by H. W. Brands
Gallatin responds equivocally, and Theo takes equivocation, after the years of Republican persecution, as a positive sign. She calls on her father to return home. “I say come; land in New York.” She would prefer to bring him to South Carolina, but she believes he must go first to the site of his original troubles, to which place he must repair eventually. “Nothing can be done here. Your arrival will be known. The news of it will reach New York long before you. The fervency of surprise and delighted friendship will have time to cool, cabals to be formed, and measures to be taken.” No, he must return directly to the city from which he fled. “Go to New York. Make your stand there.… Civil debts may be procrastinated, for a time, by confinement to the limits. There you can take breath; openly see your friends; make your arrangements; and soon, I think, you will be able to throw off those momentary shackles, and resume your station.”
She knows she is asking him to abandon much of what he has dreamed of and worked for during the past decade. But the dream of empire is gone already, at least for him. His enemies are too numerous and powerful. He must acknowledge defeat and come home.
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Her plea breaks his heart and then his will. For her he has schemed and struggled—for her and his grandson, to leave them a name and a feeling of family accomplishment. In his poverty and distress he has rarely missed a day writing her, if only in his journal. He still goes without a fire and without eating to save some coins for the boy: souvenirs of the adventure he will relate to him personally someday.
But he bows to her plea and to the inevitable. He applies again for a passport. And again. And again. He appeals to friends to intercede on his behalf. Months go by; the French bureaucracy moves glacially, infuriatingly. Hope gleams, then disappears. “A deadly blow,” he writes after one flicker is extinguished. Spring comes to Paris, easing the pinch of winter’s cold. Summer follows, bringing heat and new fevers to one whose health has already been compromised.
A duke takes his part. The blockade is broken. The passport is imminent, he is told. He refuses to believe it. “I shall not feel great confidence till I have the thing in my hand,” he writes Theo.
A note from the duke himself: the passport has been issued, circumspectly under another false name: Adolphus Arnot. “Now, indeed, I may hope,” Burr writes Theo. “Now I feel as if I was embracing you and Gamp.”
He exits France via Holland. His cash is gone; to underwrite his Atlantic passage he must sell his remaining personal property, including a watch he has purchased for Theo and which he has carried across Europe, thinking of her. “After turning it over, and looking at it, and opening it, and putting it to my ear like a baby, and kissing it, and begging you a thousand pardons out loud, your dear, little, beautiful watch was—was sold.… If my clothes had been saleable, they would have gone first, that’s sure.” But he won’t dwell on his loss, if it brings him closer to her. “Heigho! When I get rich I will buy you a prettier one.” The next breath reveals his mingled emotions. “I feel as if I were already on the way to you, and my heart beats with joy. Yet, alas! that country which I am so anxious to revisit will perhaps reject me with horror.”
Still further hindrances emerge, these the result of Britain’s blockade of France and its allies. “I forget that the little island of Great Britain lies between us, and, what is worse, their ships; there are now four of them in full sight not two leagues off. But, as we have neither merchandise nor Frenchmen on board, I think they will let us go.”
They finally do let the ship go but only to England, where the vessel, an American craft, is seized by the government. Delays mount upon delays, stretching weeks and then months. He dodges old friends, even Jeremy Bentham, lest they see him in his reduced state. He survives by selling books, clothes and other items he left behind on departing Britain. The new year, 1812, finds him still in Britain and finds Britain and America closer to war. “If there be war before April, every American ship which shall sail, even from this day, will be captured,” he writes Theo. “Indeed, my dear enfans, Gampillo”—Burr himself this time—“had never so bad a prospect of seeing you.”
Finally, with borrowed bribes, he arranges passage aboard another ship and at the end of March gets away. “I shake the dust off my feet,” he records in his journal. “Adieu, John Bull! Insula inhospitabilis, as you were truly called 1800 years ago.”
But now the wind and sea rise against him; a late-winter gale drives the vessel backward. The captain maneuvers among icebergs propelled by the wind and currents. “If a ship going at six or seven knots should come in contact with one of them, the shock would certainly be fatal,” he observes phlegmatically.
The vessel at last makes land at Boston in early May. He has to clear customs but discovers that the collector is the son of a political enemy. “For me to go direct to him to take an oath and demand a permit in the name of Arnot seemed to be an experiment that promised little success, and in the case of discovery might expose me to serious inconveniences,” he writes Theo. But to travel to the next customhouse, at Newburyport, will cost money he doesn’t have. He determines to take the chance. Among the crowd of passengers he slips past his enemy’s son.
He lies quietly at Boston awaiting a packet to New
York. When one appears he bluffs his way aboard, still posing as Arnot. His heart clutches when he hears his real name: “Ah, Burr! How goes it?” He glances cautiously toward the speaker and is greatly relieved to see that another man is being addressed, the captain’s brother, who apparently has the given name Burr.
The boat proceeds south and west until the wind dies off Long Island, leaving the sails slack and the passengers to languish almost within sight of their destination. But finally Burr passes through the narrows at the entrance to New York’s harbor.
Still he is not quite home. The tide turns and the wind fails, leaving the boat within sight of Manhattan but not within reach. Burr jumps ship onto a smaller craft, which becomes similarly stranded. He hails a still smaller boat whose rowers accept a dollar to put him ashore.
He looks up one of his few remaining friends. But the man is not at his Water Street home. Burr spends the night on the floor of a dingy rooming house. In the morning he returns to Water Street and discovers, to his great relief, that his friend is back.
“And here I am,” he writes Theo from his friend’s brother’s house. It has been four years since they parted.
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He remains in hiding till he hears from Theo. His ambitions have turned to dust, his fame to a noose about his neck. For her alone, and for young Aaron, does he live. To see them will repay his foreign hardships and the hazards of his return from exile.
The first news of his daughter and grandson comes in a letter from Joseph Alston. The opening sentence bodes ill. “A few miserable weeks since, my dear sir …,” Alston says, “I would have congratulated you on your return in the language of happiness. With my wife on one side and my boy on the other, I felt myself superior to depression. The present was enjoyed, the future was anticipated with enthusiasm.”
But malign fate has intervened. “One dreadful blow has destroyed us; reduced us to the veriest, the most sublimated wretchedness. That boy, on whom all rested; our companion, our friend—he who was to have transmitted down the mingled blood of Theodosia and myself—he who was to have redeemed all your glory, and shed new lustre upon our families—that boy, at once our happiness and our pride, is taken from us—is dead.”
Alston doesn’t say how Aaron died; Burr supposes a sudden fever. Alston explains that he and Theo are beside themselves with grief, but they are determined to carry on. “My own hand surrendered him to the grave, yet we are alive.… I will not conceal from you that life is a burden, which, heavy as it is, we shall both support, if not with dignity, at least with decency and firmness. Theodosia has endured all that a human being could endure, but her admirable mind will triumph. She supports herself in a manner worthy of your daughter.”
Through the darkness shines o
ne thin beam, at least for Burr. “My present wish is that Theodosia should join you, with or without me, as soon as possible,” Alston says. “I not only recognise your claim to her after such a separation, but change of scene and your society will aid her, I am conscious, in recovering at least that tone of mind which we are destined to carry through life with us.”
Theo herself writes. “Alas! my dear father, I do live, but how does it happen? Of what am I formed that I live, and why? Of what service can I be in this world, either to you or anyone else? … Whichever way I turn, the same anguish still assails me.… I think Omnipotence could give me no equivalent for my boy; no, none—none.”
She looks to her father for consolation. “I wish to see you, and will leave as soon as possible.” But she can’t leave right away. “I could not go alone by land, for our coachman is a great drunkard, and requires the presence of a master; and my husband is obliged to wait for a military court of inquiry.” Alston commands a brigade in the South Carolina militia and must attend the court’s session. “It will sit on the 10th of August. How long it will be in session I know not. After that we shall set off, though I do not perceive how it is possible to speak with certainty.… When we do go, he thinks of going by water, but is not determined. It will probably be late in August before we go. God bless you, my beloved father. Write to me sometimes.”
Burr has often said that he and Theo must support each other in their trials. She can’t see what support she will be for him now. “I am not insensible to your affection, nor quite unworthy of it, though I can offer nothing in return but the love of a broken, deadened heart, still desirous of promoting your happiness, if possible. God bless you.”
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Burr, stricken at the loss of his grandson, holds to the hope of his daughter’s coming. But the business of the Carolina military court, followed by the long-expected outbreak of war with Britain, detains Alston for weeks, then months. Theo grows impatient yet remains at his side. Burr’s days drag; he feels in exile still, unable to see the one he loves.
South Carolina’s business claims Alston longer. His friends urge him to run for governor, saying the moment is ripe and mustn’t be missed. He heeds their advice and wins. He tells Theo he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to leave the state.
Burr resigns himself to waiting. He cautiously resumes his life in New York and gradually discovers, to his relief, that politics has forgotten him. His enemies are retired, dead or sufficiently powerful to feel unthreatened by his return. A few old friends help him financially; one lends him the use of his law library so he can reconstruct his law practice.
But he spends most of his time looking figuratively to sea, awaiting the news that Theo is coming. As winter approaches, with no indication that Alston will be able to escape his obligations, Burr sends a man to accompany his daughter north. To the ordinary hazards of sea travel are now added the special dangers of war. “I have engaged a passage to New York for your daughter in a pilot-boat that has been out privateering,” Burr’s man writes him a few days before Christmas, referring to the American practice of licensing private vessels to act as wartime raiders. “My only fears are that Governor Alston may think the mode of conveyance too undignified, and object to it; but Mrs. Alston is fully bent on going.… We shall sail in about eight days.”
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Burr joyfully marks his calendar. His exile from his darling is finally to end. The pilot boat, the Patriot, is a fast schooner; with fair winds it will make the passage from South Carolina in less than a week.
As the blessed day approaches he frequents the waterfront, scanning the lower Hudson for a pilot boat, assessing every schooner, asking the watermen what they’ve heard of British depredations against American vessels. Each evening he returns to his modest quarters, believing the boat’s failure to arrive simply increases its chances of appearing the next day.
But day after day yields the same result. Nothing is seen of Theo’s boat, nothing heard. Burr tries to force back the fear that presses toward his mind and heart. Revelers celebrate Twelfth Night, but the worried father can’t join them. January’s second week slips by, and still no sign of his daughter. He has traveled enough to know that winds fail and vessels are becalmed; surely her boat will arrive soon. He learns of a storm off Cape Hatteras; perhaps the Patriot found a harbor and waited out the tempest.
Another week passes, then still another. He grows frantic. The overland mail brings a letter from Alston to Theo, posted at Columbia, South Carolina, and dated January 15. Burr holds the letter, unopened. A second letter, to him, arrives several days later. “Tomorrow will be three weeks since, in obedience to your wishes, Theodosia left me,” Alston writes. “It is three weeks, and not yet one line from her. My mind is tortured.… The three weeks without a letter fill me with an unhappiness—a wretchedness I can neither describe nor conquer.” Alston writes what Burr hasn’t let himself contemplate. “Gracious God! Is my wife, too, taken from me?”
Another week, another letter. “I parted with our Theo near the bar about noon on Thursday, the last of December,” Alston explains. “The wind was moderate and fair.… From that moment I have heard nothing of the schooner nor my wife. I have been the prey of feelings which you only can imagine. When I turned from the grave of my boy I deemed myself no longer vulnerable; misfortune had no more a blow for me. I was wrong. It is true, I no longer feel, I never shall feel as I was wont; but I have been taught that there was still one being in whom I was inexpressibly interested.”
And now that one being has vanished. “I have in vain endeavoured to build upon the hope of long passage. Thirty days are decisive. My wife is either captured or lost.”
Yet this ambiguity offers its own slight hope. “A short time since, and the idea of capture would have been the source of painful, terrible apprehension,” Alston says. “It now furnishes me the only ray of comfort, or rather of hope, that I have.” If the capture was by the British, Theo is alive, although a winter voyage aboard a man-of-war will test her troubled health. If the capture was by pirates, who have long plagued that treacherous coast, the chances are less but more than nil; the pirates might hold her for ransom.
But either way, Alston or Burr should have heard something. Or one of them would hear something soon. “Each mail is anticipated with impatient, yet fearful and appalling anxiety,” Alston says. He needn’t add, but does so anyway: “Should you hear aught relative to the object of this our common solicitude, do not, I pray, forget me.”
Burr continues to walk the waterfront. His step sometimes falters but never fails. He scrutinizes every mail. For weeks, nothing. Nothing from the British navy, nothing from kidnappers seeking a ransom. Nothing even from Alston.
Finally Alston writes again. Burr reads the letter, an admission of defeat and tragic loss, a full two months after Theo was due. “This, then, is the end of all the hopes we had formed,” Alston says. “Oh, my friend, if there be such a thing as the sublime of misery, it is for us that it has been reserved. You are the only person in the world with whom I can commune on this subject; for you are the only person whose feelings can have any community with mine. You knew those we loved. With you, therefore, it will be no weakness to feel their loss.” Alston’s friends have tried to fathom what her disappearance means. “They seem to consider it like the loss of an ordinary woman. Alas! they know nothing of my heart. They never have known anything of it.… But the man who has been deemed worthy of the heart of Theodosia Burr, and who has felt what it was to be blessed with such a woman’s, will never forget his elevation.”
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Burr falls silent. There is nothing to say. His few friends seek to console him; even his enemies nod to him on the street, affirming a human bond deeper than politics and acknowledging a loss more profound than most, thank God, must suffer.
He seeks solace in the law. He displays the skill he has always possessed. But his energy is gone. Without Theo to inspire him, he cannot dream.
The years pass.
He watches with curiosity but neither self-justification nor bitterness as Andrew Jackson is acclaimed a hero for irregularly forcing the Spanish from Florida, as he himself proposed to do. He quietly applauds Mexico for attaining the independence he had sought for her. He sees a new country carved out of Mexico, with Sam Houston and his Texas comrades accomplishing much of what he had envisioned decades earlier.
He fades into history and inconsequence, almost forgotten …
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“I was traveling up the Hudson on board of a steam boat,” a journalist records a dozen years after Theo’s disappearance. “It was a delightful afternoon in summer; the sky was serene, and the sweet balmy zephyrs played upon the face of the tranquil river.… The company on board consisted of a gay and fashionable assemblage of both sexes, whose sprightly conversation contributed to heighten the interest of the scene.”
The journalist examined the passengers more closely. “My attention was arrested by the singular appearance of a grave, elderly gentleman, whom I observed sitting on one of the side seats, apparently absorbed in some pensive musings, with his eyes fixed on the rolling tide. There was a melancholy dignity in his countenance; his venerable locks, gray with age, hung loosely on his shoulders. His dress was a coat considerably worn and short breeches, after the old fashion.” To outward appearances the man might have been a country farmer, returning home after a visit to the city. “Little attention was, therefore, paid by those pert fashionables, to one whom they considered an unlettered rustic.… Indeed, the old gentleman’s taciturnity, and the antiquity of his dress, afforded no small amusement to some merry wags—a kind of buffoons with whom we meet in almost every mixed company.”