His mother Martha "Patsy" Stewart Elliott Bulloch (1799–1864)
The Bulloch/Roosevelt family of Georgia and New York personify the cliché of families divided by Civil War. Children and step-children of Martha Elliott Bulloch lived with each other and conflicting loyalties. Martha, Georgia-born and bred, spent the war in Union Philadelphia and New York City.
Bulloch Hall about 1940, a century after its completion
Martha’s home was Bulloch Hall in Georgia but the widow economized by renting it out while she lived with her daughters and their Yankee husbands ---perhaps not Grandmother’s Choice but a financial necessity. She spent her last years with daughter Mittie and family in New York.
“Mittie” Bulloch (1835-1884), Martha’s daughter & husband Theodore Roosevelt (1831-1878) in the 1870s. Roosevelt did not enlist to fight his in-laws but served the Union cause in administrative roles
Mittie’s son future president Teddy Roosevelt grew up in an elegant New York City home where his grandmama and mother were Southrons, displaying their loyalties with small gestures such as smuggling necessities to Southern relatives through the Bahamas and pointedly ignoring Unionist dinner guests by dining “upstairs.” Mittie’s pride in her Confederate brother and step brother encouraged stories her son remembered as “about ships, ships, ships and the fighting of ships, until they sank into the depths of my soul." Teddy became Assistant Secretary of the Navy on his climb up the political ladder.
Lincoln’s funeral procession passed by the Roosevelt townhouse in 1865.The future president is supposed to have been watching from a window.
Grandmother's Choice by Elsie Ridgley
Irvine Stephens Bulloch (1842-1898) about the time the war ended
At 19 he enlisted as a Confederate midshipman.
English residents Commander James D. Bulloch & half-brother Irvine
By June,1861 James was in England commissioning ships while seeking loopholes in England’s professed neutrality act. Martha Elliott Bulloch’s son and step-son spent the war years in England serving as agents of the Confederacy, purchasing, outfitting and manning ships.
Édouard Manet depicted the CSS Alabama's 1864 sinking of the ship
that had been James’s most successful purchase.
After Confederate collapse many rebels were given the option of returning to the United State and resuming their lives if they signed “The Oath” but the Bulloch brothers’ transgressions seem to have denied them Lincoln’s promised “Malice Towards None.” Both remained in Liverpool, choosing exile over defeat and dealing profitably in cotton
James lived on Sydenham Avenue in Toxteth, 2 miles south of Liverpool’s city center. Six years after the War the Liverpool census shows him living with his Louisiana-born second wife Harriott Cross Foster (ca.1830-1897), their two English children and three servants. Two boys were at boarding school and the family was mourning Henry who’d recently died.
The ex-patriate Bulloch brothers
died at the turn of the century; Irvine died of a stroke in Wales in 1898;
James three years later.
Grandmother's Choice by Jeanne Arnieri
The Block
Mrs. Danner who sold quilt patterns in department stores in the 1930s called this basic block Grandmother’s Choice.
The Bulloch Belles: Three First Ladies, a Spy, a President's Mother and ...By Walter E. Wilson
James D. Bulloch: Secret Agent and Mastermind of the Confederate Navy By Walter E. Wilson, Gary L. McKay