The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  I kept my hands clasped tight, so tight my knuckles ached, and shook my head.

  “If you please, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll ask you to return the letter to him. And—and to thank him for his trouble.”

  She nodded. “He also asked to see your children. I told him that was your decision.”

  “No!” I cried, forgetting myself. I’d left Louisa and Jean-Pierre in our quarters, and I wanted to rush to them now to make certain they were safe. “That is, I do not wish him to see them, not at all.”

  Again Mrs. Tyler nodded, her approval clear, and I thought of how fortunate I’d been to land in her household. Most other white ladies would have taken the Colonel’s side against me.

  “You are certain of this, Mrs. Emmons?” she asked. “That you wish me to send him away?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said. “I am certain.”

  And I was.

  Mrs. Burr

  CHAPTER 26

  Philadelphia

  July 1, 1804

  I took one last look around the kitchen to make sure everything was as it should be before I closed and bolted the door for the night. It was well past midnight now, with the moon sliding lower into the summer night sky. I was always the last one awake in the house, the last one to my bed. That never changed. No matter how weary I was, I found my own peace in this time, when the house was still and quiet and one more day was done.

  Five years had passed since I’d left the Colonel. In truth, I still thought of him far more than I should, especially at night. This had been the hour when he’d most often sought my company, not only from what he’d called friendship, but also to share with me all his plans for his future.

  From a distance, I had followed the Colonel’s career through the newspapers. He’d climbed to the very top of the glory he’d always craved, but his fall had been precipitous. In 1800, he had indeed run for the presidency, tying Mr. Jefferson for that great prize. Only a lengthy process through Congress had finally granted the presidency to Mr. Jefferson, and by a single vote the Colonel was made vice president. Because of the acrimony of that election, however, it had become increasingly clear that he would not be endorsed again by the Democratic-Republicans for the next election. Earlier this year, he had tried one more attempt to recoup his political power, running for governor of New York, only to be roundly defeated there as well.

  Yet it wasn’t just the disenchantment of the voters that filled the newspapers. At only seventeen, Miss Burr had married a gentleman named Mr. Joseph Alston, who had taken her far away from New York to his home in South Carolina. I could imagine how lonely the Colonel must be without her, left behind and alone in his great echoing house. Perhaps that loneliness was why his name had been linked to charges of influence and bribery and every other kind of political intrigue, financial misdoings, and personal immorality. He was said to host debauched balls with prostitutes at Richmond Hill. There were even rumors that he was, at last, bankrupt.

  I reminded myself that this was what had finally forced me to leave him. Desperation can drive men to acts they’d not ordinarily consider, and the Colonel had clearly become a desperate man. I’d done what was right for myself and my children, and I’d been fortunate to escape when I had. He’d always promised to support my children. He hadn’t. Perhaps because of how I’d left, he’d never sent them or me so much as a single dollar, and now I doubted he could even if he wished to.

  Yet there was some small, shameful part of me that remembered other things: how tenderly he’d held Louisa when she’d been newly born, how we’d turned to each other for comfort in bad times and good, how his desire for me could make me overlook everything else that was wrong.

  One evening, I paused on the kitchen’s doorstep, gazing out at the small garden between the Tylers’ house and the next. A man’s shadow moved at the garden’s brick wall, and the gate squeaked open. Despite the July heat, the man was wearing a dark hat and long dark cloak that shrouded him into the night. Whoever he might be, he’d no business here at this hour, and I quickly began to retreat inside the house.

  “Mary, wait, please.” The man pulled off his hat and stepped into the moonlight, and I gasped aloud as the Colonel came toward me.

  I was shocked to see the toll his life had taken upon him during these last years. Though his eyes seemed as keen as ever, his once-handsome face was weary and drawn, with deep lines of melancholy carved on either side of his mouth. His hair was now more gray than black, receding higher upon his head. As if to balance that he now wore full side-whiskers nearly to his jaw, their stylishness in sharp contrast to his old-fashioned ribbon-tied queue.

  “You look well, Mary Emmons,” he said, his voice as deep and seductive as I remembered. “Clearly fate has treated you far better than it has treated me.”

  “Please, sir, you shouldn’t be here, not now,” I pleaded, keeping my voice low from fear I’d wake the rest of the household or, worse, Jean-Pierre and Louisa. “I have my position to consider. I cannot let Mrs. Tyler find me here with you.”

  “It’s not as easy as that,” he said. “You see, we must talk, you and I.”

  I knew too well where that could lead, and I drew back and into the house. He began to reach for me, to grab my arm or person the way he would have done without thinking in the past. But to my surprise, he stopped, his hand paused for a long moment in midair before he finally lowered it.

  “Please, Mary,” he said in a weary, urgent whisper. “I don’t have much time.”

  I should have closed the door against him then, but I didn’t.

  “What is it, sir?” I asked. “Are you in some difficulty?”

  He smiled. “How well you know me, Mary,” he said. “Perhaps better than anyone else alive.”

  That gave me a small anxious chill. “You haven’t answered me, sir. Are you in distress, or trouble?”

  “Nothing worth remark.” He made a slight, dismissive shrug that was, to me, the greatest of lies. “The uncertain wheel of fate has spun away from me at present, but it will come back. It always has before, hasn’t it?”

  “It has, sir,” I agreed softly. How could I do otherwise, when I saw the desperation so clearly in his eyes? Through his ambition and determination, he had always been able to push back against whatever ill fortune had stood in his path. But there was a melancholy about him now, a resignation that I had never before sensed in him.

  “You see why I return to you, Mary,” he said softly. “There is no artifice to you, no deceit. Even when you compel yourself to lie to me—as you so obviously have just now done—it is only from the most selfless kindness. Yet what have I done for you in return?”

  “Oh, sir, don’t,” I said, my eyes filling with tears.

  “No, Mary, you must listen,” he said. “Regard this as my pitiful confession. I’ve come to an unavoidable time of reckoning in my life. It’s all my own doing. I cannot fault, or credit, anyone other than myself. It grieved me mightily when you took our children and left me. I understood, of course. I’d given you every reason to go, and few to remain. Yet I’ve never blamed you, not for so much as an instant.”

  I listened in silence as his words pulled up old memories, old pain, and old joys, too. The first tear spilled from my eye and down my cheek and others soon followed. I let them fall unchecked, for they, too, were proof of what I’d shared with him, good and bad, and of what he was saying now.

  “Do the children ever speak of me?” he asked with a poignancy I’d never expected. “Five years is an eternity in a young person’s life.”

  “They do, sir,” I said. “It was hardest on Jean-Pierre.”

  He smiled again, thinking of our son. “He’ll be twelve soon, won’t he?”

  “This month, sir,” I said proudly. “He’s growing like a weed, too. Soon he’ll be taller than I. And Louisa—Louisa is sixteen, a woman in her own right with a good place in Mrs. Fisher’s household.”

  “I’ve not been much of a father, have I?” he said,
his regret palpable. “Let me give them my name now, if nothing else.”

  I gasped, the second time tonight. “What are you saying, sir?”

  “That is my reason for coming to you tonight, Mary,” he said. “I wish for us to be married. Now, tonight, if you’ll agree. You’ve never liked how our children falsely carried your husband’s name. Now they will have mine. I’ll expect nothing of you. You may continue your life here just as you are. Please, Mary. Let me do this.”

  “Why, sir?” I asked, stunned. “How could such a thing even be arranged at this hour?”

  “I told you,” he explained. “My time in Philadelphia is short. I’m due back in New York for some infernal celebration of the Fourth of July with the Society of Cincinnati. If I do not appear, my absence will be noticed.”

  “You’ve never cared before what others thought, sir,” I said. “You are in trouble, aren’t you?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted. “If—when—my fortunes change, I will do my best for our children. All I can offer them now is this.”

  In the shadows, his eyes were so dark as to be black, yet still I could see the rare truth in them. There was no doubt that our children would benefit by having his name, but this proposal signified more than that to him. He’d called it a reckoning. I saw it for what it was: his way to right past wrongs.

  For the briefest of moments, I thought of the love, true love, that every woman desires, and what I’d had long ago with Lucas Emmons. There was regard and respect between the Colonel and me. It had grown over the years like a tenacious vine of ivy that twines and increases against every attempt to stop it. I couldn’t deny that it remained there still, and I suspect he couldn’t, either. But love, such as should exist between a wife and husband, was not, and never had been.

  I couldn’t forget the attentions—the “friendship”—that he had first forced upon me. I remembered how he’d acted against my wishes and my will, and while his first wife had been dying, too. I remembered how he’d seemed cruel and selfish. I couldn’t deny that, either. Being who I was, I’d never had illusions, nor did I want them.

  Yet my children had come from this same friendship, the children I loved beyond reason and without any reservation. I’d always put them first in my life. Now I would again.

  But my decision wasn’t as simple as that. Until the Colonel had come to stand before me again tonight, I hadn’t realized how hard I’d tried to forget what he’d done to me. All the fear and pain that he had caused me, all the misery and hurt and resentment and shame, knotted into a burden that I’d carried in guilty silence for twenty years. Leaving him hadn’t been enough. I needed the salvation that would come with forgiveness. If this was his final chance, then it was likely mine as well.

  We were married by candlelight in the parlor of a house I did not know, by a minister I did not recognize. I signed the record; I have the paper still. As the short service rolled over us, I was the one who took the Colonel’s hand, my fingers slipping into his with the old familiarity. He glanced at me, surprised, then smiled.

  Oh, that smile.

  When it was done and we were man and wife, he smiled again.

  I didn’t. “I forgive you, sir,” I said quickly, before I lost my courage. “For everything. You—you have my forgiveness.”

  I watched his expression shift from bewilderment to comprehension, and finally to a kind of humbled acceptance.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Burr,” he said softly before he kissed me, the most chaste kiss we’d ever shared.

  I was crying again, but from peace, not sorrow. I thought once more of my grandmother’s chain, and how she’d claimed it was impossible to break one link free of the one before it. For more than half my life, I’d been bound to Aaron Burr, and now, after a ceremony that should have united us, I wasn’t.

  There was nothing more beyond that. He returned to New York, and I to our sleeping children. To this day, I have not seen him again.

  EPILOGUE

  Philadelphia

  July 1829

  I try to listen to the fine words that my son is saying, words that are leaving all around me in awe and wonder at his eloquence. I hope he hasn’t looked my way, as sons do with mothers, and seen from my face how far my thoughts had wandered from him.

  But because it is July, my thoughts will always wander back to the Colonel, and what he did on a sunny July morning in 1804. Everyone knows of it, even now. Dressed in black silk, he had himself rowed across the North River to New Jersey, and met General Hamilton on the dueling ground at Weehawken. The Colonel shot the General, and then returned to Richmond Hill to dine with a cousin as if nothing remarkable or untoward had occurred. General Hamilton died the next day, surrounded by his weeping friends and family.

  My husband (for so he was, though few ever knew it) was reviled as a villain, a demon, a coldhearted murderer who’d carefully planned to slay his rival. I don’t believe that. Instead, I believe he’d thought he’d be the one to die. Why else would he have come to me as he had, only days before the duel? Why else would he have made that one final gesture for our children? Why else would my forgiveness matter to him as it did?

  Yet it was the General who had died, and claimed his final revenge. By dying, he’d destroyed the Colonel, and condemned him to a life that is, for him, no life at all. He became an outcast. He was forced to flee New York, where creditors finally claimed his beautiful home at Richmond Hill. There was no further place for him in politics; how could there be?

  Still the Colonel tried his best to turn that wheel of fate to his advantage one more time. He went to the western frontier, and caused such mischief there that President Jefferson had the Colonel—his former friend and vice president!—arrested and tried for treason. Of course the Colonel slipped free, as he always did, though now he is called a traitor as well as a murderer.

  But the tragedy of his life grew darker still when his only grandson, the child Mrs. Alston had named after him, died of a fever. I grieved for her, poor lady. No mother deserves that sorrow. Soon after, Mrs. Alston herself was lost at sea while sailing to join her father in New York

  They say the Colonel refused to believe her dead. They say he stood at the docks, day after day, a lonely figure in black waiting for her ship that never came.

  They say he is cursed. They say he has outlived his wife and all his children, that he is alone, bitter, heartbroken, without comfort or solace.

  They say he got exactly what he deserved.

  I’ve heard that he has wandered farther still, to England, to France, to Germany. I’ve heard he has returned to New York, and that he even practices law again. I’ve heard that his health is poor, and his circumstances are so diminished that he lives in a boardinghouse.

  He has never written to me, nor do I expect him to. I do not see this as a fault, but rather one last gift, to spare me and our children the taint of his contact.

  Jean-Pierre and Louisa are not as generous toward him as I. They are known by his name, as he wished, but their father’s later actions have pushed aside whatever gentle memories of him they might possess. They know only part of my story, but enough of it that they resent him for how he treated me. I regret that, for when they were young and we lived together he showed them both much love and kindness.

  He would be proud of them, I think, of how they have prospered. Jean-Pierre is a barber by trade, with a shop of his own and a flourishing custom that caters only to white gentlemen, while Louisa is housekeeper to Mrs. Fisher, in one of the finest houses in Philadelphia. Both are married; both have given me grandchildren; both are respected by their friends and associates. I could not ask for more.

  Jean-Pierre’s voice is rising louder now, drawing me back to this day. He must be close to the end of his speech, and I must pay attention now. If I can recall the ending to be able to praise it to him later, then perhaps he won’t realize how much of the middle I didn’t hear. Freedom: yes, he always speaks of freedom, and I am proud of him for it.

  Be
cause his voice is so much like his father’s, I cannot help but think of the Colonel one more time. He was blessed to be born into a family of wealth and prominence, with every gift and grace a gentleman could possess, while I had nothing but myself. For many years, our lives were tied together, and there would have been few who envied me over him. Yet now we are both near the ends of our days, and I am the one who is blessed.

  I am the one who is truly free.

  AFTERWORD

  In the history of her times, Mary Emmons (c. 1760–1835) is only the faintest of whispers. You won’t find her (or her other name, Eugénie Beauharnais) included in any of the standard biographies of Aaron Burr. No known eighteenth-century documents, diaries, or letters mention her. No record of their marriage remains, nor of Aaron Burr acknowledging either her or their children, or offering them his financial support. She never sat for a portrait, and her appearance is a mystery.

  Yet she survived through her children, and in the memories of her descendants. There are only a handful of facts known of her, and even those are uncertain: that she was born in India, that she was brought from the West Indies to the American colonies by Major Jacques-Marc Prevost, that she had two children, Louisa Charlotte (c. 1788–1878) and Jean-Pierre (1792–1864), with Aaron Burr. At some point after the death of Burr’s first wife, Theodosia Prevost, he and Mary were married. She was called “colored” and “East Indian,” but both could have meant a variety of things in late-eighteenth-century America. By the 1790s, she was a free woman living in Philadelphia.

  And that’s it.

  Obviously, then, the majority of Mary’s story as I’ve chosen to tell it is my invention. Yet in a way, I didn’t just tell Mary’s story. Thousands of other women of color like her were brought to this country against their will, and yet despite unspeakable hardship, cruelty, and abuse they survived, and endured. Many of these women also inspired me, and their histories became woven into Mary’s narrative.