A SON OF THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH

October 27, 1858, Theodore Roosevelt born. Descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families of New York and from a noted Southern family. - Deep shadow cast upon his childhood home by the Civil War. His father's noble work for the boys in blue. His mother's Confederate brothers, one building the Alabama and other Southern cruisers, and another firing the last shot in the great battle with the Kearsarge. His father's devotion to the poor. - The son's tribute to him and to his gallant Confederate uncles. — The strenuous life chosen in preference to a life of ease.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, unlike Abraham Lincoln and other leaders whom the American people have delighted to honor and follow, was not born in a log cabin. On the contrary, he was born to wealth and position in the city of New York. Fortune spared him the anxious struggle for a living, which most of us must make from earliest boyhood.

He was reared in an elegant home and educated in one of the famous universities of the country. He read law, but he had no need to practise a profession. His father had retired from business, and there was no occasion for the son to take business career. up a

He tasted the enjoyments of travel in the Old World. The pleasure-loving society of his native city was open to him; his Knickerbocker name was a passport to the drawing-rooms of fashion and to the exclusive clubs. A life of ease was his if he chose. Not a few of his friends made this choice and gave themselves up to luxurious idle

ness.

But Theodore Roosevelt preferred for himself a life of toil the strenuous life. In this decision he accepted the part which nature seems to have been preparing for him through generations of his family history.

He is descended, on his father's side, from a sturdy race of Dutch burghers, and he himself has a head which Rembrandt might have painted on one of his immortal canvases. The first Roosevelt, or Claes Martenszen Van Rosenvelt, as he was named, came from Holland to New York, or New Amsterdam, as it was then called, in 1649 or 1650. The place was a bit of quaint old Holland transplanted to the New World, and its people, with their wooden shoes, big breeches, and long pipes, with their thrift, their cleanliness, and their windmills,

were as loyal Dutch as those that stayed in the homeland behind the dikes.

For full one hundred years the Roosevelts in this country made no marriage outside their race. The family name, Van Rosenvelt at first, then Rosenvelt and Rosavelt, did not get its present form of Roosevelt until after 1750. Theodore Roosevelt's early forbears were christened Nicholas, and Johannes, and Jacobus, and not until the Revolution did his ancestors adopt English names.

They were plain people, those founders of the family in America, and they got their living by their hands. In the beginning they lived at the Battery, the very lower end of Manhattan, but they have steadily moved up the island, generation by generation. A large tract of land was bought by one of Theodore Roosevelt's ancestors for $500, and through it Roosevelt Street was laid out. His grandfather lived in Union Square, while his father's home was in 20th Street, and he himself has lived in 57th Street, within two blocks of Central Park.

The social condition of the family kept pace with this upward movement geographically. As far back as 1750 one of the Roosevelts is dignified in the

official records of the city with the title of Esquire, and in 1765 another is set down as "gentleman.” Like the honest burghers that they were, the Roosevelts discharged their civic duties as aldermen from time to time, and in some branches there were one or two state senators, congressman or so, and a judge. But, as with most New York families, they were generally men of business.

For a century and a half they have been in the enjoyment of wealth. Theodore Roosevelt's grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, inherited a large fortune, and, as a glass importer and banker, he added a good deal to his inheritance. He was a most successful business man. Having himself left Columbia without graduating, he distrusted a college training for young men going into trade, and bred his son, Theodore, to follow in his footsteps.

This son was the father of the President. It was while he was a member of the prosperous house of Roosevelt & Co. in Maiden Lane, and on a journey to Georgia as the groomsman of a friend from Philadelphia, that he met Miss Martha Bulloch, the beautiful young woman who was to be the mother of the President. She was

the sister of his friend's bride and in a year they, too, were married.

The Bullochs were as notable a family in the South as the Roosevelts in the North. Mrs. Roosevelt's father had been a major in the Mexican War and her great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first Governor of the state of Georgia in the time of the Revolution.

Only a few years after this union of the North and the South, the great war between the sections shook the land. Nowhere in the North did it cast a deeper shadow than on the home of the Roosevelts. While her husband was deeply moved by loyalty to the Federal government, all of Mrs. Roosevelt's kindred in the old home went with the Confederacy.

Mrs. Roosevelt's elder brother, Captain James Dunwoody Bulloch, had been in the United States navy, but at the outbreak of the war was in the merchant marine, commanding a ship plying between New York and New Orleans. This ship, the Bienville, was in port at New Orleans at the time of the secession of Louisiana from the Union, and the governor commanded Captain Bulloch to turn her over to the state. The Captain refused, and his fealty to