Threads of Grey and Gold

“Learn yourself the habit of adhering vigorously to the rules you lay down for yourself. I will come for you about eleven o’clock on Saturday. Hurry the making of your gown, and also your redingcote. You will go with me some day next week to dine at the Marquis Fayette. Adieu, my dear daughter,

“Yours affectionately,“Th. Jefferson”

Mrs. Jefferson’s concern for her husband, the loss of her children, and the weary round of domestic duties at last told upon her strong constitution.

After the birth of her sixth child, Lucy Elizabeth, she sank rapidly, until at last it was plain to every one, except the distracted husband, that she could never recover.

Finally the blow fell. His daughter Martha wrote of it as follows:

“As a nurse no female ever had more tenderness or anxiety. He nursed my poor mother in turn with Aunt Carr, and her own sister – sitting up with her and administering her medicines and drink to the last.

“When at last he left his room, three weeks after my mother’s death, he rode out, and from that time, he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain.”

Shortly afterward he received the appointment of Plenipotentiary to Europe, to be associated with Franklin and Adams in negotiating peace. He had twice refused the same appointment, as he had promised his wife that he would never again enter public life, as long as she lived.

Columbia

She comes along old Ocean’s trackless way —A warrior scenting conflict from afarAnd fearing not defeat nor battle-scarNor all the might of wind and dashing spray;Her foaming path to triumph none may stayFor in the East, there shines her morning star;She feels her strength in every shining sparAs one who grasps his sword and waits for day.Columbia, Defender! dost thou hear?The clarion challenge sweeps the seaAnd straight toward the lightship doth she steer,Her steadfast pulses sounding jubilee;Arise, Defender! for thy way is clearAnd all thy country’s heart goes out to thee.

The Story of a Daughter’s Love

Aaron Burr was past-master of what Whistler calls “the gentle art of making enemies!” Probably no man ever lived who was more bitterly hated or more fiercely reviled. Even at this day, when he has been dead more than half a century, his memory is still assailed.

It is the popular impression that he was a villain. Perhaps he was, since “where there is smoke, there must be fire,” but happily we have no concern with the political part of his life. Whatever he may have been, and whatever dark deeds he may have done, there still remains a redeeming feature which no one has denied him – his love for his daughter, Theodosia.

One must remember that before Burr was two years old, his father, mother, and grandparents were all dead. He was reared by an uncle, Timothy Edwards, who doubtless did his best, but the odds were against the homeless child. Neither must we forget that he fought in the Revolution, bravely and well.

From his early years he was very attractive to women. He was handsome, distinguished, well dressed, and gifted in many ways. He was generous, ready at compliments and gallantry, and possessed an all-compelling charm.

In the autumn of 1777, his regiment was detailed for scouting duty in New Jersey, which was then the debatable ground between colonial and British armies. In January of 1779, Colonel Burr was given command of the “lines” in Westchester County, New York. It was at this time that he first met Mrs. Prevost, the widow of a British officer. She lived across the Hudson, some fifteen miles from shore, and the river was patrolled by the gunboats of the British, and the land by their sentries.

In spite of these difficulties, however, Burr managed to make two calls upon the lady, although they were both necessarily informal. He sent six of his trusted soldiers to a place on the Hudson, where there was an overhanging bank under which they moored a large boat, well supplied with blankets and buffalo robes. At nine o’clock in the evening he left White Plains on the smallest and swiftest horse he could procure, and when he reached the rendezvous, the horse was quickly bound and laid in the boat. Burr and the six troopers stepped in, and in half an hour they were across the ferry. The horse was lifted out, and unbound, and with a little rubbing he was again ready for duty.

Before midnight, Burr was at the house of his beloved, and at four in the morning he came back to the troopers awaiting him on the river bank, and the return trip was made in the same manner.

For a year and a half after leaving the army, Burr was an invalid, but in July, 1782, he married Mrs. Prevost. She was a widow with two sons, and was ten years older than her husband. Her health was delicate and she had a scar on her forehead, but her mind was finely cultivated and her manners charming.

Long after her death he said that if his manners were more graceful than those of some men, it was due to her influence, and that his wife was the truest woman, and most charming lady he had ever known.

It has been claimed by some that Burr’s married life was not a happy one, but there are many letters still extant which passed between them which seemed to prove the contrary. Before marriage he did not often write to her, but during his absences afterward, the fondest wife could have no reason to complain.

For instance:

“This morning came your truly welcome letter of Monday evening,” he wrote her at one time. “Where did it loiter so long?

“Nothing in my absence is so flattering to me as your health and cheerfulness. I then contemplate nothing so eagerly as my return, amuse myself with ideas of my own happiness, and dwell upon the sweet domestic joys which I fancy prepared for me.

“Nothing is so unfriendly to every species of enjoyment as melancholy. Gloom, however dressed, however caused, is incompatible with friendship. They cannot have place in the mind at the same time. It is the secret, the malignant foe of sentiment and love.”

He always wrote fondly of the children:

“My love to the smiling little girl,” he said in one letter. “I continually plan my return with childish impatience, and fancy a thousand incidents which are most interesting.”

After five years of married life the wife wrote him as follows:

“Your letters always afford me a singular satisfaction, a sensation entirely my own. This was peculiarly so. It wrought strangely upon my mind and spirits. My Aaron, it was replete with tenderness and with the most lively affection. I read and re-read till afraid I should get it by rote, and mingle it with common ideas.”

Soon after Burr entered politics, his wife developed cancer of the most virulent character. Everything that money or available skill could accomplish was done for her, but she died after a lingering and painful illness, in the spring of 1794.

They had lived together happily for twelve years, and he grieved for her deeply and sincerely. Yet the greatest and most absorbing passion of his life was for his daughter, Theodosia, who was named for her mother and was born in the first year of their marriage. When little Theodosia was first laid in her father’s arms, all that was best in him answered to her mute plea for his affection, and later, all that was best in him responded to her baby smile.

Between those two, there was ever the fullest confidence, never tarnished by doubt or mistrust, and when all the world forsook him, Theodosia, grown to womanhood, stood proudly by her father’s side and shared his blame as if it had been the highest honour.

When she was a year or two old, they moved to a large house at the corner of Cedar and Nassau Streets, in New York City. A large garden surrounded it and there were grapevines in the rear. Here the child grew strong and healthy, and laid the foundations of her girlish beauty and mature charm. When she was but three years old her mother wrote to the father, saying:

“Your dear little Theodosia cannot hear you spoken of without an apparent melancholy; insomuch, that her nurse is obliged to exert her invention to divert her, and myself avoid the mention of you in her presence. She was one whole day indifferent to everything but your name. Her attachment is not of a common nature.”

And again:

“Your dear little daughter seeks you twenty times a day, calls you to your meals, and will not suffer your chair to be filled by any of the family.”

The child was educated as if she had been a boy. She learned to read Latin and Greek fluently, and the accomplishments of her time were not neglected. When she was at school, the father wrote her regularly, and did not allow one of her letters to wait a day for its affectionate answer. He corrected her spelling and her grammar, instilled sound truths into her mind, and formed her habits. From this plastic clay, with inexpressible love and patient toil, he shaped his ideal woman.

She grew into a beautiful girl. Her features were much like her father’s. She was petite, graceful, plump, rosy, dignified, and gracious. In her manner, there was a calm assurance – the air of mastery over all situations – which she doubtless inherited from him.

When she was eighteen years of age, she married Joseph Alston of South Carolina, and, with much pain at parting from her father, she went there to live, after seeing him inaugurated as Jefferson’s Vice-President. His only consolation was her happiness, and when he returned to New York, he wrote her that he approached the old house as if it had been the sepulchre of all his friends. “Dreary, solitary, comfortless – it was no longer home.”

After her mother’s death, Theodosia had been the lady of his household and reigned at the head of his table. When he went back there was no loved face opposite him, and the chill and loneliness struck him to the heart.

For three years after her marriage, Theodosia was blissfully happy. A boy was born to her, and was named Aaron Burr Alston. The Vice-President visited them in the South and took his namesake unreservedly into his heart. “If I can see without prejudice,” he said, “there never was a finer boy.”

His last act before fighting the duel with Hamilton, was writing to his daughter – a happy, gay, care-free letter, giving no hint of what was impending. To her husband he wrote in a different strain, begging him to keep the event from her as long as possible, to make her happy always, and to encourage her in those habits of study which he himself had taught her.

She had parted from him with no other pain in her heart than the approaching separation. When they met again, he was a fugitive from justice, travel-stained from his long journey in an open canoe, indicted for murder in New York, and in New Jersey, although still President of the Senate, and Vice-President of the United States.

The girl’s heart ached bitterly, yet no word of censure escaped her lips, and she still held her head high. When his Mexican scheme was overthrown, Theodosia sat beside him at his trial, wearing her absolute faith, so that all the world might see.

When he was preparing for his flight to Europe, Theodosia was in New York, and they met by night, secretly, at the house of friends. Just before he sailed, they spent a whole night together, making the best of the little time that remained to them before the inevitable separation. Early in June they parted, little dreaming that they should see each other no more.

During the years of exile, Theodosia suffered no less than he. Mr. Alston had lost his faith in Aaron Burr, and the woman’s heart strained beneath the burden. Her health failed, her friends shrank from her, yet openly and bravely she clung to her father.

Public opinion showed no signs of relenting, and his evil genius followed him across the sea. He was expelled from England, and in Paris he was almost a prisoner. At one time he was obliged to live upon potatoes and dry bread, and his devoted daughter could not help him.

He was despised by his countrymen, but Theodosia’s adoring love never faltered. In one of her letters she said:

“I witness your extraordinary fortitude with new wonder at every misfortune. Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men – I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that a very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being, such enthusiasm does your character excite in me.

“When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My own vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near you, and yet, my pride is in our relationship. I had rather not live than not to be the daughter of such a man.”

She wrote to Mrs. Madison and asked her to intercede with the President for her father. The answer gave the required assurance, and she wrote to her father, urging him to go boldly to New York and resume the practice of his profession. “If worse comes to worst,” she wrote, “I will leave everything to suffer with you.”

He landed in Boston and went on to New York in May of 1812, where his reception was better than he had hoped, and where he soon had a lucrative practice. They planned for him to come South in the summer, and she was almost happy again, when her child died and her mother’s heart was broken.

She had borne much, and she never recovered from that last blow. Her health failed rapidly, and though she was too weak to undertake the trip, she insisted upon going to New York to see her father.

Thinking the voyage might prove beneficial, her husband reluctantly consented, and passage was engaged for her on a pilot-boat that had been out privateering, and had stopped for supplies before going on to New York.

The vessel sailed – and a storm swept the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida. It was supposed that the ship went down off Cape Hatteras, but forty years afterward, a sailor, who died in Texas, confessed on his death-bed that he was one of a crew of mutineers who took possession of the Patriot and forced the passengers, as well as the officers and men, to walk the plank. He professed to remember Mrs. Alston well, and said she was the last one who perished. He never forgot her look of despair as she stepped into the sea – with her head held high even in the face of death.

Among Theodosia’s papers was found a letter addressed to her husband, written at a time when she was weary of the struggle. On the envelope was written: “My Husband. To be delivered after my death. I wish this to be read immediately and before my burial.”

He never saw the letter, for he never had the courage to go through her papers, and after his death it was sent to her father. It came to him like a message from the grave:

“Let my father see my son, sometimes,” she had written. “Do not be unkind to him whom I have loved so much, I beseech of you. Burn all my papers except my father’s letters, which I beg you to return to him.”

A long time afterward, her father married Madame Jumel, a rich New York woman who was many years his junior, but the alliance was unfortunate, and was soon annulled. Through all the rest of his life, he never wholly gave up the hope that Theodosia might return. He clung fondly to the belief that she had been picked up by another ship, and some day would be brought back to him.

Day by day, he haunted the Battery, anxiously searching the faces of the incoming passengers, asking some of them for tidings of his daughter, and always believing that the next ship would bring her back.

He became a familiar figure, for he was almost always there – a bent, shrunken little man, white-haired, leaning heavily upon his cane, asking questions in a thin piping voice, and straining his dim eyes forever toward the unsounded waters, from whence the idol of his heart never came.

For out within those waters, cruel, changeless,She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea;A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.

The Sea-Voice

Beyond the sands I hear the sea-voice callingWith passion all but human in its pain,While from my eyes the bitter tears are falling,And all the summer land seems blind with rain;For out within those waters, cruel, changeless,She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea,A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.The tide comes in. The moonlight flood and gloryOf that unresting surge thrill earth with bliss,And I can hear the passionate sweet storyOf waves that waited round her for her kiss.Sweetheart, they love you; silent and unseeing,Old Ocean holds his court around you there,And while I reach out through the dark to find youHis fingers twine the sea-weed in your hair.The tide goes out and in the dawn’s new splendourThe dreams of dark first fade, then pass away,And I awake from visions soft and tenderTo face the shuddering agony of dayFor out within those waters, cruel, changeless,She sleeps, beyond all rage of earth or sea;A smile upon her dear lips, dumb, but waiting,And I – I hear the sea-voice calling me.

The Mystery of Randolph’s Courtship

It is said that in order to know a man, one must begin with his ancestors, and the truth of the saying is strikingly exemplified in the case of “John Randolph of Roanoke,” as he loved to write his name.

His contemporaries have told us what manner of man he was – fiery, excitable, of strong passions and strong will, capable of great bitterness, obstinate, revengeful, and extremely sensitive.

“I have been all my life,” he says, “the creature of impulse, the sport of chance, the victim of my own uncontrolled and uncontrollable sensations, and of a poetic temperament.”

He was sarcastic to a degree, proud, haughty, and subject to fits of Byronic despair and morbid gloom. For these traits we must look back to the Norman Conquest from which he traced his descent in an unbroken line, while, on the side of his maternal grandmother, he was the seventh in descent from Pocahontas, the Indian maiden who married John Rolfe.

The Indian blood was evident, even in his personal appearance. He was tall, slender, and dignified in his bearing; his hands were thin, his fingers long and bony; his face was dark, sallow, and wrinkled, oval in shape and seamed with lines by the inward conflict which forever raged in his soul. His chin was pointed but firm, and his lips were set; around his mouth were marked the tiny, almost imperceptible lines which mean cruelty. His nose was aquiline, his ears large at the top, tapering almost to a point at the lobe, and his forehead unusually high and broad. His hair was soft, and his skin, although dark, suffered from extreme sensitiveness.

“There is no accounting for thinness of skins in different animals, human, or brute [he once said]. Mine, I believe to be more tender than many infants of a month old. Indeed I have remarked in myself, from my earliest recollection, a delicacy or effeminacy of complexion, which but for a spice of the devil in my temper would have consigned me to the distaff or the needle.”

“A spice of the devil” is mild indeed, considering that before he was four years old he frequently swooned in fits of passion, and was restored to consciousness with difficulty.

His most striking feature was his eyes. They were deep, dark, and fiery, filled with passion and great sadness at the same time. “When he first entered an assembly of people,” said one who knew him, “they were the eyes of the eagle in search of his prey, darting about from place to place to see upon whom to light. When he was assailed they flashed fire and proclaimed a torrent of rage within.”

The voice of this great statesman was a rare gift:

“One might live a hundred years [says one,] and never hear another like it. The wonder was why the sweet tone of a woman was so harmoniously blended with that of a man. His very whisper could be distinguished above the ordinary tones of other men. His voice was so singularly clear, distinct, and melodious that it was a positive pleasure to hear him articulate anything.”

Such was the man who swayed the multitude at will, punished offenders with sarcasm and invective, inspired fear even in his equals, and loved and suffered more than any other prominent man of his generation.

He had many acquaintances, a few friends, and three loves – his mother, his brother, and the beautiful young woman who held his heart in the hollow of her hand, until the Gray Angel, taking pity, closed his eyes in the last sleep.

His mother, who was Frances Bland, married John Randolph in 1769, and John Randolph, of Roanoke, was their third son.

Tradition tells us of the unusual beauty of the mother —

“the high expanded forehead, the smooth arched brow; the brilliant dark eyes; the well defined nose; the full round laughing lips; the tall graceful figure, the beautiful dark hair; an open cheerful countenance – suffused with that deep, rich Oriental tint which never seems to fade, all of which made her the most beautiful and attractive woman of her age.”

She was a wife at sixteen, and at twenty-six a widow. Three years after the death of her husband, she married St. George Tucker, of Bermuda who proved to be a kind father to her children.

In the winter of 1781, Benedict Arnold, the traitor who had spread ruin through his native state, was sent to Virginia on an expedition of ravage. He landed at the mouth of the James, and advanced toward Petersburg. Matoax, Randolph’s home, was directly in the line of the invading army, so the family set out on a cold January morning, and at night entered the home of Benjamin Ward, Jr.

John Randolph was seven years old, and little Maria Ward had just passed her fifth birthday. The two children played together happily, and in the boy’s heart was sown the seed of that grand passion which dominated his life.

After a few days, the family went on to Bizarre, a large estate on both sides of the Appomattox, and here Mrs. Tucker and her sons spent the remainder of the year, while her husband joined General Greene’s army, and afterward, the force of Lafayette.

In 1788, John Randolph’s mother died, and his first grief swept over him in an overwhelming torrent. The boy of fifteen spent bitter nights, his face buried in the grass, sobbing over his mother’s grave. Years afterward, he wrote to a friend, “I am a fatalist. I am all but friendless. Only one human being ever knew me. She only knew me.”

He kept his mother’s portrait always in his room, and enshrined her in loving remembrance in his heart. He had never seen his father’s face to remember it distinctly, and for a long time he wore his miniature in his bosom. In 1796, his brother Richard died, and the unexpected blow crushed him to earth. More than thirty years afterward he wrote to his half-brother, Henry St. George Tucker, the following note:

“Dear Henry

“Our poor brother Richard was born in 1770. He would have been fifty-six years old the ninth of this month. I can no more.

”J. R. of R.”

At some time in his early manhood he came into close relationship with Maria Ward. She had been an attractive child, and had grown into a woman so beautiful that Lafayette said her equal could not be found in North America. Her hair was auburn, and hung in curls around her face; her skin was exquisitely fair; her eyes were dark and eloquent. Her mouth was well formed; she was slender, graceful, and coquettish, well-educated, and in every way, charming.

To this woman, John Randolph’s heart went out in passionate, adoring love. He might be bitter and sarcastic with others, but with her he was gentleness itself. Others might know him as a man of affairs, keen and logical, but to her he was only a lover.

Timid and hesitating at first, afraid perhaps of his fiery wooing, Miss Ward kept him for some time in suspense. All the treasures of his mind and soul were laid before her; that deep, eloquent voice which moved the multitude to tears at its master’s will was pleading with a woman for her love.

What wonder that she yielded at last and promised to marry him? Then for a time everything else was forgotten. The world lay before him to be conquered when he might choose. Nothing would be too great for him to accomplish – nothing impossible to that eager joyous soul enthroned at last upon the greatest heights of human happiness. And then – there was a change. He rode to her home one day, tying his horse outside as was his wont. A little later he strode out, shaking like an aspen, his face white in agony. He drew his knife from his pocket, cut the bridle of his horse, dug his spurs into the quivering sides, and was off like the wind. What battle was fought out on that wild ride is known only to John Randolph and his God. What torture that fiery soul went through, no human being can ever know. When he came back at night, he was so changed that no one dared to speak to him.