" But this conflict
of loyalties caused no discord in the Roosevelt family circle.
Her two brothers served in the Confederate Navy. One of them,
James Bulloch, "a veritable Colonel Newcome," was an admiral and
directed the construction of the privateer Alabama. The other,
Irvine, a midshipman on that vessel, fired the last gun in its
fight with the Kearsarge before the Alabama sank. After the war
both of them lived in Liverpool and "Uncle Jimmy" became a rabid
Tory. He "was one of the best men I have ever known," writes his
nephew Theodore; "and when I have sometimes been tempted to
wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and
impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by
thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction
that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy
in both public and private life."
Theodore Roosevelt grew up to be not only a stanch but an
uncompromising believer in the Union Cause; but the fact that his
parents came from the North and from the South, and that, from
his earliest memory, the Southern kindred were held in affection
in his home, must have helped him towards that non-sectional,
all-American point of view which was the cornerstone of his
patriotic creed.
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