II

“SEVERED FROM THE RACE”

Headless horsemen and other strange ghostly figures march nightly on the beach at Nag’s Head. For more than two years these shades and spectres have been seen and Coast Guardsman Steve Basnight has been trying vainly to convince his fellows. They have laughed upon him with sepulchral laughter, as though the dead enjoyed their mirth. They have chided him as a seer of visions, a mad hallucinant.

But now there are others who have seen and fled. Mrs. Alice Grice, passing the lonely sands in her motor, had trouble with the engine and saw or thought she saw a man standing there, brooding across the waters. She called to him and he, as one shaken from some immortal reverie, moved slowly off, turning not, nor seeming quite to walk, but floating into the fog, silent and serene.

Some scoffers have suggested that these be but smugglers or rum runners, enlarged in the spume by the eyes of terror. But that cannot be so, for the coast guard is staunch and active. This is no ordinary visitor, no thing of flesh and blood. This is some grieved and restless spirit, risen through a transcendence of his grave and come to haunt this wild and forlorn region.

George Midgett, long a scoffer, has seen this uncharnelled being most closely and accurately. It is a tall, great man, clad in purest white, strolling along the beach in the full moonlight, which is no clearer than the sad and dreaming face.

It is Aaron Burr. And he is seeking his lost daughter, whose wrecked ship is believed by many to have been driven ashore at this point.

So much for the lasting charm of doubt, since I take my substance here, and most of my mystery, from theNew York Worldof 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 thePatriothad 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 thePatriot, 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, thePatriotwas 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 thePatriothad 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, thePatriotput 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, thePatriothad 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 thePatriot, 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 thePatriot. 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 thePatriotmight 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.

~~ 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 thePatriotin 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 thePatriothad 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 thePatriotand 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 thePennsylvania 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.”

“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, thePatriot, 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.

It is unfortunate that the reproductions of this marvelous and romantic work do not show the least resemblance to the known portrait of Theodosia, and it is also lamentable to find that the art dealer, in his sweet account of his find, fell into all the vulgar misconceptions and blunders as regards his subject and the tales of her demise. But, while both these portrait yarns may be dismissed without further attention, they have undoubtedly served to keep the old and enchanting story before modern eyes.

In the light of analysis the prosaic explanation of the Theodosia Burr case seems to be the acceptable one. The boat on which she embarked was small and frail. At the very time it must have been passing the treacherous region of Cape Hatteras, there was a storm of sufficient violence to scatter the heavy British frigates and ships of the line. The fate of a little schooner in such weather is almost a matter for assurance. Yet of certainty there can be none. The famous daughter of the traditional American villain—the devil incarnate to all the melancholy crew of hypocritical pulpiteers and propagandists—went down to sea in her cockleshell and returned no more. Eleven decades have lighted no candle in the darkness that engulfed her.

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