A Conversation between Dolley and Aaron

Dolley Madison in One of Her Famous Hats

It was Aaron Burr who introduced James Madison to Dolley. Madison was a painfully shy bachelor. Burr was his friend from college. And Dolley was that flirty widow lady who lived in the same boarding house with Burr. Burr was not interested in Dolley, but he thought that she would do his friend Jemmy Madison a world of good. So he set them up. He told Jemmy that Dolley was interested in him. He told Dolley that Mr. Madison had shown an interest in her. That's all it took!

In Theodosia and the Pirates: The Battle Against Britain, I extrapolate from these well know facts about the first lady who loved hats to create a meeting between Aaron Burr and Dolley Madison right after the end of the War of 1812.

Excerpt from Theodosia and the Pirates

A milliners shop would have been just the place to find Dolley, Everyone knew of her fascination with head gear.

Excerpt from Theodosia and the Pirates

The letter from Jean Laffite to James Madison  did not meet with much better success than the letter from Theodosia to Dolley, pleading on behalf of her exiled father.

Excerpt from Theodosia and the Pirates

Aaron Burr may or may not have spoken to James Madison on behalf of Jean Laffite. But this small snippet of a conversation between Aaron and Dolley rings true. What else would they have said to each other?

The Declaration of Independence Through Theodosia's Eyes

The Declaration of Independence is one of the founding documents of the American republic. But it is also Thomas Jefferson's lasting legacy as an individual. Despite the many signatures at the bottom of the document, everyone knows that this is Jefferson's literary masterpiece.

Jean Laffite was a very big fan of Thomas Jefferson. Theodosia Burr despised him. Their contrasting views of the man and of his words and deeds are a big part of the conflict in Theodosia and the Pirates. 

When Theodosia and Jean first meet, the following exchange sets the stage for all other encounters that concern the virtue of Thomas Jefferson.

This fourth of July, if you are looking for a fresh new perspective on Jefferson's legacy and his literary oeuvre, the Declaration of Independence, you might want to consider Theodosia and the Pirates. It deals with issues of high interest to American patriots.

Do You Have to Be at Home to Homeschool?

I was reading a blog the other day in which a mother who devoted her entire day to homeschooling her two boys felt overwhelmed, and she did not seem to be able to accomplish anything else in her life.

I thought back to the time when I was home schooled by my own father, from age thirteen to age sixteen. My father did not stay home to homeschool me. He continued to work. My mother was the one who stayed at home and prepared the meals and made sure that the household ran smoothly. But my mother was not my teacher. She did  not supervise my lessons or grade them or do anything that pertained to my school work. She did prepare my lunch, and she took care of my much younger brother all day. But my father was the headmaster of our school, and he taught all the classes, except for English. Because he was not a native speaker of English, he delegated that task to an English teacher who came by once a week.

                                                     Me in my home school T-shirt
                                                     Our school was named after the Israeli poet

Once a week, on Sunday, my father would have a long teaching session with me. Sometimes he was quite frustrated with my lack of talent in mathematics. Sometimes I was quite frustrated by his uncompromising teaching method that did not adapt to my limitations. But even though I did not accomplish everything he had hoped for me, the homeschooling was not a complete failure, as I was able to gain knowledge of history and languages and literature that is far greater than most American students get in high school. At sixteen, I began college.

Whatever regrets my father may have had about the homeschooling experiment, his entire self-worth was not tied into it, as he never gave up his life's work to engage in it, and he continued working on many other projects, both at his place of employment and at home, while he was also running our little home school. He was not so overwhelmed that everything else fell by the wayside. And as a result, I also did not see him as exclusively my teacher or caretaker. In fact, even when he was my only teacher, he was never my babysitter.

I got to know my father as a person, and I did not judge him solely on his success or failure as a teacher -- or as a parent. I was very much aware of his other accomplishments

                                          My father and I at the airport with one of his planes
                                          Aza, our dog, is careful as she approaches.

The same thing, I believe, was true of the relationship of Theodosia Burr with her father.

http://www.historiaobscura.com/aaron-burr-as-a-father/

Burr directed Theodosia's studies while serving in the Senate and was always correcting her compositions, even from a distance. However, his duties as a father did not keep him from following other pursuits and having a career of his own.  He was not so overwhelmed by directing his daughter's studies that he could accomplish nothing else.

One of the problems with today's conception of homeschooling is that it attempts to replace the public schools, and the public schools keep students occupied all day long, because one of their main functions is to babysit children, replacing the stay at home mother or nanny, more so than the tutor or the father who directs a child's studies while doing something else, too.

Parents do not have to be nannies in order to be good parents. Those who instruct their children do not have to stay home, and even if they do stay home, they can follow other pursuits. A teacher, to be a good teacher, does not have to keep a child occupied all day long. Even a mother who stays home is entitled to some time to herself. But in order to let the mother have that time, you also need to loosen the reins on the children. They need to have some free time, too.

The Grandmother Behind the Man

Today is National Grandparents' Day. Of course, most people have grandparents, and family history, and ways in which the ancestral story shapes their development. But not everybody gets to meet every one of his grandparents. Theodosia, for instance, met neither of her paternal grandparents, because they were dead by the time that her father was two.

Aaron Burr, Sr. was the second president of Princeton University, back when it was not even called Princeton.  Burr was a theologian knowledgeable in the classics. It was his erudition, rather than his piety, that somehow was passed down to Theodosia, through her father,

Theodosia's grandmother, Esther Edwards Burr, left behind a Journal, the better for us to know her.

These were absent grandparents who still left quite a mark on the granddaughter who never got to meet them. But for Jean Laffite, who lost his mother as an infant, his grandmother was not a forgotten memory or a series of letters on a page. His mother having died shortly after he was born, Zora Nadrimal, Jean Laffite's grandmother, served him in place of a mother. It was she who taught him to read and to write (in Spanish) and who oversaw all his first lessons. She also instilled in him the desire to avenge the death of his grandfather at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

Jean Laffite inscribed one of his family bibles with the words: "I owe all my ingenuity to the great intuition of my grandmother..." They say that behind every great man is a woman. But it's not often that this woman turns out to be his grandmother!

Property Rights, Education and Suffrage

Somebody said to me yesterday:

Every advance in our culture that you take for granted was protested and fought by conservatives. As a woman, can you vote? Own property in your own name? Attend higher education? Become a doctor or lawyer? Have bank accounts or investments in your name? Serve in the military? Serve in government? 

That person was a "progressive," and he would like to attribute any rights that anybody has to the agitation of people like himself. But he is wrong. Progress does not necessarily happen in a straight line progression. Sometimes as some rights are gained, other rights are lost. Trying to imagine what our life would be like in an earlier historical period depends very much on who we might have been, because different people during the same period find themselves in situations that are as different as night from day.

Of course, we could always imagine that we might have been wealthy and prosperous and have belonged to the ruling class, and a lot of historical fantasies are based on that. What would it have been like to be Queen Elizabeth the First? How would we have handled that kind of power? Even though most women of her day and age were uneducated, without property or a say in their government, this woman was not only highly educated but a successful ruler of men.

Marie Laveau
by Frank Schneider

Other fantasies are exercises in self-subjugation and humiliation. What would it be like to be a slave girl on a plantation with a very harsh and inhumane master? How could we maintain our human dignity while having so little control over our own persons? Would it be possible?

But most people's lives, during whatever period they happen to live in, do not fall into either extreme. They are not entirely helpless and without political and economic power. And they are also not rich or royalty or commanders of great armies and fleets. In Theodosia and the Pirates, I explored some of the in-between spaces. I described middle class people of different ethnic groups with varying degrees of education, property ownership and power.

Do you imagine that during a time when the insititution of slavery was intact every black woman was powerless, enslaved and not a property owner? Would it surprise you to know that there were many eminent free, property owning, business-running, influential women of color living in the 19th century prior to the emancipation proclamation? Do you think they waited helplessly for Abraham Lincoln to come and free them?

Take Marie Laveau, for instance:

http://www.voodoomuseum.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=18

She was not only free, she was born free! Both her parents were free, and her children were born free. She owned property. She ran businesses. She was wealthy and influential. Her power exceeded that of many white men and women of her time. But most importantly, she was an individual. Her life, like the life of any person during any period, was shaped by her own decisions, within the context of the society in which she lived. You or I placed into her shoes might not have fared as well.

I didn't write about Marie Laveau in Theodosia and the Pirates, but I did include Marie Villard as a supporting character. Marie Villard was not nearly as powerful or influential as Marie Laveau, but she, too, was a woman of color who was free, owned property and enjoyed a relationship of plaçage with a relatively important man: Pierre Laffite. Plaçage guaranteed Marie the ownership of a home of her own and the acknowledgement of her children. It was better than marriage. It left Marie free, while guaranteeing her financial and social security. And all because miscegenation laws did not allow for legal marriage between races.

This is one of the ironies of anarchy versus lawful living: oftentimes the contractual agreements arrived at by free people to get around a law that will not allow them to do something can be much more fair than the legal thing they weren't allowed to do. If Marie Villard had married Pierre, she might not have been able to own property and be financially independent. But because she could not marry him, she was able to negotiate what amounts to a very nice settlement that provided for herself and her children.

A white woman, either married to or having an affair with a white man, found herself under quite a different situation. Theodosia Burr did not own property. She did not run a business. She was highly educated, but in many ways helpless to determine her own fate.

But even the question of education is a complicated one. Before mandatory state-run education was instituted, just how much of an education anybody got was very much dependent on who was the head of the household and how highly that person valued education. Aaron Burr saw to it that his daughter, Theodosia, was better educated than many men of her day. He also educated his slaves.

But just in case you think this was a complete aberration on Burr's part, please consider that his own mother, Esther Edwards Burr, the daughter of the preacher Jonathan Edwards, was also highly educated. Her diary reveals a witty, fluent and expressive writer. If conservatism is to be equated with keeping women in the dark, why was Esther Edwards better educated than most young high school students today of either gender?

These are complex issues. Education, property ownership and  the right to vote do  not mean anything, unless they are seen in the context of the society in which they arise and the personal abilities of the individual who receives them. We are not all better off because of universal suffrage, universal education and the emancipation proclamation. Not all black people were slaves. Not all women were illiterate or lacking in property rights before women's lib. Not all gained by the change in society. Having free education available actually makes it harder for some to educate their children than it was before this "right" was granted to all.

There is an ebb and flow to all things in human affairs. We take two steps forward and three steps back. Things do not always get better, there is not just one side to every argument, and looking into the lives of many different people both in the past and the present will show you how much progress we really are making. That's why I think historical fiction is worth exploring.