Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

He sent his love to "the smiling little girl," in a letter he wrote his wife when Theodosia was two years old, not knowing that with his going she had not only ceased to smile, but that she wept bitterly and heart-brokenly whenever his name was mentioned, and that it required the combined efforts of her mother and nurse to divert her thoughts from the painful fact of his absence. As her mother said, the attachment which thus early manifested itself in so marked a manner, was not of a common nature. Theodosia's life is an evidence of how exalted it was, when, with all the world against him, she was yet proud to be his daughter.

Burr exercised an almost hypnotic influence over both men and women, and there are extant innumerable anecdotes of the conquests he continually made over those who had gone forth to apprehend him as a villain. In his intercourse with Theodosia he brought into play all those delicate attributes of his mind which captivated so many women. She was constantly in his thoughts. "The ideas of which you are the object, that daily pass through my mind," he wrote to her in 1799, from Albany, where the Legislature was in session, "would, if committed to writing, fill an octavo volume.... Indeed, my dear Theodosia, I have many, many moments of solicitude about you."

He exacted much of her even as a child, among other things that she should keep a journal in his absence, to be sent to him at regular intervals, and that she should answer his letters minutely and promptly. Writing to her when she was eleven years old, he said,—

"Yesterday I received your letter and journal to the 13th inclusive. On the 13th you say you got nine pages in Lucian. It was, to be sure, a most surprising lesson. I suspect it must have been the second time going over, and even then it would have been great, and, at the same rate, you will be through a second time before my month is up. I should be delighted to find it so. I have not told you directly that I should stay longer than a month but I was angry enough with you to stay three months when you neglected to write to me for two successive posts."

"I beg, Miss Prissy," he wrote to her from Philadelphia during the same year, "that you will name a single 'unsuccessful effort' which you have made to please me. As to the letters and journal which you did write, surely you have reason abundant to believe that they gave me pleasure; and how the deuce I am to be pleased with those you did not write, and how an omission to write can be called an effort, remains for your ingenuity to disclose."

In his next letter to her, he referred again to "the unsuccessful effort."

"Your letter of the 9th, my dear Theo, was a most agreeable surprise to me. I had not dared even to hope for one until to-morrow. In one instance, at least, an attempt to please me has not been 'unsuccessful.' You see, I do not forget that piece of impudence."

He was mindful, too, of her health, and in one of his letters begged her to carry herself erect. He had himself a remarkably erect and graceful carriage, which lent a majesty to his bearing and gave the impression of much greater height than he possessed.

While his letters to her were full of advice and suggestions for her improvement, they were by no means lacking in commendation. As she grew to womanhood this was more marked, as was also his tendency to confide in her. Her father's frequent and prolonged absences from home, her mother's long illness, attended with much suffering and terminating in death when Theodosia was but eleven years old, had necessitated an early assumption of those responsibilities which mature and strengthen character. To a suggestion contained in a letter written by her father shortly before her mother's death, that he would leave Congress that he might have more time to devote to his wife, Theodosia replied with a quaintness that was characteristic of her: "Ma begs that you omit the thought of leaving Congress."

From her close association with her mother under such circumstances her receptive mind became imbued with the beauties of the Christian philosophy, which her father, though a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and a son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, founder and first president of Princeton College, had not included in the course of studies so exactingly marked out for her. She was at this time studying Latin, Greek, French, and music, and learning to dance and to skate.