyed.”

 

    So were born “Saratoga chips,” history’s first potato chip. More than three decades later the New York Herald would call Crum “the best cook in America.”

 

    American Heritage would label him, simply, “the Edison of grease.” In 2022, Smithsonian would note that American ate 1.85 billion pounds of potato chips annually, or 6.6 pounds per person. The market was worth an estimated $10.5 billion.

 

* 

“There was led an ideal life.” 

December 22: In Roswell, Georgia, Theodore Roosevelt (later “Sr.”) and Martha Stewart Bulloch are married. They will produce four children, including one raging alcoholic and one President of the United States. Martha’s half-brother James Bulloch and full brother Irvine Bulloch will fight for the South during the Civil War. James would build the famed Alabama, and Irvine would serve aboard the raider. 

    He is said to have fired the last shot from the Alabama, during the losing battle with the U.S.S. Kearsarge. 

    “Mittie,” as Mrs. Roosevelt was called, came from a background unlike anything her New York relatives had known. Her father had died young, and her mother had taken charge of the family’s affairs. In the Census of 1850, Mrs. Bulloch listed her occupation as “farmer,” and reported owning nineteen slaves, including eight children. There was even a slave named Bear Bob, who had had part of his scalp torn off by a bear. 

    Eventually, pressed for money, Mittie’s mother, called “Grandmamma Bulloch,” and sister Anna, had moved in with their relatives in New York. 

    David McCullough offers several insights: 

For the Roosevelt children, stories of the life in this [Roswell] house, the parties, the games of tableau vivants, the constant stream of friends, family, neighbors, servants, all the people, white and black, recounted by the hour by their mother, aunt, and grandmother, were as magical, as different from what they knew, as anything in books. Mittie herself, with her liquid southern-gentry voice, her everlasting interest in people, her gift for mimicry, her overflowing romanticism, could not have been more unlike the Roosevelts her children encountered if she had been reared in some distant foreign land. … Inherent to her stories was a great love of the heroic.

 

    Slaves were always described as “the servants.” 

Daddy Luke had been the coachman; Mom Charlotte, the head housekeeper and cook. Mittie and [her sister] Anna had been served hand and foot by a nurse called Mom Grace, but each also had her own slave child, her little black shadow, as was the expression. Mittie’s was called Toy, Anna’s, Bess; and Toy and Bess slept on straw mats on the floor of the girl’s bedroom. Another black child slept beneath Grandmamma’s big four-poster, “to run errands for her in the night,” it was explained, which probably meant to empty her slop jar.

 

    Half-brother Daniel Stewart Elliott once had to be sent abroad for a year of travel, so full of remorse was he. In a fit of rage he had shot and killed his “little shadow,” who by then, like Daniel, was no longer very little.

 

    Yet, to the Roosevelt children, the romance of the “Old South” seemed real. Said one, “In the roomy old home,” in Roswell, “with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life.” 

    In fact, the Bulloch family had been pressed for money. To pay for Mittie’s wedding and trousseau, four slaves “had” to be sold, including Anna’s Bess. A bill of sale indicates that the buyer, John F. Martin, paid $800 for Bess and her son John. (112/43-47)