[In the following essay, Cardwell presents the subject of dueling as an important element in the “aristocratic” culture of the Old South, one frequently treated by writers of the period.]

I

The idea of the gentleman assumes the existence of class distinctions and often assumes as well that gentlemen, men superior in courtesy and courage, are privileged to engage in extralegal mutual slaughter according to a code. Dueling seems never to have gone unchallenged, however. In America, where street affrays and Western shoot-outs were the only kinds of “duel” to survive the Civil War in a more than sporadic way, the custom enjoyed a brief life. It was generally fashionable only during the Revolutionary and immediate post-Revolutionary periods. In the South, where it lasted longer, it was widely practiced and relatively widely defended up to 1861.

Before 1861 travelers and social historians frequently commented that there were more acts of violence in the Southern part of the United States than in the North and East. They pretty well agreed that frontier conditions and the institution of slavery were responsible for this violence, and they observed that the duel was prevalent and cherished because it was associated with regional ways and manners, more particularly with the ideal of the gentleman, Southern style. Northern writers—Cooper, Emerson, Bryant, and Lowell among them—expressed indignation and alarm at what they took to be a wild, uncivilized streak in Southerners. Because dueling was attacked by Northerners and was identified at the same time as a distinctive feature of “cavalier” life, Southerners felt a special compulsion to tolerate or justify it.

Opposition to dueling became vocal and active in the South immediately after the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson warned against dueling. In 1802 Edwin Gray of Virginia moved, though unsuccessfully, the appointment of a congressional committee to draft a law that would disqualify any person involved in a duel or in carrying a challenge from holding office under the United States. Acts to suppress dueling were, of course, passed in the separate states. In South Carolina such eminent men as Charles C. Pinckney accepted membership on the committees against dueling established by the Society of the Cincinnati and by the American Revolutionary Society. Dueling was sometimes protested on merely rational grounds, but after about 1830 opponents of the duel almost habitually pleaded Christian principles as a basis for their condemnations. In his Elements of Moral Philosophy (1839), Jasper Adams, president of the College of Charleston, typically called Hamilton's announced reasons for accepting Burr's challenge despite his principles an outstanding instance of an absurd willingness to follow the sophistry of public opinion rather than divine guidance. Gentlemen, Adams wrote, must learn to distinguish true honor from false—they must cultivate a delicate, Christian understanding of honor. Only false honor seeks vengeance in a practice that is the relic of a barbarous age. Arguments similar to those of Adams were developed in numerous addresses and sermons, and instances of protests against dueling could be multiplied almost indefinitely by referring to newspapers and magazines. William J. Grayson, Maximilian LaBorde, and others writing for the Southern Quarterly Review (Charleston) opposed duels as contrary to reason and justice. An essayist in the Southern Literary Messenger for 1861 argued that honor ceases to be useful to law and morality when it supersedes its principles and teaches men to disregard the mainstays which it should brace: “There is an honour above your own—the glorious Honour of the majesty of God!”

Men sometimes announced their anti-dueling principles publicly as a reason for refusing to fight. Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, though a noted political fire-eater, when baited and insulted by Jeremiah Clemens, a “co-operationist” of Alabama, declared in 1852 before the Senate that he feared God more than man and would not go upon the field.

Despite legal checks and iterated censures, duels were frequent, mostly in newly settled areas and in such established centers as Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Obviously the commentators on violence in the South were correct in saying that duels were a by-product of frontier conditions and that they were related to the developing myth of a cavalier, slave-holding South. Actually, most of the older settled areas were either close to the frontier or felt the wash of the frontier spirit. Border areas, in their turn, were settled in part by gentlemen, and the most savage districts participated to an extent in the myth of an aristocratic Southern world. So far as mores are concerned, frontier and civilization clearly overlapped in such towns as Natchez, Mississippi, and Lexington, Kentucky.

Senators, congressmen, governors, judges, editors, collegians, and border desperadoes were among those who fought. There were countless student quarrels and disagreements over gambling, but unbridled political argument seems to have been the primary cause of the more important duels. It does not appear—though delicacy of concealment may have operated here—that a great many duels were fought over the honor of ladies. A visitor to Savannah at the end of the eighteenth century reported that seven duels were scheduled for a single day. Superseding the weak statutes of 1809, stringent statutes against dueling were passed in 1816; but during the following seventy years more than one hundred duels occurred in Georgia, and a historian reports only one case as mentioned in the decisions of the Supreme Court.

Few of the duels that took place in the South received national attention, although many won local notoriety. Button Gwinnet and Laclan McIntosh fought a famous duel in Savannah in 1777. Henry Clay, in theory an opponent of dueling, and Humphrey Marshall, also of Kentucky, wounded each other when they exchanged fire in 1808. In 1826 Clay dueled with John Randolph, each man expressing, it is said, the tenderest regard for his opponent. In 1822 Colonel William Cumming of Georgia wounded George McDuffie, well known in South Carolina politics. A point of honor between William J. Graves of Kentucky and Jonathan Cilley of Maine, both members of the House of Representatives, was settled in 1838 by Graves's killing Cilley, rifles being the weapons chosen. Benjamin F. Perry, editor of the Greenville Mountaineer, killed a fellow South Carolinian, Turner Bynum, editor of a nullification paper. Perry recorded in his autobiography that after this the nullifiers treated him with respect: “When a man knows that he is to be held accountable for his want of courtesy, he is not so apt to indulge in abuse. In this way duelling produces a greater courtesy in society & a higher refinement.” E. T. Carroll, editor of the New Orleans Crescent, and John William Frost, another editor of the Crescent, were among the many newspapermen who fought.

The more habitual and successful duelists are now, for the most part, shadowy figures. A few, such as General Charles Lee and Stephen Decatur, had names memorable for other accomplishments. Great but ephemeral reputations as duelists were established by George La Vance of Memphis, Don José Llulla and Pierre Soulé of New Orleans, and Peter Van Allen of Georgia. Louis F. Tasistro, a peripatetic actor, wrote that the best swordsman in Louisiana, an arrogant Creole, killed six young men before he was himself finished off in a duel with pistols. Rather typically, the Creole's name has been lost. William J. Grayson, best remembered for his proslavery poem The Hireling and the Slave (1856), mentioned in his biography of James Louis Petigru of Charleston that Petigru was a frequent guest at the home of Mr. Neufville, an accomplished man of the world noted for the celebrated duel in which he outmaneuvered Boone Mitchell, the most expert duelist of the day. But neither Neufville nor Mitchell appears in the standard biographical dictionaries.

Advocates of dueling made strenuous efforts to regularize it and to dissociate it from the brutalities common among frontier ruffians and city toughs. John Lyde Wilson of Charleston compiled a highly regarded Code of Honor (1838). Local or imported experts on protocol stood ready to lend advice to the parties in a quarrel. Appropriate sites were established by custom, and some, such as that on the Gentilly road outside New Orleans and that just above Vidalia, Louisiana, across the Mississippi from Natchez, became famous. Although men like Wilson were distressed by crude assaults (as when John Clarke, a political leader of western Georgia, took a riding whip to Judge Charles Tait in 1807), the exact niceties of dueling were all too seldom observed. Few duels kept to the rules for written or oral exchanges; few were fought with smoothbore pistols not exceeding nine inches in length. Arranged duels were different from street affrays that were determined by such utterly irregular weapons as clubs, dirks, and derringers as well as bitings and gougings; but they took a latitude of forms that must have appalled precisians. In 1812 General John Floyd of Georgia dueled with a man named Hopkins under an agreement to fire first with shotguns, next with pistols, and then, if it were possible to continue, to use bowie knives. The duelists, as it happened, became too weak from loss of blood to use the knives.

That the conventions could be neglected or bungled was not enough to chill the enthusiasm of partisans, and the support they gave to dueling undoubtedly weakened attempts to suppress other forms of civil disorder. William H. (“Bull Run”) Russell, the English journalist who covered the Civil War for the Times, reported that Governor Pettus of Mississippi believed that the society of which he was a member was the highest ever developed, although, the journalist wrote, there were in Mississippi more outrages on the person and more murders than were known in the worst days of medieval Venice or Florence. Much as other gentlemen might interest themselves in the more recondite aspects of chess or billiards, some Mississippians gave scrupulous technical consideration to the duel and to less polite branches of the same family. An amiable citizen of Jackson offered a number of cautionary points valuable to a newcomer. He advised against trusting to small-bore pistols or to pocket six-shooters. They would not do in a close fight; you might hit your man mortally with such weapons only to have him continue to run in on you and rip you up with a bowie knife. The wise course was to drive a good heavy bullet into your antagonist—he would then get faintish and drop at once.

II

Among Southern writers of fiction, those who censured dueling decidedly outnumbered those who defended it. While early foes—products of a comparatively rationalistic age—inclined to stress secular reasons, and later opponents tended to emphasize that the code was inconsistent with Christian principles, writers often tumbled together reasons of all kinds. Abhorrence of dueling did not, however, interfere with the depiction of duels or with full renderings of their emotional aftermaths.

John A. McClung, the author of Camden (1830), and Mary Elizabeth Talbot, the author of Rurality (1830), were among the more rationally inclined detractors. McClung expressed detestation of the practice “which seems to have taken such deep root in our land,” and because of which men die the victims of a refined delicacy or wander with the mark of Cain upon their foreheads. Miss Talbot made the enormities of dueling a major theme of her book and spoke of the prevalence of the custom in the South, “where warm feelings are easily excited by love or hate.”

William A. Caruthers, who frequently introduced duels and abortive duels into his popular romances, urgently opposed the custom. In his Cavaliers of Virginia (1834), a romance of the late seventeenth century, Nathaniel Bacon kills the adopted son of Sir William Berkeley in a formal duel with swords. Caruthers explained: “It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that duelling in that day, so far from being considered criminal, was the sole test to which all differences between gentlemen were submitted.” A duel advances the plot of Caruthers' The Kentuckian in New York (1834), but its narrator is strongly condemnatory, and in Knights of the Horseshoe (1845) the admirable young heroine addresses an elaborately calming and instructive letter on dueling to her fiancé. When the hero of James D. Nourse's Levenworth (1848) is challenged by a polished villain, he takes the practical view that if he must fall a victim to “the execrable code of miscalled honor,” he will not fall alone. He then demands that the duel be fought with pistols loaded with ball, to be placed directly over the heart.

The swashbuckling romances of John Esten Cooke glorify the ancient days and the cavalier spirit, but when Cooke paused to comment seriously on duels, his view was a hostile one. In Leather Stocking and Silk (1854), for example, a duel is averted by a wise old doctor who lectures a young man on the subject, reminding him that one who takes a human life for a word, a gesture, or a tone of voice commits a criminal and unchristian act: We live but three score years at best; is it worthwhile to fight with human brethren, with brother worms? The young man answers, “For honor—yes, sir!” The doctor's response to this is to combine the chivalric ideal with the Christian by suggesting that the chivalric exists in transcendent form in the Christian code.

An unusually complex treatment of dueling was presented by William Price in Clement Falconer (1838). Price begins his novel on an urbane, coolly ironic note by introducing a hero whose father, a young lawyer of one of the western counties of Maryland, “fell in a duel arising out of dispute about the comparative merits of William Pitt and Charles James Fox” when the hero was one month old. The mother, a blooming girl of eighteen, promptly followed her husband to the grave. During a student party at Princeton, the hero, Clem, and his best friend, somewhat intoxicated, quarrel over politics—about which neither knows anything—and Clem shoots his friend, though not fatally. Back home in Maryland the hero pays a call on his former nurse, a woman his uncle's Negro major-domo considers to be a poor white (so rigorously genteel are the major-domo's standards), although she is the wife of a successful farmer. The Negro moralizes on his young master's lack of feeling for gentlemanly conduct, and Price's implicit condemnation of dueling reaches an ironic climax as the slave exalts the gentleman's code of honor:

Master Clem, I'm an old man—look at my head, it is almost white. I knew your father when he was a child. But I'm afraid master Clem, you will never be shot through the heart like he was. I remember when they brought him home on a window shutter, his face was as white as that sheet, and his shirt and waistcoat was stiff with his own blood. Ah! he was a gentleman. Your poor folks never die in that way.

In a more conventional passage of carefully propounded debate, Price reproduces dinner-table talk at a Washington boarding-house frequented by members of Congress. A North Carolinian holds that in his state a man who refuses to fight may not be thrown out of society, but he will be considered to be “beyond the pale of honor.” A member of Congress from Virginia acknowledges that some of the objections to dueling have force, but he affirms, nonetheless, that a community of high-minded gentlemen whose intercourse is characterized by a delicate sense of propriety cannot exist without the practice. Other speakers oppose dueling, calling it a remnant of a savage state, pointing out the unhappiness of those who have killed, objecting to fighting by rule, and arguing that one should not be expected to stake his life against a villain who has debauched a lady, for such an opponent would be outside the pale of honor. Neither should one be expected to kill a man for a slight injury.

Finally, Price dramatizes meticulously the development and prosecution of a disagreement between Clem and three political opponents who considered themselves insulted by a speech Clem had made in the House of Representatives. Clem wounds one man, is shot in the hip by another, is for a time despaired of, but recovers and marries the heroine. The ending is in the conventional sense “happy,” but it seems likely that the hero will die by violence if he remains honest and stays in politics.

Moral tales of all kinds were popular in Southern periodicals, as they were elsewhere, and the evils of dueling were a frequent topic in stories and sketches. Items in the important Southern Literary Messenger were perhaps less depressingly bad than those in smaller magazines, but they were not unlike them. A desultory novel called Lionel Granby that began serially in the magazine in 1835 makes much of dueling, especially at William and Mary, throughout its early chapters. A student of plebeian background, a minor character, who rejects a challenge is seen as a noble person. His high morality is contrasted with the lack of integrity of an aristocratically inclined hero who is serving a painful apprenticeship to life. A sketch called “The Duel,” which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, pictures the despair of the friends and family of the man who falls, while the slayer is represented as overbearing and coarse. Another sketch called “The Duellist” (1840) tells how a Virginian reluctantly kills one of his cousins and then—all hopes blighted—dies a premature death himself. A challenge is the central incident of “Woman's Influence” (1845), in which a charming girl urges a young man to weigh “all holy claims” before he decides to take part in a duel. When he rejects the challenge, he is admired by friends who praise his moral courage even though they fear he has ruined himself. But the young man performs in public a feat of heroism that demonstrates his physical courage, and all ends well. Comparably moral, sentimental, and sensational treatments were accorded the duel in several popular novels.

Although Southern comic tales and sketches were, like other Southern writings, produced almost without exception by persons of the gentlemanly class, the adoption of a stance appropriate to comedy had the effect of turning the writers into “outsiders” and, when they treated the duel, consistently hostile critics. The upper-class narrators of comic stories are usually amused observers of the eccentricities of yeomen and poor whites, but they also witness the farcical behavior of pseudo-gentlemen. The pseudo-gentlemen or village pretenders to gentlemanly status who are the usual butt of this comedy, often shrink from actual combat. The duels that are fought are ordinarily burlesque or sham duels (e.g., with unloaded pistols).

William Tappan Thompson made dueling the province of a particular kind of pseudo-gentleman in a sketch in Major Jones's Scenes in Georgia (1843). His gentleman is modest when sober but aggressive when drunk. Major Ferguson Bangs, drunk, interrupts stories in the barroom of the Planter's Hotel in Pineville, smiles incredulously, and otherwise provokes those present. At length he is persuaded to challenge plain Ned Jones. The Major's “supporters” tell him that Ned will never appear for the duel, but he does. Although fortified with whisky, the Major cannot keep his courage adequately screwed up. The mock duel that follows is described in all its comic details.

Some deductions may be drawn from Thompson's sketch. The Major is a Virginian who arrived in Georgia as a slave trader and later became successful. He is not a bad fellow, but he is not a true gentleman, and when drunk he burlesques the manners and actions of a true gentleman. Misinterpretation and misapplication of the chivalric code lead, ridiculously, to bullying and casual dueling.

The Virginia gentleman (that is, the ideal gentleman) is undercut more directly and deliberately in Joseph M. Field's The Drama in Pokerville (1847). “Doctor” Slunk, a Virginian who has been trying unsuccessfully to seduce a little actress, attempts to terrify a supposedly cowardly middle-aged actor who protects her. The actor refuses to be intimidated, and a make-believe duel is arranged. Slunk plans to pretend to be killed, assuming that the actor will run away and that the actress will be left unguarded. But Slunk plays his role badly. He looks about him for a clean place to fall in the cow pasture where the duel is fought, and spectators laugh at his balk. The actor divines that something is wrong and threatens to cut off the ears of the unmasked gentleman and his second. Thus a simple man, not of the gentlemanly class, is lent dignity, a pseudo-gentleman is derided, and the gentleman's ideals are seen as susceptible to parody.

Such comedy lent support to the standard censorious observations on dueling. Readers and writers who knew the raw turbulence of the newer settlements and who had seen village and backwoods chivalry through comic lenses might come to scrutinize the entire chivalric conception. Comic writers ridiculed the false gentleman unmercifully, and if the true Virginia gentleman remained on his pedestal, he shook a little in the blasts directed at his shadow-likeness. Plain Ned Jones exposed the Major; a broken-nosed, middle-aged actor laid bare the pretensions of Slunk. Democracy gained the day over specious gentility, and in the process something was subtracted from too easy glorification of “the chivalry.”

The degree to which the code of honor was suspect is suggested by an extraordinary feature of some of those stories—both comic and serious—that opposed dueling. In general, ante bellum writing either tolerates Yankees (if the author is being conciliatory), is contemptuous of them, or casts them as villains. But in the literature attacking dueling, the Yankee is in a few instances given a new role. He appears as a simple, sensible man or as a Christian who has sufficient moral courage not to fight. As in Northern literature, the Yankee becomes a model for Southerners.

In a sketch in the Southern Literary Messenger (1840), a gentlemanly killer repeatedly insults a well-mannered Yankee schoolmaster. Finally, at dinner one day, he hurls his knife at the imperturbable Northerner, who replies by dashing his hot mush into the duelist's face. The Yankee then sets the terms for the duel that follows and humiliates the ruffian by tricking him and marching him through the village under the muzzle of an ancient musket that in the end proves to be unloaded. Also in the Messenger (1851) is the story of a young Philadelphian who, when challenged at White Sulphur Springs, manages to uphold his principles and at the same time escape the possible imputation of cowardice. In George H. Throop's Bertie (1851), a Yankee tutor has the better of it in an exchange relating to the code. The narrator tells the tutor that he must be careful what he says in the presence of a fire-eater. “What dew yaou mean by a fire-eater?” asks the Yankee, and the narrator explains that the gentleman in question is the best shot in North Carolina, able to snuff a candle at twelve paces. In reply the Yankee holds out for inspection “a clenched fist that inspired me with some considerable respect for his physical strength.”

III

George Tucker of Virginia offered in his essays what appear to be the most positive, comprehensive, fully reasoned arguments in favor of dueling assembled by any Southerner. Furthermore, in his own life he observed the dictates of the code. He wrote in his unpublished autobiography of issuing a challenge during the early 1800's to a violent young Republican (Tucker himself was a moderate), and of the intervention of friends to prevent the duel and he says that on other occasions he “demanded and received satisfaction.” Drawing for his argument upon the Scots David Hume and William Robertson (as Robert C. McLean has pointed out), Tucker composed a rationale for dueling. In an early essay “On Luxury” (1804) he broached a line of reasoning which continued to be central to his later justifications: “The sentiment of honour is … peculiar to luxurious and refined society. Whatever religion or reason may say to some of its dictates, it surely well supplies the place of savage courage.” Hume had previously said much the same thing in “Of Refinement in the Arts.” There Hume, a believer in the Idea of Progress, held that civilization is good, barbarism bad: the vices of barbarians are worse than those of civilized men, and it need not be feared that men by losing their ferocity will be deprived of their martial spirit. If anger loses somewhat its asperity, a sense of honor acquires fresh vigor. Furthermore, civilization brings with it discipline and skill.

Tucker emphatically defended the importance of a sense of honor and the merits of dueling in additional essays called “An Argument for Duelling” (1804), “Vindication of Duelling” (1805), and “On Duelling” (1822). In these pieces he held that honor more than any other quality proves the superiority of a refined to a savage age. Like Hume, Tucker saw the source of the sentiment of honor in the refining influences of civilization. Like Robertson in “A View of the Progress of Society in Europe,” he related honor to the rise of chivalry.

Tucker's essay of 1822 explains that dueling is not founded in nature. It existed nowhere in primitive society, nor did it appear in the most polished nations of antiquity. Prohibited by religion, denounced by morality, and liable to punishment by law, it still maintains itself. Historians have ascribed its origins to judicial combats among Gothic nations. A challenge between Francis I and Charles V, the two most distinguished monarchs of their age, may have extended duels to private disputes. Yet the practice may not be called an unnatural one: it could not have lived if it were not congenial to the nature of man. It must be associated with the time men began to value self-respect and honor, when because of the progress of society the horrors of wars were diminished and men ceased to think of women as the playthings of sensualists. It must be related to the formation of that compound of natural and artificial qualities which constitutes the character of a gentleman.

According to the essay, the diffusion of wealth, knowledge, and liberty extended the code of the gentleman to the great mass of individuals. In a modern society men duel to avenge personal injuries which are too subtle and delicate to be defined or regulated by laws. The man of honor properly acts from a desire for vengeance ennobled by courage and generosity. An accepted parallel suggests the propriety of such action: if his wife has been raped, a man is justified by law in taking the life of the offending party. Thus when the feelings of members of a society are wrought to such a pitch of sensibility that a charge of falsehood or cowardice becomes an intolerable offense, the same reason that admittedly exists for punishing the crime of rape applies to these injuries as well. In either case, there is no injury to anyone's life, person, or property—only to his feelings. Opposition to duels, Tucker continues, may derive from abuses originating during the reign of Henry IV of France. He admits that the practice may be perverted by the bully and the coxcomb. Possibly laws which prevent duelists and their seconds from holding any public office of honor or profit are necessary deterrents, but such adverse laws should be repealed if they deprive society of the services of its best men. Laws cannot prevent duels and they might turn men toward even more dangerous street fights.

In Tucker's view, then, dueling is a product of modern sensitivity and manners, and even though modern manners are in part artificial and fantastic, they have been accompanied by substantial benefits. A danger in civilization is that it may carry with it the seeds of its own corruption by making men effeminate and cowardly. Dueling not only accompanies and signifies progress, it safeguards manliness and preserves primitive virtues. A sense of honor accompanied by disciplined performance can make a civilized nation, no matter how luxurious, an overmatch for any savage nation. American society, therefore, should be careful not to weaken a sentiment which contributes greatly to its national security by offsetting the enervating effects of commercial habits and democratic institutions. The Southern states in particular, warns Tucker, should beware the diminution of those elevated feelings which are supposed to characterize them and which go far to redeem them from the reproaches that have been lavishly heaped upon them for one of their institutions. Tucker concludes that if dueling can be instrumental in preserving those virtues which constitute honor, it is unreasonable to complain that half-a-dozen brave men are sacrificed in a year to maintain the best features of our manners, especially “when we feel no hesitation in devoting thousands to destruction, in any petty matter of national dispute.”

Although it is difficult to see why Tucker printed this long defense of dueling among his essays of 1822 if he did not believe what he wrote, it is barely possible that he was in part indulging himself in rhetorical exercises in his remarks favoring the code. A more likely speculation may be that his attitude toward dueling changed about 1823, because certain of his later writings—especially his only published novel, the hastily written but very interesting The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824)—bring the firmness of his convictions into question.

A few of the early novelists made no bones about dueling's being an adjunct of virtuous, gentlemanly living. In Miss A. M. Lorraine's Donald Adair (1828), a novel with an international flavor, a villain mistreats his wife, answers her brother's challenge with abuse, and runs away from Scotland to London and then America. A gentleman would have answered the challenge. In Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's George Balcombe (1836) the hero argues succinctly for the need of the code: “A helmet is no defence against a rattlesnake, nor can all the wisdom of man protect his honour from the poisonous breath of insult, but by showing a spirit to repel and chastise it.” As was appropriate for an aggressive supporter of Southern rights, Tucker made chivalric conduct typically Southern in The Partisan Leader (1836), in which he prophesied the war between North and South. An insulting Union man avoids a duel by writing an abject letter of apology to a knightly Southerner.

Although John Pendleton Kennedy treated duels lightly in Swallow Barn (1832), the model for later novels in “the plantation tradition,” he implied at least faint approbation. Kennedy, a believer in the Southern myth, wrote in the mode of comedy and romance. That actual blood was shed in duels and that real men died would hardly be guessed from his stories.

Like many of the later novels, William W. Turner's Jack Hopeton (1860) gives the impression of being self-consciously Southern in its expressed attitudes. Jack Hopeton, a Georgian traveling for pleasure, overhears three men abusing Georgia and Georgians, apparently relying on their numerical superiority to escape unpunished for their insolence. Nonetheless, he challenges them and threatens to apply his riding whip to the shoulders of the spokesman for the three unless he receives satisfaction. Somewhat to Hopeton's surprise, the spokesman agrees to meet him, and the following morning Hopeton sends a bullet into the “snob's” shoulder (“I didn't want to hurt him much”) and himself escapes with only a slight flesh wound. Hopeton's mother expresses satisfaction in the duel, although she does not like the practice. His sister is less pacific: she cannot bear the idea of a brother or father who would submit to insult. All agree that some arguments against dueling are insuperable, just as some for it are unanswerable. It is best to let the circumstances of each case decide.

The assumption that dueling is a necessary feature of the chivalric way of life and that the code of honor must be cherished by Southern gentlemen permeates Turner's novel. In one passage the hero, having seconded a friend in a duel, makes the relationship of dueling and chivalry specific. Addressing the friend's sister, he says, “Miss Bently, as a true and gallant knight, I am anxious to know whether my conduct in this affair meets with your approbation.”

William Gilmore Simms, the most important and prolific novelist of the Old South, was familiar with the idea of the Great Chain of Being and often discoursed on the problem of order in society. With a set of more philosophic considerations in mind than are apparent in most defenses of dueling, Simms argued that the practice fitted beneficially into the social scheme. His ideas are well illustrated in Beauchampe (1842)—his version of the Beauchampe-Sharpe murder case in Kentucky, a story which is also told by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Penn Warren, among others. In this tale, the bold Ned Hinkley—a great fiddler, fisherman, and fighter—defines personal combat as part of the natural order: “There was a time when every mother's son in Kentucky was a man, and could stand up to his rack with the best. If he couldn't keep the top place, he went a peg lower; but he made out to keep the place for which he was intended.”

IV

Writers of the Civil War and post-Civil War years neither forgot the duel as a device nor dropped it altogether as an issue. As Reconstruction and reconciliation progressed, most Northern novelists did suppress the idea that duels were characteristic, bloody features of ante bellum Southern life. Southern writers of the Thomas Nelson Page variety, idealizing nearly everything they connected with the good old days and the good old society, exaggerated and threw a roseate light on the chivalric habits of the ante bellum gentleman, but rarely defended dueling. Realistic writers who examined the past with some seriousness treated the duel as a delicate moral issue or as an evil much better done away with. A few novelists were perturbed at the continuing violence found in the New South. The relatively equalitarian writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth reacted strongly against the idealized image of a prewar aristocracy with a chivalric code that flowered in the duel. Mark Twain and Richard M. Johnston, for example, took a skeptical view, but the cases which they made against the gentleman and the duel were far from absolute. During his maturity Mark Twain often viewed the Old South as reprehensibly savage; yet a copious stream of blood runs through his own works, not all of it intended to convey hatred for immoderation. He spares the reader little in depicting bloodshed, and he permits a conviction to shine through that the qualities which keep feuds alive and provoke duels are also associated with desirable courage and an admirable selflessness.

In the equalitarian literature the ideal of the gentleman rises phoenix-like. One may consider Johnston's Widow Guthrie (1890), a story set about the year 1830. A sturdy yeoman informs an arrogant attorney, who has made improper advances to one of the yeoman's relatives but who is unwilling to fight anyone not of his class, that if the gentleman does not fight him when challenged, he will shoot the gentleman down as he would a dog he had caught after one of his lambs. After the attorney strikes the yeoman with his hand and then with his cane, the yeoman does in fact shoot him down. But earlier this gentleman conclusively proved himself to be a “fine” gentleman, not a true one. He made improper proposals to a young schoolteacher from New England and then lied to his own wife. The schoolteacher's suitor, a plain man, challenges the gentleman, wounds him slightly, and is himself shot in the ribs. Explaining his conduct, the suitor says, “when a man finds himself on a certain line of duty, if he is a man really, he can't step aside from it because of apparent dangers.” But this question of the rightness of duels seems to have troubled Johnston, spokesman for the ordinary Georgian. He remarks that the idea that there is greater courage in declining a challenge than in accepting one passes uncontradicted out of respect for religious conviction, but the fact is that to decline a challenge attests at the best to a negative courage only. “It seems a doubtful courage … that refuses to give satisfaction which endangers life when it is the only one that the injured cares to accept for a wrong done that he feels to be worthy of death.” This, the novelist confusingly adds, does not mean that he favors dueling—he is merely talking about courage.

It seems clear that Johnston's distaste for duels was related to his distaste for the role played by the gentleman in the myth of the Old South. But it also seems clear that he did not really wish to dispose of the classification “gentleman.” He smuggled the “true” gentleman back into the new myth of the New South under the guise of the robust yeoman and the courageous plain man. And back with the gentleman came the possibility of recourse to bloodshed—under the code or not—to requite injuries too delicate for the law to handle.

More subtly indeterminate than the ambivalence in Johnston is the attitude toward dueling in Robert Penn Warren's socially and philosophically conservative World Enough and Time (1950), his treatment of the Beauchampe-Sharpe case. There is much violence in this novel—mayhem and murder with fists, fingers, dirks, clubs, and pistols. Percival Skrogg, a tubercular idealist, in the course of his life kills three men in five formal duels, and two in “hot affrays of the street.” Thus, he would seem to think, he makes a discordant world purer and less relative. The sick Skrogg's career as a duelist becomes an ironic comment on absolute actions, on the possibility of “purification.” But Warren brings new complexities explicitly into discussion in connection with an imagined duel with Colonel Fort which Beaumont records in his narrative. Beaumont, ostensibly avenging his wife Rachel, calls the duel “Our Great Purpose,” but the “real content” of the contemplated act is almost forgotten; it evaporates in the phrase and the idea. In Beaumont's imagination the opponents stand at dawn in a clearing, the seconds and surgeon waiting “with the air of farmers outside a country church”; two pistols pop, smoke rises on the frosty air, and one man falls. This duel is imagined because Fort, the older man, had done something perfectly natural; he had brought sympathy to a lonely, neurotic young woman and, finally, had tupped her in a dark parlor. At the time she did not even know her future husband. Warren adds:

That death, which we regard as perfectly silly and unnecessary, is the most real content of the event. Some of our forefathers regarded it as silly and unnecessary. In the 1820's, a Frankfort newspaper comments on a certain duel: “Yesterday morning two dunces stood up and exchanged shots from pistols. One was hit and died. It is a pity that the other dunce did not meet a like fate. We can dispense with a few more such dunces.” We are complacent as we look back on those dunces, and we congratulate the newspaper editor in old Frankfort for being so much like ourselves.

But on second thought, we may be like the dunces. We do not stand up at dawn, but we lie in a scooped-out hole in a tropical jungle and rot in the rain and wait for the steel pellet whipping through fronds. … For Hecuba may be something to us, after all.

For who is Hecuba, who is she, that all the swains adore her? She is whatever we must adore. Or if we adore nothing, she is what we must act as if we adored.

Something must serve as a sign of honor, of man's pretentious estate. Something must make it clear that life is sweet when rightly lived and less than fully meaningful when the ideal is not given its due.

V

Additional explanations or defenses of dueling may easily be adduced. There are openings for the Freudian in the fact and in the concept of the duel, in the weapons with which it was fought, and in the wounds inflicted. The duel represents most obviously the gratification of the instinct for aggression. The psychoanalyst may find rich opportunities in the duelist's discomfiture of his enemy or, for that matter, in his own defeat; the Freudian can see the dirk, sword, or pistol as a punishing sign of masculinity, and he may observe that a surprising number of wounds were inflicted in the groin or hip. Considered from another standpoint, dueling may be thought of as a form of ritual killing which is to be associated with primitive ceremonies; and in consideration of the intensity and diffusion of the cult of the heroic gentleman in the South, possible significances of this kind are not to be altogether and lightly dismissed. As a thoroughly masculine symbol the duel may be emotionally associated with the idea of the gentleman in some of his important roles, e.g., controlling and ordering nature, mastering slaves, dominating white women, and maintaining a position of political power in the South and in the nation. Taken more simply, the duel, like other devices for ordering an otherwise disturbingly amorphous existence, helped to frame life and to define certain of its problems. Thought of in this way the duel has its analogues in dangerous sports such as the bullfight. It lent the calm of distance, of rigorous formality to emotional crises which might otherwise have seemed trivial and ugly. Death in a duel was significantly conclusive: it marked the end of a life played out in accordance with the terms of a myth. The fixed details of the arranged duel veiled and muffled that which was sentimental or vulgar. Ritual death raised even the foolish to an honorable estate.

Few such refined considerations are to be found in arguments in favor of the duel before 1861. Many proponents traced its origins to the age of chivalry, not to some savage era. Some grounded it in nature, others in nature modified. They saw it as a civil, possibly even a moral, equivalent for war. It had the effect of chastening manners at the same time that it nourished courage; and it was important that masculinity and good manners be sustained and encouraged among people frequently characterized as the victims of a system which at once enervated and brutalized. Furthermore, the duel was useful for individual therapy; it released exacerbating tensions in those finely attuned persons who suffer under insult. Paradoxically, in view of the low opinion in the South of Northern “higher law” advocates, the duel was seen as adding a dimension to the possibilities of justice. Viewed from a grandly philosophic perspective, it was related to the principle of order in the cosmos: social strata exist by the dictates of nature; among individuals there must be degrees. The duel was necessary to maintain gentlemen as a class and to demonstrate, when need be, the relative positions of gentlemen within the class.

Propagandists for the South were increasingly active from 1830 to 1861, and one of their major tasks was the development and propagation of a myth for the region. They were well aware that the existence of the peculiar institution and the frequency with which blood was shed in the South were cited by critics to support charges of Southern barbarism. “Bull Run” Russell noted that some secret influence of slavery or of Northern attacks on slavery excited to a degree exceeding belief the deep animosity of the South toward New England and toward England as well—because England, like the North, had the canker of peace upon it, as was evidenced by the abolition of dueling.

Justifications for slavery existed ready to hand in literature from the Greeks forward, and excuses for ordinary violence were not hard to find. Justifying the duel proved to be more of a problem. Certainly a majority of literate Southerners came to believe that civilization had reached its finest flowering in the Southern way of life and that Southern society had come to perfection in (pace the planter's wife) the Southern gentleman. Clearly the duel had its affective charms, and to extremists the privilege of single combat became the most precious jewel in the slaveholding gentleman's crown—his archetypal attribute, the critical element in his exact, fastidious code, the ultimate test and safeguard of the Southern system.

But a majority of Southern apologists gagged on the necessary association of the duel with the myth of the South and on the assumption that to defend slavery was to defend the duel. Despite the widespread practice of dueling—perhaps in part because the practice was widespread and examples of its evil were always fresh in mind—representations which might have made the duel the focus for the symbolic system of the South as it related to the gentleman could not in fact win the collective sanction of the region or, for that matter, of the gentlemanly class. The duel was inconsonant with powerful ideas and stereotypes. It was at odds with the dictates of reason and contrary to Christian, bourgeois, and democratic principles. It was inconsistent with the image of the gentleman as—among other things—kindly, refined, and restrained. That such antagonisms existed betrays a cleavage in the Southern mind that made impossible the development of a myth acceptable to all Southerners in all details. Despite their allegiance to an overarching myth of an aristocratic South, most Southerners were strongly impelled to be peaceful citizens, Christian in their avowed sentiments, even democratic within limits. Despite the parti pris which forced them to refer all theories and problems to the interests of Negro slavery, they were eager to define a Southern gentleman who transcended the code, transcended the narrowly regional, and was calculated to win admiration everywhere. They did not see why their ideal hierarchical society could not be headed by men who were slaveholders and Christians, men of honor brave enough not to be duelists.