and most of my mystery, from the _New York World_ of June 9, 1927,
contained in a dispatch from Manteo, N. C., bearing the date of the
previous day--one hundred and fifteen years after the happening.
But if we see Aaron Burr ghostwalking in the moonlight as once he trod
in the tortured flesh at the Battery, looking out upon those bitter
waters that denied him hope, or if we believe, with many writers, that
he fell upon his knees and cried out, “By this blow I am severed from
the human race!” we are still not much nearer to the pathos or the
mystery of that old incident in 1812, when Theodosia Burr set out for
New York by sea and never reached it.
“By and by,” says Parton in his “The Life and Times of Aaron Burr,”
“some idle tales were started in the newspapers, that the _Patriot_ had
been captured by pirates and all on board murdered except Theodosia,
who was carried on shore as a captive.”
Idle tales they may have been, but their vitality has outlived the
pathetic facts. Indeed, unless probability be false and romance true,
“the most brilliant woman of her day in America” perished at sea a
little more than a hundred and fifteen years ago, caught off the
Virginia Capes in a hurricane that scattered the British war fleet and
crushed the “miserable little pilot boat” that was trying to bear her
to New York. In that more than a century of intervening time, however,
a tradition of doubt has clouded itself about the quietus of Aaron
Burr’s celebrated daughter which puts her story immovably upon the
roster of the great mysteries of disappearance. The various accounts of
piratical atrocities connected with her death may be fanciful or even
studiedly fictive, but even this realization does nothing to dispel the
fog.
Theodosia Burr was born in New York in 1783 and educated under
the unflagging solicitude and careful personal direction of her
distinguished father, who wanted her to be, as he testifies in his
letters, the equal of any woman on earth. To this enlightened training
the precious girl responded with notable spirit and intellectual
acquisitiveness, mastering French as a child and becoming proficient
in Latin and Greek before she was adolescent. At fourteen, her mother
having died some years earlier, she was already mistress of the house
of the New York senator and a figure in the best political society
of the times. As a slip of a girl she played hostess to Volney,
Talleyrand, Jerome Bonaparte and numberless other notables, and bore,
in addition to her repute as a bluestocking, the name of a most
beautiful and charming young woman. Something of her quality may be
read from her numerous extant letters, two of which are quoted below.
In 1801, just after her father had received the famous tied vote for
the Presidency and declined to enter into the conspiracy which aimed to
prefer him to Jefferson, recipient of the popular majority, Theodosia
Burr was married to Joseph Alston, a young Carolina lawyer and planter
who later became governor of his state. Thus, about the time her father
was being installed as Vice-President, his happy and adoring daughter,
his friend and confidante to the end, was making her twenty days’
journey to her new home in South Carolina, where her husband owned a
residence in Charleston and several rice plantations in the northern
part of the state.
At the time of the famous duel with Hamilton, in 1804, Burr was still
Vice-President, still one of the chief political figures and at the
very height of his popularity and fortune, an elevation from which that
unfortunate encounter began his dislodgment. Theodosia was in the South
with her husband at the time and knew nothing either of the challenge
or of the duel itself until weeks after Hamilton was dead.
Of the merits of the Burr-Hamilton controversy or the right and wrong
of either man’s conduct little need be said here. As time goes on it
becomes more and more apparent that Burr in no way exceeded becoming
conduct or violated the gentlemanly code as then practised. Hamilton
had been his persistent and by no means always honorable enemy. He had
attacked and not infrequently belied his opponent, thwarting him where
he could politically and even resorting to the use of his personal
connections for the private humiliation of his foe. The answer in
1804 to such tactics was the challenge. Burr gave it and insisted on
satisfaction. Hamilton met him on the heights at Weehawken, across the
Hudson from New York, and fell mortally wounded at the first exchange,
dying thirty-one hours later.
It is evident from a reading of the newspapers of the time and from
the celebrated sermon on Hamilton’s death delivered by Dr. Nott, later
president of Union College, that duelling was then so common that there
existed “a preponderance of opinion in favor of it,” and that the spot
at which Hamilton fell was so much in use for affairs of honor that
Dr. Nott apostrophized it as “ye tragic shores of Hoboken, crimsoned
with the richest blood, I tremble at the crimes you record against us,
the annual register of murders which you keep and send up to God!”
Nevertheless, the town was shocked by the death of Hamilton, and Burr’s
enemies seized the moment to circulate all manner of absurd calumnies
which gained general credence and served to undo the victorious
antagonist.
It was reported that Hamilton had not fired at all, a story which was
refuted by his powder-stained empty pistol. Next it was charged that
Burr had coldly shot his opponent down after he had fired into the air.
The fact seems to be that Hamilton discharged his weapon a fraction of
a second after Burr, just as he was struck by his adversary’s ball.
Hamilton’s bullet cut a twig over Burr’s head. The many yarns to the
general effect that Burr was a dead shot and had practised secretly
for months before he sent the challenge seem also to belong to the
realm of fiction. Burr was never an expert with fire-arms, but he was
courageous, collected and determined. He had every right to believe,
from Hamilton’s past conduct, that his opponent would show him no mercy
on the field. Both men were soldiers and acquainted with the code and
with the use of weapons.
But Hamilton’s friends were numerous, powerful and bitter. They left
nothing undone that might bring upon Burr the fullest measure of
public and private reprehension. The results of their campaign were
peculiar, inasmuch as Burr lost his influence in the states which
had formerly been the seat of his power and gained a high popularity
in the comparatively weak new western states, where Hamilton and the
Federalist leaders were regarded with hostility. At the expiration of
his term of office Burr found himself politically dead and practically
exiled by the charges of murder which had been lodged against him both
in New York and New Jersey.
The duel and its consequences marked the beginning of the Burr
misfortunes. Undoubtedly the ostracism which greeted him after his
retirement from office was the immediate fact which moved him to
undertake his famous enterprise against the West and Mexico, an
adventure that resulted in his trial for treason. The fact that he was
acquitted, even with the weight of the government and the personal
influence of President Jefferson, his onetime friend, thrown against
him, did not save him from still further popular dislike, and he was at
length forced to leave the country. It was in the course of this exile
in Europe that Theodosia wrote him the well known letter from which I
quote an illuminating extract:
“I witness your extraordinary fortitude with new wonder at every new
misfortune. Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me
so superior, so elevated above other men; I contemplate you with such
a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love and pride,
that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship
you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite
in me. When I afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant my best
qualities appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed
so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not
live than not be the daughter of such a man.”
Burr remained abroad for four years, trying vainly to interest
the British government and then Napoleon in various schemes of
privateering. The net result of his activities in England was an order
to leave the country. Nor did Burr fare any better in France. Napoleon
simply refused to receive him and the American’s past acquaintance
with and hospitable treatment of the emperor’s brother, once king of
Westphalia, failed to avail him. Consequently, Burr slipped back into
the United States in 1812, quite like a thief in the night, not certain
what reception he might get and even fearful lest Hamilton’s wildest
partisans might actually undertake to throw him into jail and try him
for the shooting of their chief. The reception he got was hostile and
suspicious enough, but there was no attempt to proceed legally.
Theodosia, who had never ceased to work in her father’s interest,
writing to everyone she knew and beseeching all those who had been her
friends in the days of Burr’s ascendancy, in an effort to clear the
way for his return to his native land, was overjoyed at the homecoming
of her parent and expressed her pleasure in various charmingly written
letters, wherein she promised herself the excitement of a trip to New
York as soon as arrangements could be made.
But the Burr cup of misfortune was not yet full. That summer
Theodosia’s only child, Aaron Burr Alston, sickened and died in his
twelfth year, leaving the mother prostrated and the grandfather, who
had doted on the boy, supervised his education and centered all his
hopes upon him, bereft of his composure and optimism, possibly for the
first time in his varied and tempestuous life. Mrs. Alston’s letters at
this time deserve at least quotation:
“A few miserable days past, my dear father, and your late letters
would have gladdened my soul; and even now I rejoice in their contents
as much as it is possible for me to rejoice at anything; but there is
no more joy for me; the world is a blank. I have lost my boy. My child
is gone for ever. He expired on the thirtieth of June. My head is not
sufficiently collected to say any thing further. May Heaven, by other
blessings, make you some amends for the noble grandson you have lost.”
And again:
“Whichever way I turn the same anguish still assails me. You talk of
consolation. Ah! you know not what you have lost. I think Omnipotence
could give me no equivalent for my boy; no, none--none.”
This was the woman who set out a few months later, sadly emaciated and
very weak, to join her father in New York, hoping that she might gain
strength and hope again from the burdened but undaunted man who never
yet had failed her.
The second war with England was in progress. Theodosia’s husband was
governor of South Carolina, general of the state militia and active in
the field. He could not leave his post. Accordingly, the plan of making
the trip overland in her own coach was abandoned and Mrs. Alston
decided to set sail in the _Patriot_, a small schooner which had put
into Charleston after a privateering enterprise. Parton says that “she
was commanded by an experienced captain and had for a sailing master
an old New York pilot, noted for his skill and courage. The vessel was
famous for her sailing qualities and it was confidently expected she
would perform the voyage to New York in five or six days.” On the other
hand, Burr himself referred to the ship bitterly as “the miserable
little pilot boat.”
Whatever the precise facts, the _Patriot_ was made ready and Theodosia
went aboard with her maid and a personal physician, whom Burr had sent
south from New York to attend his daughter on the voyage. The guns
of the _Patriot_ had been dismounted and stored below. To give her
further ballast and to defray the expenses of the trip, Governor Alston
filled the hold with tierces of rice from his plantations. The captain
carried a letter from Governor Alston addressed to the commander of
the British fleet, which was lying off the Capes, explaining the
painful circumstances under which the little schooner was voyaging and
requesting safe passage to New York. Thus occupied, the _Patriot_ put
out from Charleston on the afternoon of December 30th and crossed the
bar on the following morning. Here fact ends and conjecture begins.
When, after the elapse of a week, the _Patriot_ had not reached New
York, Burr began to worry and to make inquiries, but nothing was to
be discovered. He could not even be sure until the arrival of his
son-in-law’s letter, that Theodosia had set sail. Even then, he hoped
there might be some mistake. When a second letter from the South made
it plain that she had gone on the _Patriot_, Burr still did not abandon
hope and we see the picture of this sorely punished man walking every
day from his law office in Nassau street to the fashionable promenade
at the Battery, where he strolled up and down, oblivious to the
hostile or impertinent glances of the vulgar, staring out toward the
Narrows--in vain.
The poor little schooner was never seen again nor did any member of her
crew reach safety and send word of her end. In due time came the report
of the hurricane off Cape Hatteras, three days after the departure of
the _Patriot_. Later still it was found that the storm had been of
sufficient power to scatter the British fleet and send other vessels
to the bottom. In all probability the craft which bore Theodosia had
foundered with all hands.
Naturally, every other possibility came to be considered. It was at
first believed that the _Patriot_ might have been taken by a British
man-of-war and held on account of her previous activities. Before this
could be disproved it was suggested that the schooner might readily
have been attacked by pirates, since her guns were stored below
decks, and Mrs. Alston taken prisoner. Since there were still a few
buccaneers in Southern waters, who sporadically took advantage of the
preoccupation of the maritime powers with their wars, this theory of
Theodosia Alston’s disappearance gained many adherents, chiefly among
the romantics, it is true. But the possibility of such a thing was also
seriously considered by the husband and for a time by the father, who
hoped the unfortunate woman might have been taken to one of the lesser
West Indies by some not unfeeling corsair. Surely, she would soon or
late make her escape and win her way back to her dear ones. In the end
Burr rejected this idea, too.
[Illustration: ~~ THEODOSIA BURR ~~]
“No, no,” he said to a friend who revived the fable of the pirates,
“she is indeed dead. Were she alive all the prisons in the world could
not keep her from her father.”
But the mystery persisted and so the rumors and stories would not
down. For a number of years after 1813 the newspapers contained, from
time to time, reports from various parts of the world, generally to
the effect that a beautiful and cultured woman had been seen aboard
a ship supposed to be manned by pirates, that such a woman had been
found in a colony of sea refugees in some vaguely described West Indian
or South American retreat, or that a woman of English or American
characteristics was being detained in an island prison, whither she
had been consigned along with a captured piratical crew. The woman was
always, by inference at least, Theodosia Burr.
Nor were the persevering Burr calumniators idle, a circumstance which
seems to testify to the fear his enemies must have had of this strange
and greatly mistaken man. Theodosia Burr had been seen in Europe
in company with a British naval officer who was paying her marked
attentions; she had been located on an island off Panama, where she
was living in contentment as the wife of a buccaneer; she was known to
be in Mexico with a new husband who had first been her captor, then
her lover and now was in the southern Republic trying to revive Burr’s
dream of empire.
The death of Governor Alston in 1816 caused a fresh crop of the old
stories to blossom forth and the long deferred demise of Aaron Burr
in 1836 released a still more formidable crop of rumors, fables and
speculations. It was not until Burr had passed into the grave that
there appeared on the American scene a type of romantic who made
the next fifty years delightful. He was the old reformed pirate who
desecrated his exit into eternity with a Theodosia Burr yarn. The great
celebrity of the woman in her lifetime, the tragic fame of her father
and the circumstances of her death naturally conspired to promote this
kind of aberrant activity in many idle or unsettled minds. The result
was that “pirates” who had been present at the capture of the _Patriot_
in the first days of 1813 began to appear in many parts of the country
and even in England, where they told, usually on their deathbeds, the
most engaging and conflicting tales. It took, as I have remarked, half
a century for all of them to die off.
The accounts given by these various confessors differed in details
only. All agreed that the _Patriot_ had been captured by sea rovers
off the Carolina coast and that the entire crew had been forced to
walk the plank or been cut down by the pirates. Thus the fabulists
accounted for the fact that nothing had ever been heard from any of
Mrs. Alston’s shipmates. Nearly all accounts agreed that Theodosia had
been carried captive to an unnamed island where she had first been a
rebellious prisoner but later the docile and devoted mate of the pirate
chief. A few of the relators gave their narratives the spice of novelty
by insisting that she, too, had been made to walk the plank into the
heaving sea, after she had witnessed all her shipmates consigned to
the same fate. The names of the pirate ships and pirate captains
supposed to have caught the _Patriot_ and disposed of Theodosia Burr
Alston ranged through all the lists of shipping. No two dying corsairs
ever agreed on this point.
Forty years after the disappearance of Mrs. Alston this typical yarn
appeared in the _Pennsylvania Enquirer_:
“An item of news just now going the rounds relates that a sailor, who
died in Texas, confessed on his death bed that he was one of the crew
of mutineers who, some forty years ago, took possession of a brig on
its passage from Charleston to New York and caused all the officers
and passengers to walk the gang plank. For forty years the wretched
man had carried about the dreadful secret and died at last in an agony
of despair.
“What gives the story additional interest is the fact that the vessel
referred to is the one in which Mrs. Theodosia Alston, the beloved
daughter of Aaron Burr, took passage for New York, for the purpose of
meeting her parent in the darkest days of his existence, and which,
never having been heard of, was supposed to have been foundered at sea.
“The dying sailor professed to remember her well and said she was the
last who perished, and that he never forgot her look of despair as
she took the last step from the fatal plank. On reading this account,
I regarded it as fiction; but on conversing with an officer of the
navy he assured me of its probable truth and stated that on one of his
passages home several years ago, his vessel brought two pirates in
irons who were subsequently executed at Norfolk for recent offenses,
and who, before their execution, confessed that they had been members
of the same crew and had participated in the murder of Mrs. Alston and
her companions.
“Whatever opinion may be entertained of the father, the memory of the
daughter must be revered as one of the loveliest and most excellent of
American woman, and the revelation of her untimely fate can only serve
to invest that memory with a more tender and melancholy interest.”
Despite the crudities of most of those yarns and their obvious conflict
with known facts, the public took the dying confessions seriously
and the editors of Sunday supplements printed them with a gay air
of credence and a sad attempt at seriousness. Whatever else was
accomplished by this complicity with a most unashamed and unregenerate
band of downright liars, the pirate legend came to be disseminated in
every civilized country and there was gradually built up the great
false tradition which hedges the name and fame of Theodosia Burr. She
has even appeared in novels, American, British and Continental, in the
shape of a mysterious queen of freebooters.
The celebrity of her case came to be such that it was in time seized
upon by the art fakers--perhaps an inevitable step toward genuine
famosity. Several authentic likenesses of Theodosia Burr are extant,
notably the painting by John Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery,
Washington. Vanderlyn was the young painter of Kingston, N. Y., whom
Burr discovered, apprenticed to Gilbert Stuart and sent to Paris for
study. He painted the landing of Columbus scene in the rotunda of the
Capitol. But the work of Vanderlyn and others neither restrained nor
satisfied the freebooters of the arts. On the other hand, the pirate
tales inspired them to profitable activity.
In the nineties of the last century the New York newspapers contained
accounts of a painting of Theodosia Burr which had been found in an
old seashore cottage near Kitty Hawk, N. C., the settlement afterwards
made famous by the gliding experiments of the brothers Wright, and the
scene of their first successful airplane flights. The printed accounts
said that this picture had been found on an old schooner which had been
wrecked off the coast many years before and various inconclusive and
roundabout devices were employed for identifying it as a likeness of
the lost mistress of Richmond Hill.
Later, in 1913, a similar story came into most florid publicity in
New York and elsewhere. It was, apparently, given out by one of the
prominent Fifth Avenue art dealers. A woman client, it was said,
had become interested in the traditional picture of Theodosia Burr,
recovered from a wrecked vessel on the coast of North Carolina.
Accordingly, the art dealer had undertaken a search for the missing
work of art and had at length recovered it, together with a most
fascinating history.
In 1869 Dr. W. G. Pool, a physician of Elizabeth City, N. C., spent
the summer at Nag’s Head, a resort on the outer barrier of sand which
protects the North Carolina coast about fifty miles north of Cape
Hatteras. While there he was called to visit an aged woman who lived
in an ancient cabin about two miles out of the town. His ministrations
served to recover her health and she expressed the wish to pay him
in some way other than with money, of which useful commodity she had
none. The good doctor had noticed, with considerable curiosity, a most
beautiful oil painting of a “beautiful, proud and intelligent lady of
high social standing.” He immediately coveted this picture and asked
his patient for it, since she wanted to give him something in return
for his leechcraft. She not only gave him the portrait but she told him
how she had come by it. Many years before, when she was still a girl,
the old woman’s admirer and subsequent first husband had, with some
others, come upon the wreck of a pilot boat, which had stranded with
all sails set, the rudder tied and breakfast served but undisturbed in
the cabin. The pilot boat was empty and several trunks had been broken
open, their contents being scattered about. Among the salvaged goods
was this portrait, which had fallen to the lot of the old woman’s swain
and come through him to her.
From this old woman and Dr. Pool, the picture had passed to others
without ever having left Elizabeth City. There the enterprising dealer
had found it in the possession of a substantial widow, and she had
consented to part with it. The rest of the story--the essentials--was
to be surmised. The wrecked pilot boat was, to be sure, the _Patriot_,
the date of its stranding agreed with the beclouded incidents of
January, 1813, and the “intelligent lady of high social standing” was
none other than Theodosia Burr.