Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/284

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Women from the Time of Mary Washington
251


death. After that event she spent part of her time in Baltimore, when not visiting friends in other cities. She was married by the Reverend Edward Y. Buchanan in January, 1866, to Henry Elliott Johnston. They went to Cuba and spent a month or two, after which Mr. and Mrs. Johnston took up their residence in Baltimore in the beautiful home which Mr. Johnston had provided with great thoughtfulness, taste and liberality for his bride. Mrs. Johnston regained some of her former cheerfulness and brightness. She seemed very happy as a wife and mother. She had two sons and it seemed that her life was destined to be a happy one. But, alas, for human hope, on the 25th of March, 1881, her son, James Buchanan Johnston, died, and she was again overwhelmed with grief. A few years subsequently the second son died, and also Mr. Johnston, and Harriet Lane Johnston, widowed and childless came back to Washington to spend the remaining years of her life. She was the recipient of distinguished honors by the people of Washington, by whom she was greatly beloved. After her death in 1904 it was found that she had willed her residence in Washington, and endowed it, as a home for dependent women. She also left means to build and endow the National Cathedral School for Boys, at Washington, D. C.

THEODOSIA BURR.

Someone has said of this daughter of Aaron Burr: "With a great deal of wit, spirit and talent, and a face strikingly beautiful she inherited all that a daughter could inherit of a father's courage—she was a realization of her father's idea of a woman." And it is his love for this daughter, so tender and touching, that makes an appeal to our sympathy, however strong condemnation of his public acts may have been.

At the time of her birth in 1784, Burr was a successful young lawyer. Handsome, fascinating, of good family and considerable fortune, he might have aspired to the hand of a Clinton, a Livingston or a Van Rensselaer, but instead he had married a woman ten years his senior, neither rich nor pretty, and a widow with two sons. "The mother of my Theo," he was heard to say in the days when she of whom he spoke had been long dead, "was the best woman and finest lady I have ever known." It was, however, the general opinion that the coming of Theodosia, their only child, was the explanation of the success of the inexplicable marriage. It became Aaron Burr's great ambition to make of this daughter an intelligent and noble woman. One evening a volume entitled "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," by Mary Wollstonecraft, chanced to come under his notice and he sat up reading it until late in the night. In the spirit of that book he undertook the education of his daughter. He went on the principle that Theodosia was as clever and capable as a boy, and he gave her the same advantages as he would have given a son. This was an unusual principle in the days when Theodosia Burr was a girl, and in her education she may be said to be the first exponent of the college woman in America. Her father himself superintended her education even to the smallest details. From Philadelphia, where he was stationed as United States senator, he sent her fond letters of advice and criticism and at his request she sent him every week a journal of her doings and of her progress in learning.