Two weeks ago our post was about a boy born in Kentucky who rose from humble beginnings to be our sixteenth president. Today we focus is on a boy born in Macedon who rose from a conservative small-town environment to be appointed a brigadier general by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
John Lapham Bullis's biographical information is in two previous posts on this blog (see February 5 and 12, 2009). Our focus today is on his family's (and hometown's) reaction to his military and business achievements.
Since he received a standard Quaker education, questions have been raised about his family's feelings toward his military career. We have no record specific to these questions. However, we do have excerpts of letters Mr. Bullis wrote his mother while he was serving in the Civil War which indicate mutual love and support. We also have Christmas letters he wrote to his aunt, in which he enclosed a generous monetary gift and expressed his affection of her. As for his business achievements, his nephew Charles Bullis spoke about his Uncle John "always trying to earn money and get ahead...," indicating admiration for his uncle's apparent driving force and ambitions.
Again, we have no record of his community's reaction. However, Bullis family neighbors and friends must have felt proud as stories circulated in the local press and area grapevines about this hometown boy's accomplishments in the Civil War and, later on, in the Texas frontier as leader of the Black Seminole Indians. And we can imagine that after hearing stories of John Lapham Bullis's many acts of bravery, local young people may have been inspired to set higher goals and work harder to achieve them.
Next week we'll post excerpts from a 1981 article in True West titled "John Bullis."
No comments:
Post a Comment