The Forgotten History Of American Dueling

[00:00:00]Everybody knows the story. Aaron Burr shoots Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton dies. The whole country loses its mind.

[00:00:07]And it did. But it lost its mind over who died.

[00:00:12]The duel itself, nobody was shocked. Because by 1804 dueling in America was just a thing people did. A fixture. And Hamilton's death didn't even slow it down. The practice kept right on growing for another 30 years. Now, we didn't invent this. We imported straight out of the book.

[00:00:32]Over there, nobles had been settling their honor in one-on-one fights since the Middle Ages. Early on, they called it judicial combat. And the whole idea was that God himself would step in, judge whichever man was in the right, and let him win. Kings tried to ban it.

[00:00:49]The Catholic Church condemned it. Made no difference. People kept dueling anyway. So, in 1777, a group of Irishmen finally sat down and wrote the whole thing down.

[00:01:00]The Code Duello. 26 rules covering everything. And I mean everything. From what time of day you were even allowed to receive a challenge, down to how many shots it took to satisfy a man's honor.

[00:01:14]Americans borrowed the European rules for decades. It wasn't until 1838 that we got our own American version, written by the governor of South Carolina, a man named John Lyde Wilson. And the process was no joke. You didn't just walk up and shoot somebody. Every duel ran through a second, basically your representative.

[00:01:34]And get this, that second's number one job was talking you out of it. Reconciling the whole thing before anybody got hurt.

[00:01:44]The offended man sends his challenge through his second. The other guy apologizes?

[00:01:49]Usually it's over right there. He'd rather fight, then he gets to pick the weapons, the time, and the place. And here's the mercy baked into it. Right up until somebody actually pulls a trigger, an apology could still call the whole thing off.

[00:02:04]The wildest detail though, under Wilson's code, each second stood there holding his own loaded pistol. Not for show. If one of the men fired before the word was given, jumped the gun, the other man's second was allowed to shoot him down right where he stood. These codes spelled it out word for word.

[00:02:23]Wilson on the weapons, quote, "Smooth bore pistols not exceeding 9 in in length with flint and steel." And the old Irish code had a rule that a wound bad enough to make your hand shake, quote, "Must end business for that day."

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[00:03:43]Most men went with pistols, big caliber smooth bore flintlocks, the exact style Hamilton and Burr used. That was basically the standard American dueling gun. A whole lot of men owned a match pair and from 1750 to 1850, a whole lot of them got used. But here's the part that surprises people. Your odds of actually dying weren't that high.

[00:04:04]These flintlocks misfired constantly and even a good shot had a hard time hitting anything because you only had about 3 seconds to fire. Take any longer than that lining up your aim and you were considered dishonorable. And these things could drag on. 1802, DeWitt Clinton gets challenged by a guy named John Swartwout, one of Burr's friends who accused Clinton of running political smears on Burr. They go five rounds.

[00:04:31]Five. And after every single round, the seconds step in and beg them to make peace. Clinton won't apologize.

[00:04:38]Swartwout already been shot, once in the thigh, once in the ankle, and the man still won't quit. Finally, Clinton just throws up his hands. He's not willing to keep shooting a wounded man, so he walks off the field and lets the surgeons go to work. And look at who's doing this.

[00:04:54]People from every walk of life, but especially the heavy hitters. Button Gwinnett, a man who signed the Declaration of Independence, gunned down in a duel by a general named Lachlan McIntosh. Commodore Stephen Decatur, a straight-up naval hero, killed by another Commodore, James Barron. Even a young Abraham Lincoln nearly ended up in a sword fight and only got out of it by apologizing for something he'd written about an Illinois official in the newspaper. Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington both hated the whole practice. Franklin flat-out called dueling a murderous practice that quote decides nothing. But the one that really stains a reputation, Andrew Jackson. Before he was president, Jackson was a young lawyer with a name as a serious duelist. Then comes 1806 and his duel with Charles Dickinson.

[00:05:45]Dickinson fires first, wings him, then Jackson goes to fire and his pistol misfires. Now, by the rules, a misfire counts as your shot. That duel is supposed to be over, done. But Jackson, with his crazy ass, he pulls the hammer back, cold as ice, takes aim a second time, and kills Dickinson. And a whole lot of people looked at that and saw it for what it was, murder. And don't think you could just decline, especially in the South.

[00:06:14]Turn down a challenge and they'd post you. They'd write up a public statement branding you a coward and hang it where everyone could see it, or run it in the paper. When Congressman John Randolph refused to face General James Wilkinson, Wilson posted him, called him, quote, "a prevaricating, base, culminating scoundrel, poltroon, and coward." And the laws? Useless. Cities banned dueling, so people just left the city.

[00:06:41]The single most popular dueling ground in the whole country sat at Bladensburg, Maryland, right next door to the nation's capital. Illegal in Washington, perfectly legal in Maryland, a short carriage ride away. So, angry congressmen could literally ride out to Bladensburg and fire at each other at will. Some guys got so good with the pistol, they basically turned dueling into a career. There was a man named Alexander McClung who once killed an opponent from over a hundred feet away with a smoothbore pistol, which, if you know anything about smoothbores, is an absurd shot. That killing, and the ones after it, gave him a terrifying reputation. But the story goes, he was haunted by the ghost of every man he had put in the ground. And the last man Alexander McClung ever deleted with the pistol was himself in 1855. So, what finally ended dueling?

[00:07:33]Believe it or not, no law ever managed to. The laws never worked. People ignored them, dodged them, rode across state lines to get around them. What actually killed dueling was public opinion. By the time of the Civil War, the whole thing was dying out for good, even down south. Because here's what people finally understood. This thing that started out as a careful, formal process, something actually designed to stop men from killing each other in the heat of the moment, had rotted into plain, cold-blooded murder. And once folks saw it for what it had become, they were done with it. A word said wrong on a Friday night used to mean a challenge on Saturday and a funeral on Sunday. By the end, America just decided it didn't want to live like that anymore.