I feel this is revealing.

[ceiswyn]

You can find Aaron Burr's quote about his daughter Theodosia's death all over the internet. It's this:

"No, no, she is indeed dead. She perished in the miserable little pilot-boat in which she left Charleston. Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father."

All pride and bitterness, very striking.

Now, being me, I distrust the Burr quotes that one finds everywhere without a source attribution. After a long and painful search, it turns out that most of them come from one of his early biographers, James Parton. But when you take a closer look, what Parton quotes Burr as saying is actually this:

"No, no, she is indeed dead. She perished in the miserable little pilot-boat in which she left Charleston. Were she alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father. When I realized the truth of her death, the world became a blank to me, and life had then lost all its value."

And doesn't that last sentence make a difference? Isn't it interesting that the popular version is by far the less sympathetic one?