IN 1869, A VACATIONING DOCTOR named William Gaskins Pool was called to help an ill old woman named Polly Mann, who lived in a shack near Nags Head, North Carolina. When he and his daughter, Anna, gingerly entered the dark, cobweb-covered home, they were drawn to a picture on the wall, Anna remembered, “of a beautiful young woman about twenty-five years of age.” After extensively questioning Polly about the painting, Dr. Pool believed his initial hunch was correct. He was staring at a portrait of the long vanished Theodosia Burr Alston, a portrait which may hold the key to her long-debated fate at sea.Today, if people know anything about Theodosia, it is because of the lovely lullaby “Dear Theodosia,” sung by the character of Aaron Burr in the sensational musical Hamilton. But the real-life Theodosia grew from a beloved child into a highly intelligent, complex adult, whose fascinating story is largely unknown and worthy of its very own Broadway smash.
Theodosia Bartow Burr was born in Albany, New York, on June 21, 1783. Her mother, also called Theodosia, was a brilliant, cultured woman. She had scandalized New England society, when as a married mother of five, she fell in love with an equally brilliant and much younger blue-blooded lawyer and Revolutionary War soldier—Aaron Burr. After her first husband’s death, the two were married, and little Theodosia, the couple’s only child to survive, became the center of her parents’—particularly her father’s—world.
“Your dear little Theodosia cannot hear you spoken of without an apparent melancholy,” the elder Theodosia wrote to a traveling Aaron in 1785, “insomuch that her nurse is obliged to exert her invention to divert her, and myself avoid to mention you in her presence. She was one whole day indifferent to everything but your name. Her attachment is not of a common nature.”
Hellbound and Down 