12/1/2023 0 Comments Street fighter dueling statuesScholars suppose that dueling took root with the most primitive judicial systems, when disputes insoluble by witness testimony were solved in a trial by combat. We’d like to forget that only in recent times has American umbrage mutated into highway wars in which rival commuters run each other’s cars off the road, or into lesser rituals like libel suits in which honor is restored by cash instead of blood. Lyman Beecher, father of Henry Ward and Harriet, once cried out, “We are murderers, a nation of murderers.” Nobody mentions that Hamilton, not quite the textbook’s martyred innocent, had been a principal in 11 previous affairs of honor, mostly aborted, including clashes with the abrasive John Adams and the otherwise easygoing James Monroe or that Hamilton’s son Philip was killed in a duel. ![]() Or that affairs of the kind were faithful to an ancient code of honorable behavior and, by the 19th century, so characteristic of American political and journalistic life that the Rev. Nobody tells the children that the Burr-Hamilton matter ( Smithsonian, November 1976) wasn’t a uniquely gruesome crime but quite an ordinary event. Many confuse Burr with the likes of John Wilkes Booth: assassins both. to resume his presidency of the United States Senate? ![]() How was it possible that after the duel Burr went not to prison but back to Washington, D.C. Accustomed as they are to random murders, the formality of the occasion and the importance of the players seem alarming. Only one formal American duel can’t be politely overlooked in our textbooks such schoolchildren as still learn history learn that Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton. Our historians and biographers ignore gentlemanly dueling as much as possible, though the historic air is blue with accounts of rude Western types plugging each other in places like Dodge City. The spat had begun when Dickinson took the “sacred name” of Jackson’s wife, Rachel, into his “polluted mouth” and escalated in an argument over a horse-racing debt until death was the only answer.Īmericans like to think of dueling as antique, elitist and purely European. The year was 1806 and the survivor was Andrew Jackson, later our widely beloved seventh President, just doing what any gentleman would do. “I should have hit him,” our bleeding hero said, “if he had shot me through the brain.”Ī costume melodrama in glorious Technicolor from the archives of MGM? A paperback swashbuckler at the airport newsstand? Well, no. Dickinson fell, the bullet having passed clear through him, and died shortly afterward. Coolly he drew it back, aimed again, and fired. Dismayed, he stepped back a pace and was ordered to return to stand on his mark.īlood ran into our hero’s shoes. “Great God! Have I missed him?” cried Dickinson. Slowly he lifted his left arm and placed it across his coat front, teeth clenched. ![]() The bullet struck him in the chest, where it shattered two ribs and settled in to stay, festering, for the next 39 years. He was to rack up a lifetime total of at least 14 duels in most duels a slight flesh wound would end the matter, but this man he had sworn to kill. ![]() He himself wasn’t nearly as good, and his eyes, though fierce, were getting weak, but he was here deliberately, even eagerly. He knew the other’s reputation as a deadly shot, probably the best in all of pistol-packing Tennessee. He was a tall, bony, wild-haired man, and he faced his opponent at eight paces instead of the standard ten.
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