It’s been ten years since the first performance of Hamilton: An American Musical, on the Public Theater stage in Manhattan. And though its plot is centered around New York, the show—like the history on which it is based—has some distinct Southern credentials. In the song “Dear Theodosia,” third vice president Aaron Burr sings about his only child, Theodosia Burr Alston, who would grow up to marry into one of South Carolina’s wealthiest families and, eventually, board a ship that would never reach port. Her fate would make her the real-life lead in one of the era’s most enduring mysteries.
Born in 1783 in Albany, New York, Theodosia really did “come of age with our young nation,” as the song’s lyrics attest. And Burr ensured a rigorous education for his daughter from the start. Tracey Todd, director of museums at the Historic Charleston Foundation in Charleston, South Carolina, points to a collection of books, housed at the city’s Edmondston-Alston House, that are marked with Theodosia’s signature. “Those books are tangible evidence of her being a really unusual nineteenth-century female,” he says. “Her father took an amazing interest in her, unlike the norm for the nineteenth century. She was the apple of his eye.”
Theodosia married Joseph Alston, future governor of South Carolina, in 1801 in Albany. Afterward, they traveled to the Georgetown, South Carolina, region to begin their life together. Theodosia was linked to several Southern residences during her married life, most notably the Oaks, a plantation on the Waccamaw River, and 94 Church Street in downtown Charleston. But to Todd, “if you want to associate a house with Joseph and therefore Theodosia that was the center of their Charleston existence, it is probably the Miles Brewton House.” Here at the Georgian-style home on King Street, Theodosia gave birth to her only child, Aaron Burr Alston, in 1802.
94 Church Street, a 1730s home connected to Theodosia.
The Miles Brewton House on King Street in Charleston.
The next decade brought tragedy to the Alston family. In 1808, Burr was tried for treason and, though acquitted, decamped to Europe. In 1812 Theodosia’s young son fell ill and died. When her father returned to New York that same year, a grieving Theodosia made plans to visit him. On December 31, 1812, she boarded the Patriot, which departed from Georgetown. Her course would have taken her through the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”—North Carolina’s Outer Banks—and likely through a dangerous storm. “The British did have ships between the Outer Banks and Bermuda, and it’s very clear that [around] January 1, 2, and 3, there was a tremendously bad storm,” Todd says. Theodosia never made it to New York.
Though Todd believes the aforementioned storm likely led to the Patriot’s demise—“the simplest explanation is usually the right one,” he says—other theories circulated, then and now. “I think most people believe it is either one of two things: pirates, or wreckers from Nags Head,” says Molly Trivelpiece, education curator at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras, North Carolina. According to Trivelpiece, wreckers would attach a lantern to a horse and walk it across the sand dunes. A ship would mistake the movement for another vessel and run aground, where the wreckers would scavenge it.
To make matters even murkier, Dr. William Gaskins Pool of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, received a portrait as payment for his medical services in 1869. His patient was Mrs. Mann, a woman living near Nags Head. Now housed in Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, the painting is titled Portrait of Theodosia Burr Alston, or the Nags Head Portrait. Folklore suggests that Theodosia carried a portrait onto the Patriot as a present for Burr, but neither this theory nor the true identity of the Nags Head Portrait subject have been confirmed.
Though Theodosia was just twenty-nine years old at the time of the ship’s departure, her unknown fate has granted her a degree of immortality. “If we actually knew what happened to her, we might not be talking about her right now,” Todd says.
Or perhaps we would be—after all, a tender duet in Hamilton memorialized her for a different reason, as the recipient of a doting if imperfect father’s love. According to Richard N. Côté in his book Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy, Burr was confronted with the rumor that his lost daughter was still alive, carried off by pirates. “Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father,” Burr responded. “When I realized the truth of her death, the world became a blank to me, and life then lost all its value.”
