#and who else but aaron fuckin burr is the only good father figure in her life

[artigas]

My sisters are obsessed with Hamilton and constantly playing the album around the house, so lately I’ve been thinking about one of my fave and factual historical crossovers of all time. I doubt this will interest anyone but me, considering the thesis I spent a year writing, but there’s this line in The World was Wide Enough: Aaron Burr says “I had only one thought before the slaughter: / This man will not make an orphan of my daughter.” 

Here’s what gets to me about that line. If you watch the musical or know anything about this man’s life, you know that Burr was almost unbelievably followed by the specter of death. His parents and his caretakers died. When he finally has a stable guardian, the guy is an abusive piece of shit who constantly beats him. Burr tries repeatedly to run away from home. About 12 years into their marriage, Burr’s wife died of cancer. There is no mention of the senior Theodosia after Wait For It, so this line does a great job of revealing yet another heartbreaking loss in Burr’s life and instantly illuminates the stakes of the duel he’s started. 

So, anyways, here’s the bit that just appeals to me personally and probably literally nobody else. Burr kills Hamilton. His daughter goes un-orphaned, which would be some consolation for Burr, I’m sure, except she dies about eight years later, when a voyage going north from South Carolina is lost at sea. Years pass and Burr, who makes public his belief that his daughter died in the shipwreck, is plagued by false accounts that his daughter was discovered alive and well in a far off island or was violently killed by pirates or kidnapped for ransom, etc

Burr eventually leaves the United States. He has other children, yes, but the loss of Theodosia is obviously quite a significant one. So, here’s the bit that jumped out at me when I read a biography that had literally nothing to do with Aaron Burr (so imagine my surprise when he showed up like a guest star in the illustrious life of another historical figure I care a lot more about...). Burr goes to Europe for a while where he frequents the houses of thinkers like William Godwin, who already had a history of aligning himself with American revolutionaries and radicals (like my boy Thomas Paine). And as Burr becomes a more frequent guest, he develops a paternal bond with a young girl in the household who has found herself replaced by Godwin’s children from another mother, a disapproving and possibly violent woman who is so unlike the infamous proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft...

That’s right! Aaron Burr went on to become a needed, welcomed, and overall beloved father figure to Mary Shelley! The Mary Shelley! The very prodigy who would go onto to create the science fiction genre, the first non-religious creation story, the first apocalyptic novel, and, of course, the masterpiece about failed fatherhood, the loss of children, the insidious nature of valuing reputation over compassion, and the costs of monstrosity: Frankenstein!!