Part 36

"which first inspired me with a respect for that of your sex, and with some regret I confess, that the ideas you have often heard me express in favor of female intellectual power are founded in what I have imagined more than in what I have seen, except in you."

In those days an educated woman was among the rarest of rarities. The wives of many of our most renowned revolutionary leaders were surprisingly illiterate. Except the noble wife of John Adams, whose letters form so agreeable an oasis in the published correspondence of the time, it would be difficult to mention the name of one lady of the revolutionary period who could have been a companion to the mind of a man of culture. Mrs. Burr, on the contrary, was the equal of her husband in literary discernment, and his superior in moral judgment. Her remarks, in her letters to her husband, upon the popular authors of the day, Chesterfield, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others, show that she could correct as well as sympathize with her husband's taste. She relished all of Chesterfield except the "indulgence," which Burr thought essential. She had a weakness for Rousseau, but was not deluded by his sentimentality. She enjoyed Gibbon without stumbling at his fifteenth and sixteenth-chapters. The home of Theodosia presents to us a pleasing scene of virtuous industry. The master of the house, always an indomitable worker, was in the full tide of a successful career at the bar. His two step-sons were employed in his office, and one of them frequently accompanied him in his journeys to distant courts as clerk or amanuensis. No father could have been more generous or more thoughtful than he was for these fatherless youths, and they appeared to have cherished for him the liveliest affection. Mrs. Burr shared in the labors of the office during the absence of her lord. All the affairs of this happy family moved in harmony, for love presided at their board, inspired their exertions, and made them one. One circumstance alone interrupted their felicity, and that was the frequent absence of Burr from home on business at country courts; but even these journeys served to call forth from all the family the warmest effusions of affection.

"What language can express the joy, the gratitude of Theodosia!" writes Mrs. Burr to her absent husband, in the fifth year of their marriage.

"Stage after stage without a line. Thy usual punctuality gave room for every fear; various conjectures filled every breast. One of our sons was to have departed to-day in quest of the best of friends and fathers. This morning we waited the stage with impatience. Shrouder went frequently before it arrived; at length returned--no letter. We were struck dumb with disappointment. Barton [eldest son] set out to inquire who were the passengers; in a very few minutes returned exulting--a packet worth the treasures of the Universe. Joy brightened every face; all expressed their past anxieties, their present happiness. To enjoy was the first result. Each made choice of what they could best relish. Porter, sweet wine, chocolate, and sweetmeats made the most delightful repast that could be enjoyed without thee. The servants were made to feel their lord was well; are at this instant toasting his health and bounty. While the boys are obeying thy dear commands, thy Theodosia flies to speak her heartfelt joy--her Aaron safe--mistress of the heart she adores, can she ask more? Has Heaven more to grant?"

What a pleasing picture of a happy family circle is this, and how rarely are the perils of a second marriage so completely overcome! It was in such a warm and pleasant nest as this that Theodosia Burr passed the years of her childhood.

Charles Lamb used to say that babies had no right to our regard merely as babies, but that every child had a character of its own by which it must stand or fall in the esteem of disinterested observers. Theodosia was a beautiful and forward child, formed to be the pet and pride of a household. "Your dear little Theo," wrote her mother in her third year, "grows the most engaging child you ever saw. It is impossible to see her with indifference." From her earliest years she exhibited that singular fondness for her father which afterward became the ruling passion of her life, and which was to undergo the severest tests that filial affection has ever known. When she was but three years of age her mother would write: "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." And again:

"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 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."

Here was an inviting opportunity for developing an engaging infant into that monstrous thing, a spoiled child. She was an only daughter in a family of which all the members but herself were adults, and the head of which was among the busiest of men.

But Aaron Burr, amidst all the toils of his profession, and in spite of the distractions of political strife, made the education of his daughter the darling object of his existence. Hunters tell us that pointers and hounds inherit the instinct which renders them such valuable allies in the pursuit of game; so that the offspring of a trained dog acquires the arts of the chase with very little instruction. Burr's father was one of the most zealous and skillful of schoolmasters, and from him he appears to have derived that pedagogic cast of character which led him, all his life, to take so much interest in the training of protégés. There was never a time in his whole career when he had not some youth upon his hands to whose education he was devoted. His system of training, with many excellent points, was radically defective. Its defects are sufficiently indicated when we say that It was pagan, not Christian. Plato, Socrates, Cato, and Cicero might have pronounced it good and sufficient: St. John, St. Augustine, and all the Christian host would have lamented it as fatally defective. But if Burr educated his child as though she were a Roman girl, her mother was with her during the first eleven years of her life, to supply, in some degree, what was wanting in the instructions of her father.

Burr was a stoic. He cultivated hardness. Fortitude and fidelity were his favorite virtues. The seal which he used in his correspondence with his intimate friends, and with them only, was descriptive of his character and prophetic of his destiny. It was a Rock, solitary in the midst of a tempestuous ocean, and bore the inscription, "Nee flatu nee fluctu"--neither by wind nor by wave. It was his principle to steel himself against the inevitable evils of life. If we were asked to select from his writings the sentence which contains most of his characteristic way of thinking, it would be one which he wrote in his twenty-fourth year to his future wife: "That mind is truly great which can bear with equanimity the trifling and unavoidable vexations of life, and be affected only by those which determine our substantial bliss." He utterly despised all complaining, even of the greatest calamities. He even experienced a kind of proud pleasure in enduring the fierce obloquy of his later years. One day, near the close of his life, when a friend had told him of some new scandal respecting his moral conduct, he said: "That's right, my child, tell me what they say. I like to know what the public say of me,--the great public!" Such words he would utter without the slightest bitterness, speaking of the great public as a humorous old grandfather might of a wayward, foolish, good little child.

So, at the dawn of a career which promised nothing but glory and prosperity, surrounded by all the appliances of ease and pleasure, he was solicitous to teach his child to do and to endure. He would have her accustomed to sleep alone, and to go about the house in the dark. Her breakfast was of bread and milk. He was resolute in exacting the less agreeable tasks, such as arithmetic. He insisted upon regularity of hours. Upon going away upon a journey he would leave written orders for her tutors, detailing the employments of each day; and, during his absence, a chief topic of his letters was the lessons of the children. Children,--for, that his Theodosia might have the advantage of a companion in her studies, he adopted the little Natalie, a French child, whom he reared to womanhood in his house. "The letters of our dear children," he would write,

"are a feast. To hear that they are employed, that no time is absolutely wasted, is the most flattering of anything that could be told me of them. It insures their affection, or is the best evidence of it. It insures in its consequences everything I am ambitious of in them. Endeavor to preserve regularity of hours; it conduces exceedingly to industry."

And his wife would answer:

"I really believe, my dear, that few parents can boast of children whose minds are so prone to virtue. I see the reward of our assiduity with inexpressible delight, with a gratitude few experience. My Aaron, they have grateful hearts."

Or thus: "Theo [seven years old] ciphers from five in the morning until eight, and also the same hours in the evening. This prevents our riding at those hours."

When Theodosia was ten years old, Mary Wollstonecraft's eloquent little book, "A Vindication of the Eights of Woman," fell into Burr's hands. He was so powerfully struck by it that he sat up nearly all night reading it. He showed it to all his friends. "Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice," he wrote, "that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered, or would allow the merit of this work?" The work, indeed, was fifty years in advance of the time; for it anticipated all that is rational in the opinions respecting the position and education of women which are now held by the ladies who are stigmatized as the Strong-minded, as well as by John Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other economists of the modern school. It demanded fair play for the understanding of women. It proclaimed the essential equality of the sexes. It denounced the awful libertinism of that age, and showed that the-weakness, the ignorance, the vanity, and the seclusion of women prepared them to become the tool and minion of bad men's lust. It criticised ably the educational system of Rousseau, and, with still more severity, the popular works of bishops and priests, who chiefly strove to inculcate an abject submission to man as the rightful lord of the sex. It demonstrated that the sole possibility of woman's elevation to the rank of man's equal and friend was in the cultivation of her mind, and in the thoughtful discharge of the duties of her lot. It is a really noble and brave little book, undeserving of the oblivion into which it has fallen. No intelligent woman, no wise parent with daughters to rear, could read it now without pleasure and advantage.

"Meekness," she says,

"may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship... A girl whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative Most of the women, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, have accidentally been allowed to run wild, as some of the elegant formers of the fair sex would insinuate Men have better tempers than women because they are occupied by pursuits that interest the head as well as the heart. I never knew a weak or ignorant person who had a good temper Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels, but to sink them below women? They are told that they are only like angels when they are young and beautiful; consequently it is their persons, not their virtues, that procure them this homage It is in vain to attempt to keep the heart pure unless the head is furnished with ideas Would ye, O my sisters, really possess modesty, ye must remember that the possession of virtue, of any denomination, is incompatible with ignorance and vanity! Ye must acquire that soberness of mind which the exercise of duties and the pursuit of knowledge alone inspire, or ye will still remain in a doubtful, dependent situation, and only be, loved while ye are fair! The downcast eye, the rosy blush, the retiring grace, are all proper in their season; but modesty being the child of reason cannot long exist with the sensibility that is not tempered by reflection.... With what disgust have I heard sensible women speak of the wearisome confinement which they endured at school. Not allowed, perhaps, to step out of one broad path in a superb garden, and obliged to pace, with steady deportment, stupidly backward and forward, holding up their heads and turning out their toes, with shoulders braced back, instead of bounding forward, as Nature directs to complete her own design, in the various attitudes so conducive to health. The pure animal spirits, which make both mind and body shoot out and unfold the tender blossoms of hope, are turned sour and vented in vain wishes or pert repinings, that contract the faculties and. spoil the temper; else they mount to the brain, and, sharpening the understanding before it gains proportionable strength, produce that pitiful cunning which disgracefully characterizes the female mind,--and, I fear, will ever characterize it while women remain the slaves of power."

In the spirit of this book Theodosia's education was conducted. Her mind had fair play. Her father took it for granted that she could learn what a boy of the same age could learn, and gave her precisely the advantages which he would have given a son. Besides the usual accomplishments, French, music, dancing, and riding, she learned to read Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucian, Homer, in the original. She appears to have read all of Terence and Lucian, a great part of Horace, all the Iliad, and large portions of the Odyssey. "Cursed effects," exclaimed her father once,

"of fashionable education, of which both sexes are the advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe, that women have souls."

How faithfully, how skilfully he labored to kindle and nourish the intelligence of his child his letters to her attest. He was never too busy to spare a half-hour in answering her letters. In a country court-room, in the Senate-chamber, he wrote her brief and sprightly notes, correcting her spelling, complimenting her style, reproving her indolence, praising her industry, commenting on her authors. Rigorous taskmaster as he was, he had a strong sense of the value of just commendation, and he continued to mingle praise very happily with reproof. A few sentences from his letters to her will serve to show his manner.

(In her tenth year.)--

"I rose up suddenly from the sofa, and rubbing my head, 'What book shall I buy for her?' said I to myself. 'She reads so much and so rapidly that it is not easy to find proper and amusing French books for her; and yet I am so flattered with her progress in that language that I am resolved she shall, at all events, be gratified. Indeed I owe it to her.' So, after walking once or twice briskly across the floor, I took my hat and sallied out, determined not to return till I had purchased something. It was not my first attempt. I went into one bookseller's shop after another. I found plenty of fairy tales and such nonsense, fit for the generality of children nine or ten years old. 'These,' said I, 'will never do. Her understanding begins to be above such things'; but I could see nothing that I would offer with pleasure to an intelligent, well-informed girl nine years old. I began to be discouraged. The hour of dining was come. 'But I will search a little longer,' I persevered. At last I found it. I found the very thing I sought. It is contained in two volumes octavo, handsomely bound, and with prints and registers. It is a work of fancy, but replete with instruction and amusement. I must present it with my own hand."

He advised her to keep a diary; and to give her an idea of what she should record, he wrote for her such a journal of one day as he should like to receive.

Plan of the Journal.--

"Learned 230 lines, which finished Horace. Heigh-ho for Terence and the Greek Grammar to-morrow. Practised two hours less thirty-five minutes, which I begged off. Hewlett (dancing-master) did not come. Began Gibbon last evening. I find he requires as much study and attention as Horace; so I shall not rank the reading of him among amusements. Skated an hour; fell twenty times, and find the advantage of a hard head. Ma better,--dined, with us at table, and is still sitting up and free from pain."

She was remiss in keeping her journal; remiss, too, in writing to her father, though he reminded her that he never let one of her letters remain unanswered a day. He reproved her sharply. "What!" said he,

"can neither affection nor civility induce you to devote to me the small portion of time which I have required? Are authority and compulsion then the only engines by which you can be moved? For shame, Theo. Do not give me reason to think so ill of you."