On his 22nd birthday, October 27, 1880, Theodore Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alice was nineteen. Their wedding began a marriage Roosevelt would later remember in a private tribute as “three years of happiness such as rarely comes to man or woman.”
The young couple settled with Roosevelt’s family in New York City, where Theodore attended Columbia Law School and worked on The Naval War of 1812. They participated in New York society and spent five months touring Europe in 1881. That autumn, Roosevelt won election to the New York State Assembly.
Their life together ended on February 14, 1884. Alice died of Bright’s disease, a kidney illness, just two days after giving birth to their daughter, also named Alice. Earlier that same day, Roosevelt’s mother, Martha, had died of typhoid fever in the same house.
The double loss marked a turning point in Roosevelt’s life. Later that year, he returned to the Dakota Territory, where he had already invested in a cattle ranch, seeking relief in demanding physical work. He rarely spoke or wrote of Alice afterward, and she went unmentioned in his autobiography. But his diary preserved the immediate force of his grief: beneath a large black X on February 14, he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”
