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John Pierre Burr, one of two children the former vice-president Aaron Burr is said to have fathered with a servant from India, was officially memorialized as a descendant of the founding father at a ceremony in Philadelphia on Saturday.
The elder Burr was the vice-president to Thomas Jefferson between 1801 and 1805 but is perhaps best known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, an act which made him the villain in a hit Broadway musical.
The younger Burr, who lived from 1792 to 1864, was a prominent member of black society in Philadelphia. Rumored to be the vice-president’s son for several years, he was officially recognized by the Aaron Burr Association in 2018.
At Eden Cemetery in Philadelphia on Saturday, the not-for-profit association unveiled a headstone for John Pierre in a ceremony which featured a procession of men in tricorn hats, carrying flags.
The headstone identifies John Pierre as the son of Aaron Burr and reads: “Champion of justice and freedom, conductor on the Underground railroad.”
A descendant of John Pierre Burr, Sherri Burr, spoke at the ceremony, which came about largely because of her own work to determine whether Aaron Burr was John Pierre’s father.
Burr, an emeritus professor of law at the University of New Mexico and the third vice-president of the Aaron Burr Association, told the gathered crowd: “From henceforth I hope John Pierre Burr is never again referred to as ‘the natural son’ or ‘the illegitimate son’, but is simply referred to as ‘the son’,” the Washington Post reported.
Along with other evidence Burr found, a DNA test showed she was related to Stuart Johnson, another Burr descendant.
At the Aaron Burr Association’s annual meeting last year, members voted unanimously to recognize that Aaron Burr had two children – the other was Louisa Charlotte – by Mary Eugenie Beauharnais Emmons, who was from Kolkata, India, and was a servant in the Burr home.
The association was founded in 1946 and knew of rumors about John Pierre for more than a decade. In 2005, a black woman named Louella Burr Mitchell Allen came forward, claiming she had traced her lineage to John Pierre.
It was the work of Sherri Burr which swayed members of the association, a group of roughly 75 Burr descendants and history fans, to formally recognize the lineage. Historians told the Post the evidence Burr had found was convincing.
Sherri Burr is working on a book, Aaron Burr’s Family of Color. A historical fiction book about Burr’s “secret wife”, by Susan Holloway Scott, is due for release next month.
Close ties between the founding fathers of the United States and people of color, including the people they enslaved, have become a more prominent thread in public history.
In 2018, Jefferson’s home at Monticello launched an exhibit about Sally Hemmings, an enslaved women who had Jefferson’s children. The relationship was an open secret while Jefferson was alive but for two centuries it was largely avoided at historical sites and in school textbooks.
In 2017, the first comprehensive history of George Washington’s runaway slave, Ona Judge, was published by the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Washington’s home in Virginia, Mount Vernon, hosted an exhibit about Judge.
The Aaron Burr Association timed its headstone instillation to coincide with the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans being brought to the US.
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