"'Oh, fools, who think it solitude to be alone!'
"This is but poetry. Let us, therefore, drop the subject, lest it lead to another, on which I have imposed silence on myself." Then he proceeds, in his usual gay and agreeable manner, again urging her to go on in the pursuit of knowledge. His last thoughts before going to the field were with her and for her. His last request to her husband was that he should do all that in him lay to encourage her to improve her mind.
The bloody deed was done. The next news Theodosia received from her father was that he was a fugitive from the sudden abhorrence of his fellow-citizens; that an indictment for murder was hanging over his head; that his career in New York was, in all probability, over forever; and that he was destined to be for a time a wanderer on the earth. Her happy days were at an end. She never blamed her father for this, or for any act of his; on the contrary, she accepted without questioning his own version of the facts, and his own view of the morality of what he had done. He had formed her mind and tutored her conscience. He was her conscience. But though she censured him not, her days and nights were embittered by anxiety from this time to the last day of her life. A few months later her father, black with hundreds of miles of travel in an open canoe, reached her abode in South Carolina, and spent some weeks there before appearing for the last time in the chair of the Senate; for, ruined as he was in fortune and good name, indicted for murder in New York and New Jersey, he was still Vice-President of the United States, and he was resolved to reappear upon the public scene, and do the duty which the Constitution assigned him.
The Mexican scheme followed. Theodosia and her husband were both involved in it. Mr. Alston advanced money for the project, which was never repaid, and which, in his will, he forgave. His entire loss, in consequence of his connection with that affair, may be reckoned at about fifty thousand dollars. Theodosia entirely and warmly approved the dazzling scheme. The throne of Mexico, she thought, was an object worthy of her father's talents, and one which would repay him for the loss of a brief tenure of the Presidency, and be a sufficient triumph over the men who were supposed to have thwarted him. Her boy, too,—would he not be heir-presumptive to a throne?
The recent publication of the "Blennerhassett Papers" appears to dispel all that remained of the mystery which the secretive Burr chose to leave around the object of his scheme. We can now say with almost absolute certainty that Burr's objects were the following: The throne of Mexico for himself and his heirs; the seizure and organization of Texas as preliminary to the grand design. The purchase of lands on the Washita was for the three-fold purpose of veiling the real object, providing a rendezvous, and having the means of tempting and rewarding those of the adventurers who were not in the secret. We can also now discover the designed distribution of honors and places: Aaron L, Emperor; Joseph Alston, Head of the Nobility and Chief Minister; Aaron Burr Alston, heir to the throne; Theodosia, Chief Lady of the Court and Empire; Wilkinson, General-in-Chief of the Army; Blennerhassett, Embassador to the Court of St. James; Commodore Truxton (perhaps), Admiral of the Navy. There is not an atom of new evidence which warrants the supposition that Burr had any design to sever the Western States from the Union. If he himself had ever contemplated such an event, it is almost unquestionable that his followers were ignorant of it.
The scheme exploded. Theodosia and her husband had joined him at the home of the Blennerhassetts, and they were near him when the President's proclamation dashed the scheme to atoms, scattered the band of adventurers, and sent Burr a prisoner to Richmond, charged with high treason. Mr. Alston, in a public letter to the Governor of South Carolina, solemnly declared that he was wholly ignorant of any treasonable design on the part of his father-in-law, and repelled with honest warmth the charge of his own complicity with a design so manifestly absurd and hopeless as that of a dismemberment of the Union. Theodosia, stunned with the unexpected blow, returned with her husband to South Carolina, ignorant of her father's fate. He was carried through that State on his way to the North, and there it was that he made his well-known attempt to appeal to the civil authorities and get deliverance from the guard of soldiers. From Richmond he wrote her a hasty note, informing her of his arrest. She and her husband joined him soon, and remained with him during his trial.
At Richmond, during the six months of the trial, Burr tasted the last of the sweets of popularity. The party opposed to Mr. Jefferson made his cause their own, and gathered round the fallen leader with ostentatious sympathy and aid. Ladies sent him bouquets, wine, and dainties for his table, and bestowed upon his daughter the most affectionate and flattering attentions. Old friends from New York and new friends from the West were there to cheer and help the prisoner. Andrew Jackson was conspicuously his friend and defender, declaiming in the streets upon the tyranny of the Administration and the perfidy of Wilkinson, Burr's chief accuser. Washington Irving, then in the dawn of his great renown, who had given the first efforts of his youthful pen to Burr's newspaper, was present at the trial, full of sympathy for a man whom he believed to be the victim of treachery and political animosity. Doubtless he was not wanting in compassionate homage to the young matron from South Carolina. Mr. Irving was then a lawyer, and had been retained as one of Burr's counsel; not to render service in the court-room, but in the expectation that his pen would be employed in staying the torrent of public opinion that was setting against his client. Whether or not he wrote in his behalf does not appear. But his private letters, written at Richmond during the trial, show plainly enough that, if his head was puzzled by the confused and contradictory evidence, his heart and his imagination were on the side of the prisoner.
Theodosia's presence at Richmond was of more value to her father than the ablest of his counsel. Every one appears to have loved, admired, and sympathized with her. "You can't think," wrote Mrs. Blennerhassett, "with what joy and pride I read what Colonel Burr says of his daughter. I never could love one of my own sex as I do her." Blennerhassett himself was not less her friend. Luther Martin, Burr's chief counsel, almost worshipped her. "I find," wrote Blennerhassett,
"that Luther Martin's idolatrous admiration of Mrs. Alston is almost as excessive as my own, but far more beneficial to his interest and injurious to his judgment, as it is the medium of his blind attachment to her father, whose secrets and views, past, present, or to come, he is and wishes to remain ignorant of. Nor can he see a speck in the character or conduct of Alston, for the best of all reasons with him, namely, that Alston has such a wife."
It plainly appears, too, from the letters and journal of Blennerhassett, that Alston did all in his power to promote the acquittal and aid the fallen fortunes of Burr, and that he did so, not because he believed in him, but because he loved his Theodosia.