Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

Theodosia Burr

(Mrs. Joseph Alston)

By Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin

His library, which bespoke the critical taste of the scholar, and which he had begun to collect as a boy, was a feature of the house, recalled in after years by men who had been his guests as vividly as the brilliant dinner-parties given beneath the same roof by the distinguished Adams and his wife. He had his London bookseller, through whom he made constant additions to his collection, for Burr was ever a lover of books, and he recorded in his journal in his days of exile and want with what pangs he had been obliged to part with some odd volumes he had with him upon discovering that he was again under the necessity of dining.

His passion for books he imparted to his daughter, urging upon her at all times the necessity for study and improvement, and never relinquishing his endeavors to carry her mind to a high order of cultivation. In the communication he addressed to his son-in-law on the night before his duel with Hamilton, he asked as a last favor that he would urge Theodosia to continue to study. In all his letters to her his efforts to stimulate this habit were uppermost. "The longer I live," she wrote to him after her marriage, "the more frequently the truth of your advice evinces itself, that occupation is necessary to give us command over ourselves."

In the development of her mind and character he pursued a clearly-defined and well-directed course. When she was ten years old he wrote to his wife from Philadelphia, where he was at the time occupying a seat in the Senate, reminding her that he had left a memorandum of what Theodosia was to learn during his absence. While his public duties were such that he was not able always to personally superintend her studies, he gave minute instructions to the tutors to whom he intrusted her, and constituted himself their vigilant and inexorable critic. "If your young teacher," he wrote to her when she was in her sixteenth year, "after a week's trial should not suit you, dismiss him on any pretence, without wounding his pride, and take the old Scotchman. Resolve to succeed, and you cannot fail."

Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," in which Burr became so absorbed that he sat up all night reading it, so affected him that its influence told on all Theodosia's life. On the principles it inculcated were based both her mental and moral development. "If I could foresee," he wrote to his wife, "that Theodosia would become a mere fashionable woman with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe,—that women have souls."

"And do you regret," he wrote to Theodosia herself, when she was a little more than sixteen, "you are not also a woman? That you are not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room? Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with confidence. You feel that you are maturing for solid friendship. The friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously received by too many of your sex."

Burr was himself an ornament to many a drawing-room, and no man ever had better opportunities for estimating the deficiencies in the system of educating the women of his day. Theodosia he brought up like a young Spartan, with few or none of the feminine affectations then in vogue. Courage and fortitude were his darling virtues, and so instilled into her from her infancy that they formed almost the groundwork of her character. "No apologies or explanations. I hate them," he said, reproving her for some fault of omission when she was a little child. "I beg and expect it of you," he wrote to her from Richmond, where he was awaiting trial for treason, and whither she was hastening to him, "that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you manifest no signs of weakness or alarm."

Theodosia's affection for her father was the absorbing passion of her life. "You appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men," she once wrote to him, "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 do 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."