Thee Roosevelt

Theodore "Thee" Roosevelt (September 22, 1831 – February 9, 1878) was an American businessman and philanthropist from New York City. A member of the plate-glass importing business Roosevelt & Son, Roosevelt helped found the New York City Children's Aid Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Children's Orthopedic Hospital. A participant in New York society life, he was described by one historian as a man of both "good works and good times."

During the American Civil War, Roosevelt was an active supporter of the Union cause, while his wife Martha "Mittie" Bulloch Roosevelt, a Georgian who had two brothers in the Confederate States Army, was a supporter of the Confederacy. It was perhaps for this reason that Roosevelt, while he sponsored programs to support the troops, paid for a substitute to fulfill his own conscription obligation in the Army of the Potomac.

Roosevelt's oldest son Theodore was younger than 20 at his father's death, and remembered him as "the best man I ever knew," and his father's idealized memory seems to have inspired many of the younger Roosevelt's more notable accomplishments, including the policies of his presidency. His father's lack of military service seems to have troubled the younger Roosevelt, who eagerly formed the "Rough Riders" volunteer regiment in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Thee Roosevelt in Southern Victory
In 1881, Theodore Roosevelt remembered his father as being broken-hearted after the United States of America (Southern Victory)United States lost the War of Secession, when the younger Roosevelt was nearly four years old. While the younger Roosevelt felt his father's pain, he believed (at the time) that the nation as whole was better off without the Rebels and their Negroes - the latter of whom responsible, in his mind, for dividing the Union in the first place. Nevertheless, Roosevelt acknowledged the Confederate States as a dangerous national foe, a view which inspired him to fight against that nation as colonel of a volunteer regiment in the Second Mexican War, and as Commander-in-Chief in the Great War three decades later.