The Disappearance of Theodosia Burr

A tale of tragedy, pirates, and ghosts

Our first post on Substack – hope you enjoy enough to want more!

Recently, I took part in a seminar on presidential power and the Constitution with 17 American history teachers. One teacher told a joke about Shays' Rebellion, and we all laughed. “Yep, I'm with my peeps today,” I thought.

You see, I have always loved American history. I blame my dad's twin sister, who we called Aunt Wiz. Aunt Wiz was unmarried, living in Greensboro, NC, when my sisters and I were kids. I learned a lot from spending weekends with Aunt Wiz. I learned you don't run barefoot in a backyard populated by sweet gum trees, you can make a great toy from dry beans stitched into a small pouch, and you can learn a lot about history by touring historic parks.

Aunt Wiz took me to Guilford Courthouse Battlefield Park every time I asked. We drove out Battleground Blvd, crossed Cornwallis, and parked close to the equestrian statue of Nathanael Greene. That statue – huge to a small boy of five or six — awed me. "What a hero he must have been to get a statue like that," I thought.

I still believe there are heroes in American history. Yet, a lifetime of study has taught me that the stories of the American people run the whole human gamut – from the tragic to the sublime. It's the stories that are important. The stories large and small comprise the entire history of America. Stories of the rich and famous, the poor and oppressed, the honest and the corrupt, the religious fanatic, the fanatical atheist, the John Bircher and the socialist. I want to know them all. I want to know more American history stories and stories of the American people on the day I die than any other day.

In a perfect world, we would gather in a café and trade our favorite stories. In this imperfect world, we can use the power of the internet to share our tales and the tales of others.

So, I invite you to my virtual café, The American History Café. Grab your favorite beverage, settle in, and read a story about our nation's past. We will publish twice a month. If you have a suggestion for a good story, send it to baxterhistorycafe@gmail.com.

Hope you enjoy the first story. It's my favorite!

Fans of the Broadway musical Hamilton are familiar with Aaron Burr, vice-president of the United States during Thomas Jefferson’s administration and bitter political rival to both Jefferson and Hamilton. His famous duel with Alexander Hamilton resulted in Hamilton’s death and the end of Burr’s political career in 1804. Later, Jefferson accused him of treason, but he was acquitted in a federal trial in Richmond, VA.

Burr’s only child, Theodosia Burr Alston, is briefly mentioned in Hamilton in the song “Dear Theodosia.” What fans of the musical may not know, however, is just how tragic Theodosia’s life was—mirroring that of her father.

Burr's daughter Theodosia disappeared at sea in January 1813. What happened to her and the ship on which she was a passenger remains a mystery. The mystery has fascinated me since I first heard the tale from my high school history teacher, Mrs. Hazel Flack. It's a dramatic story of familial love, conspiracy, and even piracy.

On the last day of December in 1812, Theodosia Burr Alston, then South Carolina's First Lady, left Georgetown, SC, on a small schooner named The Patriot. She was sailing to New York to visit her father for the first time in several years. It was a trip expected to take six days. When The Patriot failed to arrive weeks after it was due, Burr, and his son-in-law South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston, assumed the ship had gone down in a winter storm and that all aboard had drowned.

In the following decades, sensational stories about The Patriot and the fate of its crew and passengers made headlines. Several former pirates swore on their deathbeds that they participated in stopping the schooner and forcing its passengers to walk the plank. Two men claimed they had murdered Theodosia! Others claimed she was held captive by pirates for the rest of her life. One legend claims that her ghost stalks the Outer Banks of North Carolina, still searching for her father.

The mystery of Theodosia and The Patriot took a strange turn in 1869, when a North Carolina physician, Dr. William Poole, treated a woman in Nags Head while vacationing on the Outer Banks. She told Poole that her only valuable possession was a portrait of a young woman her first husband took from a wrecked ship during the War of 1812. She gave Poole the unsigned portrait as payment for his services.

Dr. Poole knew about Theodosia's disappearance. He knew that the Burr family maintained that The Patriot went down in a storm, but that was never proven. He also knew there was no proof of the sensational claims of pirates and ghosts. Poole became convinced that the portrait the elderly woman gave him was a portrait of Aaron Burr's long-lost daughter, Theodosia.

I told Theodosia's story many years ago to my son's eighth-grade class. I challenged the students to think of questions historians would ask when investigating what happened to Theodosia and whether the woman in the Nags Head Portrait was really her. Questions like: How do we know if the British stopped The Patriot? Were storms off the Carolinas coast in 1813 documented? Who might have painted the portrait? Only a few early 19th-century artists had the talent to do so.

Historians have documented a winter storm off the North Carolina coast in January 1813. Yet, ships' logs from vessels patrolling those waters in 1813 do not record The Patriot being stopped by the British Royal Navy. Historians have suggested that one or two artists may have visited Charleston, SC, around the time a portrait of Theodosia would have been completed for her to take to her father as a gift. Speculation centers on John Vanderlyn as the most likely candidate. Still, no one knows whether the Nags Head Portrait is Theodosia. It now belongs to the Walpole Museum at Yale University and to the annals of unsolved mysteries that make American history so fascinating.

Theodosia Burr Alston's only child, Aaron Burr Alston died in June of 1812, just months before his mother disappeared. Aaron Burr’s only grandchild is buried in what is now Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC. Brookgreen's property was once owned by Theodosia's in-laws, the Alstons. You can read more about her life in Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy by Richard N. Cote.

A previous version of this column appeared on teachingamericanhistory.org blog: We the Teachers blog on April 22, 2021.