The paces have been counted, and two men, squeeze the trigger, one is fatally wounded. Aaron Burr had shot Alexander Hamilton, which will overshadow any accomplishments he will achieve, for the rest of his life.
Tragically, the son of Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel 3 years prior. As a devoted son, he tried to defend his father’s honor against a man who insulted him.
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had been conducting a feud since Burr’s election to the Senate more than 10 years earlier, but Hamilton’s attacks on Burr became more intense in early 1804.
On the morning of July 11, 1804 the men rowed across the Hudson River from New York City to a dueling ground at Weehawken, New Jersey.
Accounts of the actual duel have always differed, but the result was that both men fired their pistols. Hamilton’s shot did not strike Burr.
Burr fled and actually went into hiding for a time. He feared being charged with murder. However, though duels were illegal in every state, they were rarely prosecuted in trial by jury.
In 1791, Burr had won a seat in the U.S. Senate by defeating Philip Schuyler, a prominent New Yorker who happened to be the father in law of Alexander Hamilton.
1796, Aaron Burr lost his bid for president, which he attributed to the smear campaign by Alexander Hamilton who viewed Burr as an opportunist.
Burr and Hamilton had already been adversaries, but Burr’s victory in that election caused Hamilton to hate him.
Also, Burr generally opposed the programs of Hamilton, who was serving as secretary of the treasury.
While Burr was vice president, in Thomas Jefferson’s term. Jefferson, never trusted Burr, and kept his distance, or treated him as an enemy.
Burr was involved in a number of other controversial episodes, including one of the most disputed elections in American history and a peculiar expedition to the western territories that resulted in Burr being tried for treason.
After 200 years, Burr’s complicated life remains contradictory.
Was he a villain, or simply a misunderstood victim of hardball politics?
Aaron Burr in the Revolutionary War
When the American Revolution broke out, the young Burr obtained a letter of introduction to George Washington, and requested an officer’s commission in the Continental Army.
Washington turned him down, but Burr enlisted in the Army anyway, and served with some distinction in a military expedition to Quebec, Canada.
Burr did later serve on Washington’s staff. He was charming and intelligent, but clashed with Washington’s more reserved style.
In 1775, Colonel Benedict Arnold led a contingent of patriot soldiers from Massachusetts to Quebec City by way of Maine. Altogether, some 1100 men made the journey; Burr was one of them.
En route, the impressed colonel remarked that this future vice president was “a young gentleman of much life and activity [who] has acted with great spirit and resolution on our fatiguing march.”
Fatiguing march, indeed: Arnold had severely underestimated the severity of the trek, and around 500 of his men had run off, died, or been captured by the time they reached their destination.
As a young officer Burr began a romantic affair in 1777 with Theodosia Prevost, who was 10 years older than Burr and also married to a British officer.
When her husband died in 1781, Burr married Theodosia.
In 1783 they had a daughter, also named Theodosia, to whom Burr was very devoted. 
In ill health, Burr resigned his commission as a colonel in 1779, before the end of the Revolutionary War.
He then turned his full attention to the study of the law.
Burr’s wife died in 1794. Accusations always swirled that he was involved with a number of other women during his marriage.
Burr’s enemies—including Hamilton—were known to accuse him of rampant womanizing.
Such rumors help explain what is quite possibly the strangest work in American literature: 1861’s The Amorous Intrigues and Adventures of Aaron Burr.
Presented as a novelized biography, the book (whose author is unknown) retells everything from Burr’s birth in 1756 to his death 80 years later.
But it also includes lurid descriptions of fictitious sexual conquests in several different states, with virgins, young widows, and unhappy wives constantly throwing themselves at our protagonist..
Burr’s Expedition to the West
The once-promising political career of Aaron Burr, had been stalled while he served as vice president, and the duel with Hamilton effectively ended any chance he may have had for political redemption.
In 1805 and 1806 Burr plotted with others to create an empire consisting of the Mississippi Valley, Mexico, and much of the American West. The bizarre plan had little chance for success, and Burr was charged with treason against the United States.
At a trial in Richmond, Virginia, which was presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall, Burr was acquitted. While a free man, his career was in ruins, and he moved to Europe for several years.
Theodosia Burr Alston, was the daughter of Arron Burr, the former vice president. Her father had just gone through a trial for treason when the War of 1812 had broken out in June between the United States and Great Britain.
Theodosia was traveling north by ship. Her husband was sworn in as Governor of South Carolina on December 10. As Governor he was also head of the state militia and he could not accompany her. Her father sent a family friend Timothy Green, to travel with her instead on the schooner Patriot.
The Patriot was a famously fast sailer, It had originally been built as a pilot boat, and had served as a privateer during the War of 1812 when it was commissioned by the United States government to prey on English shipping.
It had been refitted in December in Georgetown, its guns dismounted and hidden below decks. Its name was painted over and any hint of recent activity was completely erased.
The schooner’s captain, William Overstocks, desired to make a rapid run to New York with his cargo; it is likely that the ship was laden with the proceeds from its raids.
The Patriot and all those on board were never heard from again.
Then over the years, rumors started to come in about Theodosia.
The Bankers
One story which was considered somewhat credible was that the Patriot had fallen prey to the wreckers known as the Carolina “bankers.”
The bankers populated the sandbank islands near Nags Head, North Carolina, pirating wrecks and murdering both passengers and crews.
When the sea did not serve up wrecks for their plunder, they lured ships onto the shoals. On stormy nights the bankers would hobble a horse, tie a lantern around the animal’s neck, and walk it up and down the beach.
Sailors at sea could not tell the difference the bobbing light they saw from that of a ship. Often they steered toward shore to find shelter and instead, became wrecked on the banks, after which their crews and passengers were murdered.
Pirates
Writing in the newspaper Charleston News and Courier, Foster Haley claimed that documents he had discovered in the State archives in Mobile, Alabama, said that the Patriot had been captured by a pirate vessel captained by a John Howard Payne and that every person on board had been murdered by the pirates including “a woman who was obviously a noblewoman or a lady of high birth”.
However, Haley never identified or cited the documents he had supposedly found.
Different Pirates
Shipwrecked in Texas
Polly gave it to him as payment and claimed that when she was young, her first husband had discovered it on a wrecked ship during the War of 1812.
The doctor became convinced the portrait was of Theodosia and contacted members of her family, but there was little consensus because they had not actually met her, more than 50 years having passed.
Mary Alston Pringle, who had been Theodosia sister-in-law, was the only person contacted by Pool who had actually known her, and Mary could not recognize the painting as a portrait of her.
The unidentified “Nag’s Head Portrait” is now at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut.
It is quite possible Theodosia simply was lost at sea, or it maybe that one of these stories is true, or something even stranger occured. We may never know.
Burr’s first wife had passed away in 1794, a victim of stomach cancer. He didn’t remarry until 1833, when he exchanged “I dos” with a rich widow named Eliza Jumel.
(In the interim, his beloved daughter, Theodosia, vanished forever at sea.)
After two turbulent years, Jumel accused Burr of committing adultery and of trying to liquidate her fortune, and sued for divorce.
Her attorney during the proceedings was Alexander Hamilton Jr.
Yes, the son of the man Aaron Burr had shot in 1804 represented his estranged second wife in a highly-publicized divorce case that was derided by haughty Whig newspapers.
In financial ruin, Burr died on September 14, 1846—the day this divorce was made final.
In financial ruin, he died on September 14, 1836, at the age of 80, while living with a relative on Staten Island in New York City.
The case of Theodosia remains unsolved.
