Mary Emmons

Mary Emmons ( – ), also known as Eugénie Beauharnais, was a Haitian governess who may have been born in Calcutta, India who worked as a servant in the household of Theodosia Bartow Prevost. While working as a servant, she had a relationship with Theodosia's second husband, American Founding Father and Vice President Aaron Burr, by whom she had two children: a daughter, Louisa Charlotte, born 1788, and a son, John Pierre Burr, born 1792.

Biography

Slavery in India continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. The Portuguese imported Africans into their Indian colonies on the Konkan coast between about 1530 and 1740. Little is known about Emmons's early life. The oral history is she was a colored woman born in Calcutta, who traveled to Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti) where she then lived and worked. she originally immigrated to the Thirteen Colonies as a servant of Theodosia Prevost and her first husband, Jacques Marcus Prevost, a British military officer who was stationed in the West Indies in the early 1770s. Emmons's first child with Burr was Louisa Charlotte Burr, born in 1788. In 1792, Emmons gave birth to her second child with Burr, John Pierre Burr, at sea while she was travelling back to the United States after a visit to Haiti.

Aaron Burr never acknowledged the fact that he had a relationship or children with Emmons during his lifetime – nor did he mention his children with Emmons in his will, even though he did mention two of his other illegitimate children in it. Additionally, the death certificates of both Louisa Ann and John Pierre both leave the slots for "Mother" and "Father" blank.

Popular culture

In 2013, artist Camilla Huey included a portrait of Emmons as part of nine corset portraits of women in Aaron Burr's life in the exhibition "The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding."

The 2019 novel The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr by Susan Holloway Scott is a fictional account of Emmons's life. Scott writes that because so little was known about Emmons, she took the liberty of creating imagined details of her life herself.