Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/286

Rh Throughout the trial Mrs. Alston was at Richmond. Her presence there was a great help to Burr's cause. She was universally admired for her beauty, her ability and her blind faith in her father. Many believed in Aaron Burr because she believed in him. Luther Martin, her father's counsel, had the keenest admiration for the daughter of his client. "I find," wrote one statesman of this time, "that Luther Martin's idolatrous admiration of Mrs. Alston is as excessive as my own, as it is the medium of his blind attachment to her father."

Burr was acquitted, but popular feeling was so strong against him that he was forced to leave America. In the spring of 1808, the year after his trial, he sailed from New York, and his daughter, sick, sorrowful, but as true as ever, left her Carolina home and journeyed north to see him once more before he went, and to bid him good-bye. The night before his departure she spent with him at the house of a loyal friend. Father and daughter were both brave, and in the morning he parted from her and sailed away in the ship that was carrying him from all that he held most dear. The years of Burr's exile were sad years for his daughter. She realized with keen distress the bitterness of his position, and indeed she herself was made to feel some of the odium that was directed against him. She longed earnestly for his return and pleaded eloquently and pathetically with those in authority that her father might be allowed to come back to America. But when in the year 1812 he did come back to New York and his daughter started to join him there, the ship on which she had taken passage went down off Cape Hatteras and not a soul on board was saved. The father and husband waited in agonized expectancy, but at length came the news of her tragic fate. Thus Burr was left alone, but he did not complain. He was silent through his great sorrow. But there were those who remembered him in his last days, a solitary old man walking along the Battery and looking wistfully toward the horizon for ships. The look was a habit he had acquired while waiting for the ship which never brought his daughter.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland, February 6, 1785. She was the daughter of William Patterson, who came a poor boy from Ireland to Maryland, where he became a prominent merchant, and one of the wealthiest citizens. She was a beautiful girl of eighteen when she met Jerome Bonaparte at a social gathering in Baltimore, and despite the opposition of her father, a marriage was speedily arranged, the ceremony taking place with all legal formalities on Christmas Eve, 1803, when the groom had just passed his nineteenth birthday. Mr. Patterson's fears that the marriage would be offensive to the First Consul proved to be well grounded. Attempts were unsuccessfully made, through Robert R. Livingston, the American minister at Paris, and through influential persons, to reconcile Napoleon to his brother's marriage. He ordered Jerome to return immediately to France, "leaving in America, the young person in question." Jerome refused to obey and a year was spent in travel and in residence at Baltimore. Meanwhile, Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor, and in 1805 Jerome, hoping for a reconciliation with his brother, took his wife to Europe. They reached Lisbon in safety, but there Jerome was arrested and taken to France, his