Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt
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Alice Hathaway Lee was only seventeen when she first met Theodore Roosevelt on Oct 18, 1878 |
Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt (
July 29,
1861 in
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts –
February 14,
1884 in
Manhattan, New York) was the first wife of
Theodore Roosevelt and the mother of their only child together,
Alice Lee Roosevelt.
Of their first encounter, Theodore would write, "As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me." For young TR it was "love at first sight." Within a few weeks of their first meeting, Theodore would decide that this woman was to be his wife.
On February 13, 1880, an ecstatic Roosevelt recorded in his diary (see photo) his great joy that the woman of his dreams, who he had actively courted for more than a year, had finally accepted his proposal of marriage. Knowing that his love was reciprocated and that he could now "hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose" gave the enraptured young Roosevelt enormous satisfaction. They announced their engagement in February 14, 1880 and after courtship of a few months that might have gotten in the way of Roosevelt's studies at
Harvard University, they married on
October 27,
1880.
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Alice Roosevelt left, with her sisters-in-law, Corrine and Anna (Bamie) Roosevelt |
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TR Diary Entry Feb 14, 1884, the day Alice and his mother died |
On
February 14,
1884, age 22, Alice died of
Bright's disease two days after the birth of her daughter. The kidney ailment had not been diagnosed as it was masked by the pregnancy. Alice's husband, Theodore, received a terrible double-blow as both his wife, Alice, and mother,
Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, had died within hours of one another in the Roosevelt house in New York City. His mother, age 50, had succumbed to typhoid fever in the same house.
Upon her death, Theodore was so distraught by this loss that except for a diary entry (see facsimile on right) and some oblique references to her in the months after her passing, he never spoke of her again and refused to have her name mentioned in his presence. So final was this decision to try to put her loss out of his life, that his first wife, Alice Roosevelt, is not even mentioned, by name, in his autobiography. According to a number of historians, TR's willingness to leave behind or suppress his experiences with his first wife were a source of deep resentment by his daughter
Alice. She was unable to get him to talk about her mother in any meaningful way. Her rebellious life finds some explanation in this sad aspect of her relationship with her father.
In the immediate aftermath of his wife's death, Theodore turned the care of their newly born infant daughter,
Alice, to his elder sister Anna, also known as
Bamie, and embarked on a journey of personal discovery to his ranch in the
Badlands of
North Dakota where Roosevelt would emerge a renewed man and would go on to the Presidency of the United States in 1901.
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1].
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The Whitehouse Presidents Biographies *
Theodore Roosevelt Association
