Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from Howstuffworks.com

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.

I have a slight cold voice today so apologies it's not the episode for that.

Yeah we both caught some cred while we were in New York.

So that apology aside the last time we mentioned Hamilton on the podcast I said it would be cool to do an episode about one of the ladies on the show because Hamilton's men are becoming really well represented in our podcast archive already.

So today that is what we are doing. She's a figure who played a hugely important role in that show despite not singing any songs or even ever being on stage.

It's the Adosha Burr Allston and in keeping with our Halloween theme because it is October we're going to be spending some time on her mysterious 1812 disappearance and all the stories surrounding it some of which are quite macabre.

Hurray macabre.

It's almost impossible to separate the Adosha Burr Allston's life from her parents Aaron Burr and the Adosha Bartow.

And when they met the elder the Adosha was married to Jacques Marcus Prouveau or provost depending on how you pronounce it.

Here for ensure American he is also sometimes known as James Mark provost who was an officer in the British Army.

Jacques and the Adosha had five children together three daughters and two sons none of whom are the subject of this episode.

They all lived on a 250 acre estate in New Jersey known as the Hermitage and they lived there along with the Adosha's widowed mother and an enslaved household staff.

When the revolutionary war started Jacques who had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and earlier wars returned to service in the army.

He became second in command to his brother Augustine and Augustine is actually sometimes incorrectly named as the Adosha's husband.

Jacques's role in the British army put the Adosha in a precarious position because the Hermitage was in territory controlled by the Patriots and she was entertaining a lot of their most prominent military and political leaders there.

But somehow she managed to walk a very fine line in which her husband and most of her male relatives were fighting for the loyalist cause while she was at home playing host to such prominent Patriots as the Marquit Elafiad,

John Lawrence, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Lee, James Monroe and George Washington himself.

It's basically the elder the Adosha was hosting the entire cast of Hamilton at the state.

And of course there was her future husband Aaron Burr who the Adosha met at the hermitage while her husband was stationed in Jamaica.

Aaron Burr was a notorious flanderer but the first time he saw the Adosha he was totally convinced that she was to use a slightly more recent term his soulmate.

This was in spite of the fact that she was married, she was a decade older than he was and she already had five children.

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