Theodosia had been married to the governor of South Carolina at the time. She boarded the schooner Patriot to make a quick run up to New York to visit dad, and neither she nor the Patriot was ever seen again.
Years later, at a dinner party in London, a US official met the British admiral who had been blockading the US coast at the time. He said that he’d stopped the Patriot on New Year’s Day, 1813, and allowed them to pass through, but that a major storm had hit that same night, and scattered his fleet. He believed that the Patriot went down in the storm. In fact, the governor of South Carolina had actually written a NOTE asking any British ships that stopped them to please allow them to pass. (and also explaining that the dog ate their homework, no doubt). The Admiral said he’d actually seen that note, and honored it (!).
So it sounds pretty plausible that they were just lost in a storm, but there were other stories, mostly deathbed confessions years later, by supposed pirates who claimed to have caught the ship themselves, and keelhauled everybody, or made them walk the plank, or some such. But that may not mean much. When famous people are involved, there are always people wanting to hitch themselves to their star, even at the cost of incriminating themselves. Show me a confessor willing to go to prison for it and we might have something.
The only alternate story that was somewhat plausible came about a half century later, when a portrait of an apparent society lady was found by a doctor in a shack on the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina. In those days, North Carolina was famous for land pirates. (What are land pirates?) Unlike regular pirates, who go to sea and look for ships to plunder, land pirates were lazy stay-at-homes, who would just walk a burro with a lantern on its back up and down the beach during a storm. Ships at sea would mistake the light for a ship safe at harbor, come in close, and get grounded on the shoals, where the land pirates would then plunder it.
The lady who owned the portrait said that her first husband had found it on a wrecked ship during the War of 1812, which sounds a little fishy. (WHO wrecked it, hmm???) She gave it to the doctor in payment for his services. The doctor believed it was Theodosia Burr, and that the portrait must be one she’d had made to take to Aaron as a Christmas present. He contacted the family, but unfortunately, by that time, there was only one person left who had ever met Theodosia, and couldn’t swear exactly what she looked like in 1812. There were earlier portraits of her which may or may not have been the same person as in the portrait the doctor found.
There haven’t been any new developments in this case since I first read about it, and it’s hard to imagine what there could be, short of actually finding the ship on the bottom of the ocean. About the only new thing I’ve since learned about this case is that the portrait is now in the Yale Library… And the fact that Theodosia Burr and Joseph Alston are the first recorded couple to have honeymooned at Niagara Falls (!)… Oh yes, and that silent film star Theda Bara (Real Name: Theodosia Burr Goodman) was named after her. There was a book put out in 2002, called “Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy”, which I might read some day if I thought I could resist the urge to just skip right to the last chapters. She is an interesting historical character even without the mystery. She seems to have been brought up as Aaron Burr’s attempt to create his own ubermensch.
To me, the moral of this story is that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. That British Admiral caught an enemy ship containing the wife of a US State governor, but decided to be a nice guy about it, and let them go on their way. Had he been a jerk and arrested them, as he had the power to do, they’d probably have all survived. It’s just too bad the governor himself wasn’t with Theodosia on that trip. Maybe the Admiral wouldn’t have been so nice in that case. But that wasn’t possible, as state law forbade him from leaving South Carolina as long as he was in office.
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