I LOVED this book. It is brilliant. To understand Theodore Roosevelt you have to understand his family background. His father paid a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War, but was actively involved in social work and in trying to improve society. His mother came from a family in Georgia which was actively involved in the civil war. You also need to understand Theodore's place in the family and his parents attitudes toward raising children. Lots on information on Roosevelt's first marriage and the tragic day in which he lost everything. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Examining Roosevelt's early years makes the rest of his life easily understandable.

The subject carried this book. It’s not one of the author’s best - felt like a research essay more than a full manuscript. That said, Roosevelt’s background is fascinating. Such a unique figure.

This is another great book by one of history’s greatest story tellers. David McCullough describes the childhood of our 26th president Theodore Roosevelt in “Mornings on Horseback” with little known details of how Teddy Roosevelt became a great man. He begins with Theodore’s grandfather whom started the wealthy Roosevelt family. His name was Cornelius and he started a glass manufacturing company which was the sole glass making company in New York City in the 1800’s. He used this money to buy real estate and eventually opened up a bank named Chemical Bank. CVS, as Cornelius was referred to as, preached to always make the best out of every situation. CVS was the grandfather and his son Theodore Sr. was the future president’s father.

Theodore Sr. married a southern lady by the name of Martha Bullock who was referred to as Mittie. He was a hard worker in the glass manufacturing family and seemed like a wonderfully attentive father and husband. She was also a very lovely doting mother and wife. They schooled their four children Elliot, Theodore, Anna (referred to as Bamie) and Corrine with tutors and they were taught a variety of subjects including foreign languages. Theodore took the family on a year long vacation where they visited European countries as well as Egypt. Elliot was the older more promising son. He was smart and strong. Theodore suffered from asthma. McCullough describes this terrible condition that the young Theodore had to endure vividly. Asthma occurs when a person’s bronchial tubes constrict making exhaling very difficult. It is described as a brutally painful experience where you feel like you are suffocating. What is fascinating is that it was discovered that is brought on by psychological factors. Theodore would experience it every Sunday when his father was not around. Missing his father caused his asthma.

Theodore Sr. ran a very successful business becoming one of the wealthiest business men in New York. His dedication, honesty and wealth soon had the New York politicians swooning for his attention. He would join what was known as “The Half Breeds” of the Republican Party attempting to reform the New York customs house’s abuse of power. But there was a very powerful and entrenched political class running the custom house which became known as the Republican Party’s “Stalwarts.” The Stalwarts were led by New York’s charismatic intelligent Senator Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was described as political savvy good looking man who exercised regular producing an attractive figure. He would be Theodore Sr.’s number one enemy. Theodore Sr. was invited to the Republican nominating convention along with other “Half Breeds.” They managed to get a sympathetic-to-their-cause Rutherford Hayes nominated as the Republican’s nominee for President. However, they failed to produce any meaningful customs’ house reform at the convention. Rutherford Hayes would succeed at this as President of the United States in the near future though.

As Theodore Sr. muddled through New York politics, Theodore Jr. was sent to Harvard. At Harvard Theodore Jr. exhumed all knowledge thrown on him. He and a buddy would take 30 mile hikes where Theodore Jr. would catalog different animal species. But after two years at Harvard, the family would be devastated by Theodore Sr.’s unexpected illness. He had stomach cancer and died shortly after discovering it.

While at Harvard Theodore wrote his first book “The Naval War of 1812.” Theodore graduated from Harvard and became attracted to politics. He ran for a state house seat in New York’s state assembly. He became a work horse representative. He took on a lot of issues and became very respected by his colleagues. He then met the love of his life Alice Lee. They married and had a beautiful baby daughter also named Alice. Two days after baby Alice was born tragedy hit the young Roosevelt family. Theodore came home from work at the state assembly and found both his mother and wife sick. His mother w succumbed that evening to typhoid fever. But shockingly his wife Alice also died the same day, a victim of Bright’s disease.

Theodore continued his whirlwind political career in New York’s assembly. In 1884 he became a representative from NY in the Republicans nomination convention. He fought bitterly against the party’s support of James Blaine for President of the United States. Blaine won the nomination none-the-less. So Theodore retired and headed to the Dakota’s where he owned land.

He became a rancher in the Badlands of Dakota off and on for three years. In the 1880’s this part of the west was legitimately called the “wild west.” He met interesting characters and even rounded up criminals. One such character was the Marquis de Mores. The Marquis was the dominant presence in the Badlands ranching. He was a former member of the French cavalry, he was a superb horse handler and expert shot. He was rumored to have killed two men in duels while in France. He carried a walking stick filled with lead. He would raise the stick with one hand, extend and hold it straight out. This was done to build strength in his arms. Theodore was the other “big” presence in the badlands. Theodore worked long, hard hours and when he finished he would write letters and work on his book entitled “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.”

After three years Theodore abandoned his ranch for good. He sold it off and moved back to NYC. He surprised the family a short time later by announcing his engagement to Edith Carow. They married and had 5 children later. He also was willingly conjured up into running for the Mayorship of NYC by his influential acquaintances. He lost the election but esteem for his skills still rose.


This is where David McCullough ended his book. In an Afterword chapter he expanded on what happened later to Theodore, his brother and two sisters.
Of course, Theodore rose to the Vice Presidency and became President of the United States himself. McCullough lists the achievements of his presidency – settling of the 1902 coal strike, brokering peace in the Russo –Japanese War and the construction of the Panama Canal et al. His sister Bamie married at the age of 40 after raising Theodore’s daughter and had her own baby at the age of 43. His brother Eliot fell victim to alcoholism and died at the young age of 34. His youngest sister Corrine married and lived long enough to see a cousin elected to the Presidency in 1933.

I had given this book as a gift 20 years ago, but never read it myself. TR is such an exceptional character to study that, even if the book drags at times, we still marvel at the transformation that occurred with young Teddy as he grew from a child to a young man. This guy was well-read and had a mind that absorbed everything, and a body that he literally reshaped over the years. His father, Theodore, was a character I knew virtually nothing about, yet this book gives a most favorable impression of him. TR had parents that between them were formidable and gave TR the foundation to succeed- and not just in financial terms, although to be sure, this was a family of substantial means.
I did not find McCulloough's writing as honed and conversational in this book as were the later books on Truman and Adams. Nevertheless, it is chock full of details of the family and the fascinating times spanning the Civil War through the early years of the 20th Century. This family clearly made its mark on America's history in this period, and which resonates even today.

This is the second Theodore Roosevelt book I've read. The first was The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. I enjoyed them both. This book covers his father's and mother's life briefly and then covers Roosevelt's life through his marriage to Edith Carrow. The book focuses on family relationships (his sister Bamie and his father are the heroes of the book), his childhood, and his time in the West. The chapters are well-organized into smaller sections which makes for easy reading.

At times, the book plods along with lists of names of family members or politicians that won't ever come up again.

The chapter on his childhood asthma was a vivid description of the hardships of dealing with an asthmatic child.

One of the memorable quotes was from Roosevelt's childhood doctor who told him, "Bodies are made for working, not just for being".

A beautiful story about early life of Theodore Roosevelt — the people, places, and events — both triumphs and tragedies — that made him the great man and president recorded by history. While slow at times, McCullough’s prose is rich with imagery and great affection for America’s 26th President. Highly recommended for those who enjoy biography and are interested in the late Victorian age of Northeast America.

This is the trifecta of all my nerdy dreams. A book written by David McCullough, on Theodore Roosevelt before the presidential years, read by Edward Hermann.

Mornings on Horseback is another in long line of books on the biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I was a little disappointed and I blame myself for not reading the sleeve of the book that this is not a full biography of T.R. just his early life. What the reader gets is about 30% Teddy and the rest is about ancestors, random politicians of the age, his extended family and ends right before he becomes President. Yet, David McCullough did his usual job of researching and then weaving it into an excellent tale. I found McCullough rich in detail and candid in depicting Roosevelt. If you are looking for a complete biography of T.R. this is not the book for you. This would be ideal book to read before tackling a more traditional biography of T.R. McCullough always handles the main subject matter with skill and accuracy. The story is engaging just like the man himself was.

David McCullough's Mornings On Horseback represents an overview of the first half of future president Teddy Roosevelt's life, while blending in the particular culture of a wealthy New York family in the last half of the 19th century; the book is at times as much a depiction of upper-class American social & political history, as it is a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.


"Teddy" idolized his father, the senior Theodore R. & seemed not to question his life of wealth & privilege, including private tutors in lieu of a public or private school, multiple servants, European tours, life in a family New York mansion & a Harvard education, his initial contact with fellow students, though even then he lived separately in an apartment with his own horse & a personal servant.

Although his father had paid to have someone take his place in the Civil War, the family was long involved in philanthropy, a multitude of worthy causes and beyond that, was part of the progressive or reform wing of the Republican Party of their day. And while quite definitely far removed from working class New Yorkers, Teddy R. was severely asthmatic, with his health precarious & his survival occasionally in doubt.

The younger Theodore Roosevelt's asthma was a defining factor in his childhood, "affecting his personality, outlook, self-regard & all else but he resolved to make nature & exercise his cure". Leaving the polluted air of Manhattan behind whenever possible seemed to help T.R.'s breathing, especially time at another of the family homes, at Oyster Bay on Long Island, again with a full compliment of servants.

There were lovely mornings on horseback, with father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons in the water. Everyone had his own horse or pony. There were rowboats, a sailboat, miles of shoreline to explore, other large Roosevelt houses for children to charge in & out of, woods & fields to tramp & shoot in, times of every special delight, the happiest summers of our lives.

There is ample cataloging of T.R.'s father's political career, with the young Teddy constantly brooding over his inability to match his father "morally, mentally or physically." His loving relationship with an older sister is also amply highlighted.

Well beyond his father's rather sudden death at a young age, tragedy of an even more dire sort occurred when Teddy's mother, whom he adored & called "Motherling" died at age 44 & on the same day, Feb. 14th, 1884, his young wife Alice also perished at age 22, just having given birth to their first child, a devastating compound sequence of losses. As T.R. put it, "The light has gone out of my life".

But, already having been elected to congress, T.R. somehow had the resilience to continue his political career, as "his father would have done", with ample backing for a fellow in his mid-20s & is seen as

someone with integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, pugnacious, someone who will not truckle or cringe, whose political life may be turbulent but who will always be a figure, not a figurehead.

In time & partly because the candidate he backed for president in 1884 did not prevail at a raucous Republican convention in Chicago, T.R. headed west to property he had earlier acquired in the Badlands of the Dakotas, endeavoring to become a cowboy.

I found the chapter, "Glory Days" among my favorites in the book, with Roosevelt portraying the cowboy as folk hero, following in the steps of other Ivy Leaguers out west, including the author of The Virginian, Owen Wister, a Harvard man and Frederic Remington, a Yale grad. As Teddy R. put it:

With the wild gallops by day & the wilder tales by the night watch-fires, I became intoxicated with the romance of a new life. The dreams of home began to die within me, as did the illusory ideas of many a young & foolish ambition. My strength increased both physically & intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits & a vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action.

It was a different time & place, as there is no mention of his reaction to Native Americans & T.R. appeared to shoot every animal he encountered, nary a hint of the man who later in life would develop a considerable environmental sensitivity. However, we see a man tempered by extreme adversity, beginning a process of personal transformation that would in time carry him to the White House.


Morning on Horseback stands as a quite interesting, well-rendered, rather straight-forward portrait of the Roosevelt clan, with Teddy R. at the center, without being very deeply probing. Neither does it question material within Teddy's seemingly embellished journals. What McCullough does do is to thoroughly research the background material of the age in which the future president lived his first 30 years, including a painstaking study of asthma.

*Within my review are 3 photo images of Teddy Roosevelt, with the 2nd one of T.R. as a 5 year old boy, together with his brother Elliott, looking out the 2nd floor window of their expansive Manhattan home as Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege passes by and lastly, one of T.R. in cowboy profile, witin the Badlands in 1885.

Detailed account of Theodore Roosevelts family and early life

Author David McCullough introduces this biography of Teddy Roosevelt by saying that his first encounter with "the president" was when his brother was playing him in a school production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." Because of that, I'm not ashamed to admit that an entertainment venue sparked my interest in this book also: the American Film Company is planning a movie called "Born in the Badlands" about Teddy Roosevelt's cowboy years in the Dakotas (coinciding with Laura and Almanzo's first four, incidentally). This book covers the Badlands period, the return to the East, and plenty that happened beforehand. In other words, it's a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's early life from his childhood to his mid-20's.

Judging by the cover, the book seemed rather daunting - 375 pages plus notes and an index - but it turned out to be highly readable because it focuses on the personalities, and not just Theodore's, but his family's. Theodore Roosevelt Senior was an especially admirable man, and Teddy's oldest sister Bamie turns out to be the real woman behind the man, more so than his mother or wife. (She was the woman behind Eleanor, too.) The two factors that shaped Teddy's childhood most, though, were a positive and a negative: his family's wealth and his asthma. Both of these are explored extensively. I think any parent of an asthma sufferer will be fascinated by what was known of the disease in the 1860's and 1870's and what treatments Teddy was put through.

Because he dared to criticize the Czar after the Kishinev pogrom, I already had a favorable opinion of Teddy Roosevelt going into this book, though it was marred slightly by Sarah Vowell's comment in n  Unfamiliar Fishesn that he approached American expansion the way some people talk about building additions onto their homes. Now that I've read this book, I think TR was the greatest president the United States ever had, save for Lincoln, whom Teddy himself probably would have named #1.

Though this is not a complete biography as it does not delve into his presidency and only summarizes it in an afterword at the end, the book is so thorough about his early life, I feel quite satisfied for now. I'm definitely looking forward to the movie. I want Daniel Radcliffe as TR.

Theodore Roosevelt--pioneering naturalist, Rough Rider, hero of San Juan Hill, populist reformer, trust buster, champion of the National Park system, the President with his "big stick", the Bull Moose--he seems like a force of nature, something unstoppable. But how did it happen? How did a sickly, asthmatic child who was not expected to live become this towering wave of pure human energy? Both nature, nurture and self-will shaped the boy and the man and McCullough does a masterful job discovering how the one became the other.

It starts, of course, with his family.

Mornings on Horseback is as much a story of the Roosevelt family and the times as it is of Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy, or Teedie, as the family called him, was born into one of New York's wealthiest and respected old Dutch families. His grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, was among the founders of Chemical Bank (later Chase) and was a model of probity, respectability and solid citizenship. C.V.S. Roosevelt's mansion on 13th Street and Union Square was the gathering place for a growing clan of children and grandchildren.

The family story told in David McCullough's history spans three generations and several pivotal moments in American history. One of them is captured here as President Lincoln's funeral cortege marches slowly past the Roosevelt manor towards Union Square. From the second floor window you can catch a glimpse of two children leaning out: they are thought to be Teddy, age seven, and his younger brother, Elliot, age five.



The Civil War looms large in the Roosevelt history because there was another improbable branch to the family tree. In 1853 Cornelius Roosevelt's youngest son, the businessman and philanthropist Theodore met and married beautiful Martha 'Mittie' Bulloch, daughter of a prominent Georgia plantation owner.



The Bulloch's owned some 80 slaves; two of the house slaves are pictured here.



If the Roosevelts seldom produced anyone with a sense of adventure or even a whiff of impropriety, the Bullock's were something else again. Teddy, who clearly inherited his father Theodore's sense of honor and dedication to the those less fortunate, also listened enthralled to his mother's tales of the Bullochs. Among those the children most admired were Mittie's brothers who served in the Confederate navy; few stories were more thrilling than the one about how uncle Irvine got a dangerously fast new ship built in England and smuggled it away to sail against the Union. McCullough makes a good case that Teddy's adventurous side was a trait learned from his spirited mother and her Bulloch relatives.

Even through the strains of the Civil War, Theodore and Mittie's marriage would endure, the family prospered and the two would bequeath their very different gifts but complementary gifts to their their children.

I loved the story of the Roosevelt brood growing up. In particular, the chapter on Teddy's childhood asthma was sensitively and beautifully researched and, as a (now cured) asthma sufferer, I was struck by how well McCullough captured the terror of those nighttime attacks and how brilliantly he dissects the psychological aspects of the disease. I felt like cheering as Teddy emerges from those early shadows as a budding and enthusiastic naturalist, skilled taxidermist and contributor of specimens to one of his father's projects, New York's Museum of Natural History.



It was not easy being a Roosevelt child: the standards were high and never was selfishness, cruelty, dishonesty or idleness tolerated. Mittie and "Thee" were whirlwinds of energy and activity--they had money and, boy, did they now how to use it to the fullest! Few 21st century Americans could match the non-stop pace and intense focus of the Roosevelts and their entourage whether on a grand tour of Europe, or in New York working 18 or more hours a day to better the lot of the thousands of homeless children through the Newsboys Lodging House or helping crippled children through a new orthopedic hospital.

The second half of Mornings on Horseback covers Teddy's education at Harvard, his early forays into politics, his first marriage and the tragic death of his wife and Mittie on the same day. Then comes a wonderful section on Teddy's adventures in the North Dakota Badlands. The story gets a little disconnected towards the end as McCullough tries to follow not just young Teddy's career, but also the stories of his brother, Elliot and two sisters, Anna ('Bamie') and Corrine. The book delves into pivotal moments in Teddy's early political career and closes with Teddy's second marriage and failed run for mayor of New York City.

I'm looking forward to learning more about TR with two books from Edmund Morris: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex