The whole State of New York had been waiting impatiently for the evacuation of the City.  Many hundreds of the old Whig inhabitants, who had fled at the entrance of the English troops seven years before, were eager to come again into possession of their homes and property, and resume their former occupations.  Many new enterprises waited only for the departure of the troops to be entered upon.  A large number of young men were looking to New York as the scene of their future career.  Albany, which had served as the temporary capital of the State, was full of lawyers, law-students, retired soldiers, merchants, and mechanics, who were prepared to remove to New York as soon as Rivington’s Gazette should inform them that the British had really left, and General Washington taken possession.  As in these days certain promises to pay are to be fulfilled six months after the United States shall have acknowledged the independence of a certain Confederacy, so at that time it was a custom for leases and other compacts to be dated from “the day on which the British troops shall leave New York.”  Among the young men in Albany who were intending to repair to the city were two retired officers of distinction, Alexander Hamilton, a student at law, and Aaron Burr, then in the second year of his practice at the bar.  James Kent and Edward Livingston were also students of law in Albany at that time.  The old Tory lawyers being all exiled or silenced, there was a promising field in New York for young advocates of talent, and these two young gentlemen had both contracted marriages which necessitated speedy professional gains.  Hamilton had won the daughter of General Schuyler.  Burr was married to the widow of a British officer, whose fortune was a few hundred pounds and two fine strapping boys fourteen and sixteen years of age.

And Burr was himself a father.  Theodosia, “his only child,” was born at Albany in the spring of 1783.  When the family removed to New York in the following winter, and took up their abode in Maiden Lane,—­“the rent to commence when the troops leave the city,”—­she was an engaging infant of seven or eight months.  We may infer something of the circumstances and prospects of her father, when we know that he had ventured upon a house of which the rent was two hundred pounds a year.  We find him removing, a year or two after, to a mansion at the corner of Cedar and Nassau streets, the garden and grapery of which were among the finest in the thickly settled portion of the city.  Fifty years after, he had still an office within a very few yards of the same spot, though all trace of the garden of Theodosia’s childhood had long ago disappeared.  She was a child of affluence.  Not till she had left her father’s house did a shadow of misfortune darken its portals.  Abundance and elegance surrounded her from her infancy, and whatever advantages in education and training wealth can produce for a child she had in profusion.  At the same time her father’s vigilant stoicism guarded her from the evils attendant upon a too easy acquisition of things pleasant and desirable.