Dueling and the Origins of the Old South (SHEAR version) (July 1996)

[This is the paper I actually delivered under the title “Dueling and the Origins of the Old South” at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) conference in Nashville, July 1996. I was quite pleased with the positive response I received from so many people there.]

Around sunrise on the morning of Tuesday the 28th of April, 1767, Dr. Arthur Lee and Mr. James Mercer, both of Williamsburg in Virginia, were supposed to fight a duel but none took place. Each later claimed to have shown up at the agreed upon spot but found no sign of the other. The duel never did occur, and instead Lee and Mercer preferred to taunt each other as cowards in the public coffee rooms of Williamsburg and on the pages of the Virginia Gazette. 1

A scholarly consensus arising from the work of Rhys Isaac, Elliott Gorn, Edward Ayers, Kenneth Greenberg, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown suggests that dueling developed in the South out of such modes of honor violence as fistfights, cartwhippings, and tavern brawls reflective of primitive frontier conditions. In this view, Virginia society from the very beginning was a violent, competitive society in which aggressive displays of drinking, gambling, banter, swearing, horse racing, and cockfights naturally erupted, at times, in violence. The shift to dueling would only come about under the general civilizing influence of Anglicization in the late eighteenth century and the particular influence of British, French, and German officers during the American Revolution. 2

The rather farcical Lee-Mercer affair was about as close as colonial Virginians would come to the field of honor. On the surface, it seems to lend support to this theory of the rise of dueling in America. But it actually shows that the theory has a fundamental flaw. For contrary to the scholarly consensus, not only was dueling rare in the colonial era but so was honor violence in general, at least before the mid-eighteenth century. Such evidential problems suggest that, if anything, historians like Isaac who like to speak of “the transformation of Virginia” have unjustly underplayed the dramatic significance of the emergence of dueling in the post-revolutionary era, reflective of far greater changes in the political and legal culture of early America than historians have been willing to credit.

The Lee-Mercer affair is significant because it stimulated the first and only public debate in Virginia on the pros and cons of dueling and honor before the celebrated Hamilton-Burr duel of 1804. 3 Following the incident, Lee, who had issued the original challenge, sent letters to the editors of the Virginia Gazette to defend the practice of dueling. He employed all of the traditional arguments developed to justify dueling and aristocratic notions of honor in England as well as in antebellum America later. 4

Critics of Lee’s essays in Virginia condemned the barbarous practice of dueling in a civilized age, repudiating the order of chivalry as an age in which a group of “hectors”‑-no more than “professed bullies” or “licensed lunatics”‑-who “strolled about from one kingdom to another, destroying their fellow creatures with impunity.” They ridiculed the exchanges between duelists as “the ravings of insanity.” 5

Colonial Virginians had their genteel vices‑-sexual misconduct, drunkenness, gambling, and certainly tobacco-smoking‑-all behaviors traditionally associated with dueling in Europe. 6 But the colonial Virginian elite drew the line at the vice of dueling. The label “duellist” was a term of opprobrium. 7 Before the Lee-Mercer affair, the few challenges sent did not end with anyone coming even that close to the field of honor, the challenger almost always dragged into court for disturbing the peace or contempt of court. 8 Occasionally one notes a Giles Bland, a Daniel Parke, or an Arthur Lee who‑-because of some combination of their individual personalities, education, and experience‑-had absorbed aristocratic notions of honor and dueling, but the other colonists soon put these upstarts in their place. 9

As for the more primitive forms of honor violence from which historians suggest dueling emerged, there is only sketchy evidence and that restricted almost totally to the lower classes after the mid-eighteenth century. Historians like Arthur Scott, Bradley Chapin, Lois Green Carr, Jon Kukla, James Perry, and James Horn who have taken a close look at seventeenth-century records have conclusively rejected the view of the colonial Chesapeake as a violent and chaotic frontier. They find Virginia and Maryland to be “intensely governed societies” remarkable for “the primacy of law” and their social and political stability. 10 One cannot even say that the lower classes in Virginia were particularly violent. The number of trials for homicide in Virginia never amounted to more than two or three a year and manslaughter no more than one or two a year over the colonial era. 11 If personal violence within the lower classes was rare, it was practically non-existent within the upper classes. The major exception that proves the rule was the notorious affray‑-not a duel‑-in which Col. John Chiswell stabbed and killed Mr. Robert Routledge in a quarrel over some debts in the summer of 1766, the year before the Lee-Mercer affair. For this Chiswell was roundly condemned as a murderer and luckily, for him, died before he could be tried and hanged. 12 What violence there was‑-that directed at felons like Chiswell and servants, slaves, and other underlings‑-was strictly controlled by the elite in order to maintain the hierarchical order. 13

This does not mean that Virginians were unconcerned about their reputations. As James Horn notes in his most recent synthesis of the social history of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, “‘considerations of honour, good name, and reputation’ were of vital concern at all levels of society.” 14 Modern scholars who have studied court records have been astonished at the proportion of time consumed by the early county courts in settling cases of slander and defamation. 15 Yet colonial Virginians believed these were proper matters only for the courts. As Horn concludes, “perhaps the most important point to emerge from this analysis is that a means of channeling social friction through the courts was quickly established by adopting English precedents, and potentially bloody contests over honor, rank, and status were for the most part avoided.” 16

Yet by the early 1800s there was a widespread feeling that dueling had become a “national sin.” 17 What had happened between the late colonial and early national period to explain the anomaly? The answer lies in part in a greater acceptance of honor violence among all levels of American society in the early republic, an indirect result of the wide-open competition for membership in the post-revolutionary elite.

Many scholars have associated the rise of the duel in various nations with an elite threatened by the lower orders and/or outsiders. The duel set the bounds of the circle of honor and the code of honor provided the strong inner bond to an aristocratic class pervaded by tension and antipathy as well as fraternity. 18 In this view the numerous political duels between Federalists and Republicans in the early republic were all part of a general caste response to the democratic changes accompanying the Revolution. However, I would have to agree with Richard Buel and Dickson Bruce that “in the South during the early national period, there was less a question of whether an elite would rule than of who should be fit for the elite.” 19

The cult of honor so associated with antebellum Virginia seems to have arisen out of the clash of backcountry and lowcountry elites and cultures. The most prominent players were the second generation of backcountry leaders who were determined to take their proper place in the new state leadership. Although backcountry, Piedmont, and Tidewater shared much culturally, the backcountry, dominated by its Scots-Irish leadership, epitomized the primitive forms of honor violence that the present consensus among historians incorrectly associates with colonial Virginia in general. When these backcountry gentlemen traveled to Richmond or Williamsburg they often and justly felt looked down upon, were particularly sensitive to insults, and engaged in numerous duels to defend their honor. 20

A classic pronouncement of the impact of backcountry culture can be found in a 1786 letter from John Preston to his brother Francis concerning a recent duel in Richmond involving their cousin James Breckenridge in which Francis had apparently served as a second. John and Francis were the sons of William Preston who had emigrated from Ulster, settled and become a prominent leader in the Upper Valley of Virginia, and whose siblings and children had intermarried with many of the other families of the Upper Valley. 21 About the duel, John Preston wrote:

Jamy is a wrong person to triffle with on the subject of batteling. I hope he has come off with honour & convinced his adversary together with the rest of our lowland Gents, that politeness blended with true courage can be found in a back woodsman, this will teach such Gentleman to be a little more reserve in casting their particarly or ever general reffections on a man or sett of men who in my opinion nature has been far more bountifull to than themselves, if art is not so much practised & now they find themselves attacked in any Character they choose & worsted at either. 22

But the cult of honor in early national Virginia was not strictly backcountry in origins. An independent force seems to have stemmed from the lowcountry, a force far closer to Cavalier elements in England than the primal honor of the Scots-Irish, a sense of honor epitomized, as Dickson Bruce notes, by John Randolph of Roanoke. 23 In 1792, as a young student at William & Mary, Randolph engaged in the first of his many duels, with Robert Barraud Taylor (afterward a leading Virginia Federalist), following an intense debate over the pronunciation of some word. As Lemuel Sawyer, one of Randolph’s biographers and a member of Congress with him for sixteen years, described the affair, “they had taken opposite sides in politics and were both fiery spirits and full of Virginia pride of chivalry.” 24

Randolph’s aristocratic view of honor, strikingly close to that of Arthur Lee, was out of place in colonial America but not among certain elements of Virginia society in the early republic who sought to distinguish themselves by the duel as much by their lack of fear of death as their ability to restrain their passions. These were the first hints of the chivalric revival that would sweep the South and the rest of the United States in the nineteenth century. 25

For the origins of this chivalric revival one might not have to look any farther than the American Revolution. Heroic wars have always had a tendency to put chivalric ideas in the heads of idealistic youth who come of age hearing tales of the courageous deeds of “our illustrious Heroes & patriots,” reflected most strongly in the veneration bestowed on the great American warrior George Washington in the early American republic. 26 Adminstrators bemoaned the way the youth on college campuses across the nation appealed to revolutionary principles to justify a rash of riots in the years 1798-1815. 27

But the chivalric revival of which John Randolph was a part was in many ways more a rebellion against than a fulfillment of the values of their parents. There is no better proof of this than the passion with which the second generation of Virginia patriots took to dueling. The period of intense campus rebellions also saw a dueling craze sweep the College of William & Mary although students knew that involvement in a duel in any way brought immediate expulsion. 28

The post-revolutionary revival shares many parallels with other chivalric revivals like the Elizabethan revival of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh. 29 In post-revolutionary Virginia, as in Elizabethan England, a younger generation believed new circumstances demanded new principles. Reacting against the rationalism of their parents’ generation, they sought solutions in romanticism. 30 One can find no better evidence of such a younger generation in Virginia than the tight network of correspondence among students and former students of the College of William & Mary, the breeding ground of many an antebellum southern lawyer and politician. 31 Renowned as the birthplace of the honor system in American colleges, William & Mary students took honor far more seriously than simply signing a pledge on examinations. 32

But we would be wrong to think that we could explain the rise of dueling from strictly local factors. For the early nineteenth century also saw the introduction or revival of dueling in many parts of the English-speaking world including England, Upper Canada, the West Indies, and other English colonies, as well as post-revolutionary France. 33 Furthermore the romanticism of Virginia youth has to be seen as part of the Romantic Movement that swept Europe and America. Although the timing of the rise of dueling in America can hardly be explained, as some historians are wont, by the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott‑-“the Sir Walter disease” as Mark Twain put it‑-one cannot deny that European opinions and fashions had a significant direct and indirect impact on notions of honor and dueling in America. 34

The competition for state elite status, the infusion of Scots-Irish and chivalric elements, and the consequent rise of dueling goes far toward explaining the emergence of the culture that we associate with the Old South. But the process would not have been completed without the competition for national elite status, the tension between a Yankee North and a Cavalier South, that gave to each section its sense of distinctiveness. 35

The debates over dueling that followed the Hamilton-Burr duel show how the North and South began forming two distinct visions of each other as they gravitated toward opposing notions of right conduct. The South started moving toward an ideal centered around romanticized honor and dueling, while the North aspired to an ideal of Christian virtue in which dueling was considered pagan. In the eyes of the other, northerners appeared like soulless capitalists and southerners like ruthless barbarians. 36

Contemporaries recognized the divergence. 37 Southern views can be found in comments in letters from Virginians attending Yale College noting how they felt far more at home with “southerners” than “yankees.” 38 Charles Buford in a letter from New Haven in 1816 wrote:

The opinions I have formed of the Yankees are not very favourable. It is true they are to be admired for their morality and for the oeconomy when they do not carry it so far as to make undeserving of the appelation of virtue; but they are deficient in nobleness of heart and manly pride. They are by no means hospitable, and many of them who put on long faces on Sunday will cheat a stranger on Monday. 39

Quoting Goldsmith‑-‘honour sinks where commerce long prevails’‑-another Virginian, George Tucker, in 1813 lamented that “our commercial habits and possibly some of our political institutions” were undermining “the vestal flame of honour among us.” While directed especially at the North, Tucker warned the South that they

should beware how they hazard the diminution of those elevated and honourable feelings which are supposed to characterize them, and which go so far to redeem them from the reproach for one of their institutions, that has been so lavishly heaped upon them. 40

While historians have long recognized such Cavalier and Yankee ideologies at the heart of the tensions that eventually would lead to the Civil War, they have been too willing, as were antebellum Americans themselves, to give such ideologies longer historical roots than they deserved. As North and South moved in opposite directions on honor and dueling, Americans little realized how far they had come from a colonial world in which even the Southern elite stood firmly united against and effectively suppressed honor violence.

Cite this article as: Baird, Bruce C. "Dueling and the Origins of the Old South (SHEAR version) (July 1996)." Dr. Baird Online. July 12, 2017. Web. May 7, 2024. <https://www.drbairdonline.com/dueling/dueling-and-the-origins-of-the-old-south-2/>.

Notes:

  1. Corbin Griffin, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 28 May 1767; James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 23 July 1767. See also A. R. Riggs, The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot (Williamsburg: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1976) 18-9; Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) 40-4. ↩
  2. Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775,” Shaping Southern Society: The Colonial Experience, ed. T. H. Breen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 249‑53; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 95-8, 319, 322, 373n11; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) 15, 20-1; Elliott J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 19-22; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 57-74; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Honour and American Republicanism: A Neglected Corollary,” Ideology and the Historians, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991) 59-60. For other studies emphasizing the influence of British, French, and German soldiers, an argument going back to the 1890s, see [William G. Stanard,] Rev. Barons of the Potomac and Rappahannock, by Moncure D. Conway Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 216; Evarts B. Greene, “The Code of Honor in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, with Special Reference to New England,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 26 (1927): 376; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965) 207; James T. Moore, “The Death of the Duel: The Code Duello in Readjustor Virginia, 1879‑1883,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 259n1; Robert M. Weir, “The Last of American Freemen”: Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986) 228; V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 304-5. ↩
  3. In August 1780 a meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society debated “Ye Question, Whether Duelling ought to have toleration in this or any other free state” although we do not know what arguments they made. See “Original Records of the Phi Beta Kappa Society,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 4 (1896): 238. ↩
  4. L. C. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 23 July 1767; L. C. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 24 Dec. 1767. My assumption that Arthur Lee was the author of these essays signed “L. C.” is based in part on the observation that Lee later used similar initials‑-“C. L.”‑-with some anonymous essays he wrote for London dailies in 1768 and 1769. See A. R. Riggs, “Penman of the Revolution: A Case for Arthur Lee,” Essays in Early Virginia Literature honoring Richard Beale Davis, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977) 208. Also the July 23 letter specifically condemns the dishonorable practice of opening other people’s letters which was most likely the immediate cause of Lee’s challenge. See Rev. John Camm to Mrs. McClurg, 24 July 1766, “Original Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 2 (1894): 238. ↩
  5. “An Essay on Duelling,” Virginia Gazette, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, 27 Aug. 1767. ↩
  6. Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929) 105; George C. Brauer, Jr., The Education of a Gentle­man: Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England, 1660-1775 (New York: Bookman, 1959) 16-8; Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979) 31; Kiernan, Duel in European History 8, 81-2, 87, 120-1, 153-5. ↩
  7. L. C. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, 24 Dec. 1767. ↩
  8. [William G. Stanard,] Rev. Barons of the Potomac and Rappahannock, by Moncure D. Conway Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 216; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1910; New York: Russell & Russell, 1958) 75-80; Arthur P. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930) 178-9. For colonial America in general, see Greene, “The Code of Honor” 367-88; W. J. Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel in the Early Republic: Burr v. Hamilton,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 14n33. ↩
  9. On Bland, see “The Case of Giles Bland, 1676,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1913): 126-35. On Parke, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 318-9. ↩
  10. Lois Green Carr, “The Foundations of Social Order: Local Government in Colonial Maryland,” Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978) 72-110; Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 275-98; James R. Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615‑1655 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) 237; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth‑Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 334-80, quote 380. ↩
  11. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 200-5; Hugh F. Rankin, Criminal Truial Proceedings in the General Court of Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1965) 204-15. ↩
  12. Carl Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virginia in Virginia, 1766; or, The Importance of the Trivial,” Early Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 188-212. ↩
  13. Fischer, Albion’s Seed 398-405. ↩
  14. Horn, Adapting to a New World 363. ↩
  15. Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1910; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964) 1: 50-2; Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 181-3; Clara Ann Bowler, “Carted Whores and White Shrouded Apologies: Slander in the County Courts of Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 411‑26; Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983) 51-2, 76-7, 85-9, 131-4; Mary Beth Norton, “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 3-39; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 396-7; Perry, Formation of a Society 113‑4, 201‑2; Horn, Adapting to a New World 363-8. The Virginia gentry were not so likely to engage in civil suits for slander as to drag anyone who had shown them the least lack of respect for their official dignity (since the gentry were usually public officials of some kind) as contempt of court. Contempts encompassed a wide range of offenses, including the issuing of challenges. See Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 164‑74; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 81-3, 118-19, 174. ↩
  16. Horn, Adapting to a New World 367. ↩
  17. See, e.g., Samuel Low, A Discourse on Duelling; Preached on Sunday, March 4, 1810, at the Capitol in the City of Washington, and on Sunday, January 6, 1811, at the Capitol in the City of Richmond (Richmond: John O’Lynch, 1811) 3; Lyman Beecher, The Remedy for Duelling. A Sermon delivered before the Presbytery of Long‑Island…April 16, 1806 (New York: J. Seymour for Williams and Whiting, 1809) 31. ↩
  18. Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman 19, 96-7, 319; Kiernan, Duel in European History vii, 1-5, 7, 49-54, 82, 91, 152-3, 159-60; Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 3, 12, 35. ↩
  19. Richard Buel jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972) 80-1; D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 40 (quote). ↩
  20. Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988) 146-70; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 690, 764-71. ↩
  21. Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) 8-9, 21-2, 34. ↩
  22. John Preston to Francis Preston, 26 Dec. 1786, “Some Letters of John Preston,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 1 (1921): 48-9. John Preston himself in 1794 served as a second in a duel in which he noted the seconds after the first round “interposed & compromised the difference amicably & honorably…They both behaved bravely & stood very firm.” See John Preston to Francis Preston, 25 Nov. 1794, “Letters of John Preston,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 2 (1922): 187. ↩
  23. D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 41; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 412. ↩
  24. William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833, 2 vols. (1922; New York: Octagon Books, 1970) 1: 123-6. ↩
  25. Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nation­al­ism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949); Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968); Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 123-6, 163-6, 172; R. Don Higginbotham, “The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South: Some Further Speculations in a National Context,” Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 3-26. ↩
  26. Kiernan, Duel in European History 80-1. On Washington, see I. A. Coles to Henry St. George Tucker, July 20, 1799, “Original Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 4 (1895): 107; Charles A. Stuart to Andrew Reid, Jr., 24 Dec. 1799, “Glimpses of Old College Life,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 8 (1900): 214; Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985) 191-5; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987) 162-70; Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993) 231-49. However, one may note that the most “Jacobinical” students at William & Mary had little respect for Washington as a Federalist. See Joseph Shelton Watson to David Watson, 24 Dec. 1799, “Letters to David Watson,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 29 (1921): 152. Charles Royster has fully demonstrated that honor and dueling were important concerns to officers in the Continental Army. See Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) 88-96, 199-200, 206-10, 337-8. ↩
  27. Edgar W. Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953) 4: 274-7; Howard Miller, The Revolutionary College: American Presbyterian Higher Education, 1707-1837 (New York: New York University Press, 1976) 259-68; Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977); Brugger, Beverley Tucker 41-3; Harold Hellenbrand, The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990) 147-9; Pangle and Pangle, Learning of Liberty 163-6. ↩
  28. Thomas L. Preston to Andrew Reid, Jr., 22 Feb. 1802, 15 Apr. 1802, “Glimpses” 216-7; “The Yates Family,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 7 (1899): 91; “Punishment for Duelling,” William and Mary Quarterly 16 (1907): 126; W. Radford to Andrew Reid, Jr., 1 May 1806, “Glimpses” 220; “Glimpses” 213; Rev. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 31 May 1809, “Letters of Rev. James Madison, President of William and Mary College, to Thomas Jefferson,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 5 (1925): 156. On official policy, see “Statutes of the College in 1792,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 20 (1911): 53; “Punishment for Duelling” 126; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “The Honor System at William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly 18 (1910): 169. ↩
  29. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960); Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966); Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986) 66-82; Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 387-91. For later revivals in England and America, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). ↩
  30. The contrast between the first and second generation of Virginia patriots is well shown in the Tucker family by comparing and contrasting the rationalist views of St. George Tucker with the romantic views of his son Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, his stepson John Randolph of Roanoke, and his younger cousin George Tucker. See W. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke 2: 379-83; Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker: Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) 212-6; Charles T. Cullen, St. George Tucker and Law in Virginia, 1772-1804 (New York: Garland, 1987); Brugger, Beverley Tucker 18-9, 41-3, 126, 204-9. ↩
  31. On the strength of support for Jefferson, see, e.g., Joseph Shelton Watson to David Watson, 24 Dec. 1799, 1 Apr. 1801, “Letters from William and Mary College, 1798-1801,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 29 (1921): 151-2, 165-6; Thomas L. Preston to Andrew Reid, Jr., 7 Jan. 1802, “Glimpses” 216; Brugger, Beverley Tucker 14-7. On the influence of William & Mary, see Herbert B. Adams, The College of William and Mary: A Contribution to the History of Higher Education, with Suggestions for its National Promotion (Washington: GPO, 1887) 48-54; “Education in Colonial Virginia, Part V: Influence of William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 7 (1898): 1-9. ↩
  32. N. Tucker, “Honor System” 165-6. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker had been a student at William & Mary in the late 1790s at a time when his father St. George Tucker was the law professor there. There has still been no thorough study of the origins of the honor system and the role of the College of William & Mary. See, however, “Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 9 (1901): 194-5; “The Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 14 (1906): 216; “The Honor System in American Colleges,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 23 (1914): 6-9; “The Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 23 (1914): 219-20; “The Honor System at William and Mary,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 24 (1915): 31-4; “College Papers,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 25 (1917): 238-40. ↩
  33. Antony E. Simpson, “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99-155; Kiernan, Duel in European History 185-203, 293-314; François Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 187-8; Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Cecilia Morgan, “‘In Search of the Phantom Misnamed Honour’: Duelling in Upper Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 529-62. On the other hand, the heyday of dueling in Ireland began about the 1760s and was in decline by the 1790s and in Germany would not begin until the 1880s. See James Kelly, “That Damn’d Thing Called Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995); McAleer, Dueling. ↩
  34. [George Tucker], Essays on Various Subjects of Taste Morals, and National Policy…By a Citizen of Virginia (Georgetown, D.C.: J. Milligan, 1822) 266-7. On Sir Walter Scott, see Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies 1607‑1763 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) 6; Kiernan, Duel in European History 223-57, 312. ↩
  35. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961); Brugger, Beverley Tucker 163-6; Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Percep­tion of Con­trasting Traditions,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 597-614; Jan C. Dawson, The Unusable Past: America’s Puritan Tradition, 1830 to 1930 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984) 61-75; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr, The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). On a similar tension between Cavalier and Puritan images in seventeenth-century England, see William Lamont and Sybil Oldfield, eds., Politics, Religion and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (London: Dent, 1975) 59-121. ↩
  36. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience 207-8; D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 41-2; Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767‑1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) 42; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 19-20; Kiernan, Duel in European History 306, 309; Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel” 19-23. ↩
  37. See, e.g., Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 23-5; W. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke 382-3. ↩
  38. Charles A. Stuart to Andrew Reid, Jr., 10 July 1800, “Glimpses” 214. ↩
  39. Charles Buford to Samuel McDowell Reid, 19 Jan. 1816, “Glimpses” 224. ↩
  40. G. Tucker, Essays 270-1. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. Henry Reeves, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 2: 230-42, esp. 235-8; McLean, George Tucker 212-6; Roeber, Faithful Magistrates 258-9. On the tension between bourgeois and aristocratic attitudes toward honor and dueling, cf. Donna T. Andrew, “The Code of Honour and Its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850,” Social History 5 (1980): 409-34; Kiernan, Duel in European History 152-3, 159, 163. ↩