Jessie asked Susan Holloway Scott:

I thought that Aaron Burr was part of the group with Alexander Hamilton to ban slavery. How could Burr have owned a slave like Mary?

Susan Holloway Scott Hi, Jessie ~ Sorry to be so slow answering this! Yes, Aaron Burr was a member of the New York Manumission Society, as was Alexander Hamilton. Early in his political career, Burr also introduced a bill for the abolition of slavery to the New York state legislature; the bill was voted down. However, Burr was a slaveholder for most of his adult life. His parents, grandparents, and wife Theodosia Prevost were also slaveholders. While surviving records are scarce, it appears that Burr often bought and sold enslaved people as his finances rose and fell; the few named individuals seldom appear more than a handful of times in his papers. On the night before his duel with Hamilton, he put his affairs into order in the event that he did not survive. Instead of freeing the enslaved people in his household, he left them to his daughter Theodosia in South Carolina, where they likely would have been sold. So while he was outwardly a manumissionist, he never backed up his words with any actions.

Another fact to note: since I wrote "I, Eliza Hamilton", new research by Hamilton scholars had uncovered documentation that the Hamiltons did in fact have enslaved servants at The Grange, their country house in upper Manhattan. Considering that the Eliza's parents and sister Angelica were slaveholders and that as a lawyer, Alexander bought and sold enslaved people for his clients, it's long been suspected that he and Eliza held slaves, too. Scholars have suspected that any letters or receipts that mentioned this were destroyed by their children as detrimental to their father's historical reputation. Knowing that the Hamiltons did possess enslaved servants doesn't lessen Hamilton's positive legacy, but it does give a more complete representation of him as a man of his times, as well as acknowledging the existence of those he enslaved.

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