Preserving the hair of a loved one after death was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, a tangible memento in the age before photographs. I’ve written other posts about the hair of Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, and George Washington. These people were well-loved by their family, friends, and descendants, and strands of their hair - whether clipped and saved during their lives or on their deathbeds - were treasured as relics, and doled out strand by strand to admirers long after their deaths.
But what if there were no grieving widows or children to cut that hair, or to wear the mourning jewelry designed to hold it? By the time that Aaron Burr died on September 14, 1836, he had outlived his first wife Theodosia Bartow Prevost Burr, their two sons and two daughters, and their sole grandson.
While the hair of Hamilton and Washington is kept in museums and historical societies all over the country, this pendant, above, is the only hair that I’ve encountered that belonged to Aaron Burr. Encased in the plainest of cases, it belongs to the New-York Historical Society, and was recently on view in their exhibition Life Cut Short: Hamilton’s Hair and the Art of Mourning.
Hindsight makes it tempting to see karma at work in Burr’s checkered life in the three decades following the duel, and a comparison between two pieces of mourning jewelry - one for Hamilton, one for Burr - included in this exhibition is no exception.
Strands of Hamilton’s hair, cut by his widow Eliza, were preserved under a glass bezel and set into a gold mourning ring. Nathaniel Pendleton, his good friend and second in the duel, clearly wore and treasured the ring. A poignant letter to Pendleton by the grieving Eliza, who commissioned the ring, is presented nearby. (Read more about this ring and letter here.)
The small pendant containing Burr’s hair is gold-toned metal (pinchbeck?) According to Debra Schmidt Bach, the exhibition’s curator, there’s no record of who commissioned it, or if it was ever even worn at all. Burr was an elderly man when he died, and his once-dark hair had faded with age to the yellowing white found here. The collection’s records report that the hair was cut from Burr’s head soon after he died by a niece named Miss Edwards, though which Miss Edwards in his extended family is not known. There is no accompanying letter to mourn Burr, no grief described by Miss Edwards or any other family member or friend.
Unlike many of the other examples of mourning jewelry in the exhibition, Burr’s hair wasn’t carefully tied with a gold thread, or elaborately braided or woven into a pattern, or enhanced with tiny seed pearls. Instead it appears to have been cut and simply tucked into the glass locket, and that was that: a humble, tousled memento of a man who’d once been vice president.
Many thanks to Debra Schmidt Bach and Marybeth Ihle of the New-York Historical Society for their assistance with this post.
Above: Aaron Burr’s hair in case, 1836. Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society. Photograph ©2020 by Susan Holloway Scott.
Read more about Alexander and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton in my historical novel I, Eliza Hamilton; order here. My latest historical novel, The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr, is now available everywhere. Order here.