FDR - Jean Edward Smith [6]
James’s son Isaac (Franklin’s great-great-grandfather), a sugar refiner, was briefly active in the Revolutionary cause, helped draft New York’s first constitution, and proved a solid but silent member of the Federalist phalanx led by Alexander Hamilton at the state convention that ratified the United States Constitution. With Hamilton he founded the Bank of New York and served as its president from 1786 to 1791.
The Roosevelts avoided flamboyance, moved cautiously, and did not become involved in public affairs unless they had to. As charter members of the city’s original elite they enjoyed inherited social status, a self-contained lifestyle, and a profound sense of entitlement. Isaac’s son James (1760–1847) went to Princeton, followed his father into the sugar-refining business, dabbled at banking, bred horses, and in 1819 purchased a substantial tract of land fronting the Hudson north of Poughkeepsie. There he built a large house, which he called Mount Hope, and assumed the life of a country squire. His son, another Isaac (1790–1863), also went to Princeton, trained as a physician at Columbia, but declined to practice medicine. The sight of blood was unbearable to him, and he could not tolerate the sound of suffering.3 Instead, Isaac turned inward. He lived with his parents at Mount Hope, where he devoted himself to raising exotic plants and breeding horses. A charitable relative described him as having “a delicate constitution and refined tastes.” The fact is, Dr. Isaac was a recluse, a hypochondriac paralyzed with fear of the everyday world.4
To the family’s surprise, Dr. Isaac, at the age of thirty-seven, announced his intention to marry Mary Rebecca Aspinwall, the sprightly eighteen-year-old daughter of their neighbors, the John Aspinwalls. For three generations, the Hudson River Roosevelts had been a family of declining enterprise, content to husband the money they inherited. That was not the case with the Aspinwalls, a hearty, acquisitive, seafaring family from New England. Together with their partners, the Howlands, the Aspinwalls dominated the shipping industry in New York. Their clipper ships, including the record-breaking Rainbow, were familiar in the ports of every continent, and the firm easily adjusted to the advent of steam. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 proved an even greater bonanza for the company, which held a monopoly carrying passengers and freight between the East and West coasts via its steamship lines and the Panama Railroad—which it had pioneered.
Rebecca Aspinwall brought Yankee vigor to the sluggish Roosevelt gene pool. “Thus the stock kept virile and abreast of the times,” FDR wrote in a Harvard essay on the family.5 The infusion was overdue. Dr. Isaac had no house of his own, and it was to his parents’ home at Mount Hope that he took his bride in 1827. The following year a son was born, christened James in the Roosevelt tradition of alternating “James” and “Isaac” for the firstborn son from generation to generation. James, the president’s father, was the third of that name in the line. Not until four years after James’s birth did Dr. Isaac establish a home of his own. At Rebecca’s insistence, and with a generous dollop of Aspinwall money, he purchased a large plot of land immediately across the Albany Post Road from Mount Hope and constructed a rambling gabled house with deep verandas. He named it Rosedale and planted shrubbery so thickly that the house was forever shrouded in shade. As one chronicler of the family has written, “it was a quiet place, quietly furnished, quietly lived in,” and it was here that James grew up, an only child for the first twelve years of his life.6
Franklin’s father was not only a Roosevelt but an Aspinwall. After graduating from Union College in 1847 and before matriculating at Harvard Law School, he asked his parents’ permission to undertake a European grand tour. Dr. Isaac objected. Wandering through Europe would be dangerous, he told James. Sickness and disease lurked everywhere, and there were unmistakable signs of political unrest.