James Dunwoody Bulloch
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James Dunwoody Bulloch (25 June 1823 – 7 January 1901) was the Confederate States of America's chief foreign agent in Great Britain during the American Civil War. He was the half-brother of Martha Bulloch, the mother of future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt.
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[edit] Birth and early years
James D. Bulloch was born near Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Major James Stephens Bulloch and Esther Amarintha Elliot. After the death of his mother, his father remarried and had four more children, including Martha Bulloch and Irvine Bulloch. In 1842, the family moved to the beautiful Bulloch Hall in Roswell, Georgia. Bulloch married Elizabeth Caskie in 1852. After her death, he married Hariott Cross Foster in 1858 and they had five children.
[edit] Naval service and European agent of Confederacy
Bulloch served in the United States Navy for 14 years before joining a private shipping company. When the southern states attempted to leave the Union and the Civil War began in 1861, one of the first acts of Washington was to begin a strangling Federal naval blockade on the Confederacy. With these developments, Bulloch decided to serve the southern cause. In 1861, he offered to assist the Confederate States of America by travelling to Liverpool, to arrange the Confederacy's foreign affairs in England.
Knowing that the Confederacy was desperate for arms and cash, he quickly arranged for the construction of two fast and powerful cruisers, CSS Florida and CSS Alabama, to be purchased secretly by the Confederacy to prey upon Union shipping. James' brother, Irvine, would serve and fight on the CSS Alabama. James also purchased a large quantity of naval supplies. Next, realizing that he must arrange for a steady flow of new funds before he could go much farther with his purchasing program and also prompted by the fact that the materiel of war that he had already acquired would be useless to the Confederate cause as long as it remained in England—he decided to buy a steamship (the CSS Atlanta), to fill it with the ordnance that he and an agent of the Southern War Department had accumulated, and to sail in her to America.
After turning the Atlanta over to the Confederate States Navy and conferring with Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Bulloch returned to England. He established a business relationship with the shipping firm of Fraser & Trenholm in Liverpool. Fraser & Trenholm would buy Southern cotton transported on blockade runners, thus providing Bulloch with the hard currency needed to purchase arms and other goods for the return trip. Bulloch was also involved in constructing and acquiring a number of other warships and blockade runners for the Confederacy.
[edit] Postbellum influence and collaboration with nephew Theodore Roosevelt
After the war, Bulloch and his brother realized that they could not return to the U.S. They therefore decided to stay in Liverpool, where they went into business and became quite successful.
In 1879, when his sister Martha and the Roosevelt family toured Europe, the first port they reached was in Liverpool where a joyous reunion took place. Although Theodore Roosevelt at first seemed to show no interest in his uncle's exploits, he was no johnny-come-lately to naval topics and history. In fact, Bulloch's nephew's childhood had been filled with stories told him by Bulloch's sister, Mittie. Roosevelt wrote that his mother used "to talk to me as a little shaver about ships, ships, ships and the fighting of ships, until they sank into the depths of my soul."
Filled with his mother's and uncle's stories, by the time Roosevelt went to Harvard he was already dreaming of writing a book on a neglected aspect of American military history, the role played by the US Navy during the War of 1812. Indeed, right in the middle of classes on mathematics at Harvard, (Morris TR Vol 1, 565) Roosevelt's mind would wander from his tedious mathematics classes to the accomplishments of the infant U.S. Navy, the clash of the "fighting tops".
When Roosevelt's father took the family on what they called their "grand tour" in 1879, young Theodore spent time with those uncles in Liverpool, their first stopping port on their trip. Years later, it would be Theodore, by that time known as "TR", who would persuade his uncle "Jimmie" to write and publish the account of his part as an agent of the Confederacy in England called Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, in two volumes published in 1883. TR wrote to his mother telling of his success with the project saying, "I have persuaded him [James Bulloch] to publish a work which only he possesses the materials to write." [1] In return, Uncle Jimmie provided help to TR on his War of 1812 naval history project.
When that book came out in 1882, any reading of TR's first book, The Naval War of 1812, demonstrates that TR, like his friend Alfred Thayer Mahan, well understood the influence of seapower on history.
For example, in the summary of Chapter II of Roosevelt's Naval War of 1812, Roosevelt uses the term, "Overwhelming naval supremacy of England when America declared war against her." He begins the chapter by declaring that, "During the early years of this century England's naval power stood at a height never reached before or since by that of any other nation. On every sea her navies rode, not only triumphant, but with none to dispute their sway. The island folk had long claimed the mastery of the ocean..."
TR's book was published eight years before Mahan's. It seems likely that reading Mahan's book on the weekend of May 10th and 11th, 1890 helped, in Morris's words, to "extend and clarify his [TR's] vision," Morris Vol I pg 424
[edit] Theodore Roosevelt on the Bullochs
In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt toured the South. After spending October 19 in North Carolina, and skipping South Carolina, Roosevelt visited Roswell, Georgia the next day. He spoke to the citizens there as his "neighbors and friends" and concluded his remarks 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.”
In Roosevelt's autobiography, he mentions his Bulloch uncles as follows:
- "My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine Bulloch, came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old retired sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a veritable Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy, and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the Alabama, and fired the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the Kearsarge. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war. "
- My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone. The only occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of the best men I have ever known, 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."
[edit] Later years
Bulloch was able to visit the United States after the Civil War under an assumed name. James died in Liverpool at 76 Canning Street,Canning, Liverpool, England in 1901 at 77. In his will he left $30,000 to his nephew, Theodore, by that time, the 26th US President. On his grave marker is the inscription, "an American by birth, an Englishman by choice."
[edit] See also
- Irvine Bulloch half-brother
- Martha Bulloch sister and mother of Theodore Roosevelt
- Theodore Roosevelt nephew and 26th US President
- Eleanor Roosevelt grand-niece
[edit] References
- Bulloch, James D. "The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe; or, How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped." 1883.
- ^ McCullough biography, footnote on page 76
