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. [Pg 67]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.

[Pg 67]

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 [Pg 68]the sepulchre of all his friends. “Dreary, solitary, comfortless—it was no longer home.”

[Pg 68]

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 [Pg 69]habits of study which he himself had taught her.

[Pg 69]

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 

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