Thursday, October 19th, 1797

My Dearest, Theodosia,

                                                Although I am still weak, I felt as though I should pen this letter to you and thank you. Angelica read your letter to whilst I was delirious and it was one of the few things able to penetrate the fog that filled my mind. Once I heard that letter, I knew I had to pull through, for my mother, for my siblings, for you.

That letter is the reason I am here today and I owe it all to you. I have read your letter several times over and I have the intention of keeping it as safe as I possibly can for the foreseeable future. I promise to look after for the remainder of life, swear to you that I shall refer to it whenever I am in doubt.

You save my life, Theo, and I shall never be able to repay you for that. It is a debt that shall never be repayable.

Love Always,

Philip Hamilton.

~~~

My Dearest, Philip,

                                       I cannot tell you how I pleased I was to receive your letter! Angelica has been kind enough to keep me informed as to your condition, and I was extremely pleased to hear that you had awoken and was well on the way to making a recovery. I must confess that I did not expect to receive a letter so soon. I thought your recovery would have been more important than writing a letter to me, but I am glad to hear from you.

Hearing you were ill was possibly one of the worst experiences of my entire life. I could not bear to loose you after loosing Mother to an illness. Granted, they are not similar, Mother's illness occurred over a period of years rather than a few weeks. But the fear was still there. Not knowing if he was going to wake one morning to find you had passed. It was a thought I wished I did not have.

I am glad you are recovering well, but I must ask that you look after yourself before you think of writing to me again. I would hate for your recover to suffer because of me.

Love Always,

Theodosia Burr.

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Notes;

Historically speaking, we know little as to when Hamilton actually recovered from the fever he suffered in early-September. However, thanks to this letter, we have been able to determine that by mid-October, Hamilton's fever had passed by and he was in the process of making a full recovery.

Here we can firmly see Hamilton's love for Burr as he would rather have written a letter to her then focused on his own recovery, something that we have never witnessed before. We can also see Burr's concern for the fifteen-year-old Hamilton in regards to his impulsive need to write to her rather than recover.