“The Coffee-House World Manifest their Esteem by Laughing” (Nov. 1998)

[Originally presented as “’The Coffee-House World Manifest their Esteem by Laughing’: Honor, Violence, and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Southern Historical Association, Birmingham, November 1998.]

In the early hours of April 16, 1801, Skelton Jones and Armistead Selden, two young Virginians, met at Bloody Run near Richmond to settle accounts. During a quarrel a few days beforehand, Selden had called Jones a liar. One of Jones’s friend demanded that Selden either apologize or meet on the field of honor. Selden offered a few conciliatory remarks but, after conferring with his own friends, refused to elaborate further unless Jones apologized to him as well. The latter refused, the duel ensued, and Selden died instantly when Jones shot him through the heart. ¹

The scene is all too familiar in Southern history, not to mention regional myth. Yet, surprisingly, historians have neglected the origins of the duel. They assume that it arrived with the first “Cavalier” settlers of Virginia or grew from imitations of British, French, and German officers, who dueled at the slightest provocation, in the Revolutionary war in the 1770s. ² Neither explanation is accurate.

Instead, the origins of the duel in Virginia are best examined as the outcome of a three-stage development. In the first period (roughly from the founding of Jamestown to the early eighteenth century), the opinion of gentlemen–and they were the exclusive participants in the custom–permitted no challenges at all. In the second stage, in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, challenges remained socially unacceptable, but paradoxically, gentlemen were expected to honor them if they were issued under conditions thought appropriate. In the third era, from the close of the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth century, opinion greatly shifted. Genteel society perceived the duel as almost a necessary convention. ³

The only record of an actual duel before 1765 occurred in 1624 between George Harrison, a planter, and Richard Stephens, a Jamestown merchant. In the spring of 1624, planter Harrison went to check on his goods that had arrived at Jamestown and got into an argument and fight with Stephens. A week later, Harrison sent a challenge to Stephens to meet him at a certain time and place and Stephens complied. There is no record of the actual duel, but we do know that, as a result, Harrison received “a cut in the leg which did somewhat grieve him.” Two weeks later Harrison died, and since he had been hurt in the field there was a coroner’s inquest. The doctors found that he had not died from the cut‑-which was only a small one between the garter and the knee‑-but from natural causes, and Stephens was released. ⁴

Challenges not resulting in duels were also rare before 1765. So far as this researcher has discovered, there were only seven. Moreover, when such challenges were issued, almost all the initiators of the trouble ended up in court. There they were reprimanded in one way or another. While there were no colonial Virginia statutes specifically outlawing dueling or the sending of challenges, Virginians quite clearly and simply believed that sending challenges, as one court put it, was “contrary to ye known laws of England and peace of this country.” ⁵

Take the 1676 case of Giles Bland, a merchant newly arrived from England. While paying a visit to the home of Thomas Ludwell, a member of the Council, the two got into a heated argument and fell to blows. At that point, depending upon who you believe, Bland either challenged Ludwell to a duel and the two exchanged gloves to meet the next morning or Bland stole Ludwell’s glove after Ludwell rejected the challenge. However Bland obtained it, the next morning he nailed Ludwell’s glove to the door where the Grand Assembly met in Jamestown, with some libelous words against Ludwell written underneath. For issuing a challenge, the Governor and Council ordered Bland to ask Ludwell’s forgiveness (which Bland did) and further fined him £500 (a very significant sum indeed) for his abuse done to the Grand Assembly by nailing the glove to their door, although they suspended payment for two years to allow Bland to appeal to the Crown. As the Governor and Council said, “they intended by itt rather to deter him from the like Rash Actions for the tyme to come, then to Ruin him, for what he had unadvisedly committed.” For his part, Ludwell publicly proclaimed that, as a councillor, he “knew better what was becoming the place he exercised than to give or accept a challenge from any man.” ⁶

In the second stage in the rise of dueling, a stage Virginia reached around the mid-18th century, opinion continued to condemn sending challeges, but there was increasing pressure to accept challenges. There is a record of at least three duels between 1765 and 1775 and at least two other “near duels” (challenges that did not quite reach the field of honor). ⁷

How much things had changed can be seen by an account of a 1765 duel, the first of record in Virginia since the Harrison-Stephens duel nearly a century and a half earlier. In August 1765, during the heated politics of the Stamp Act Crisis, a British officer, Col. John Bayliss, posted a notice on the Dumfries Town Notice Board accusing two local Virginians of being “arrant cowards.” Although it is not clear why Col. Bayliss posted the two men, we do know that he had been angry with one of the young men’s father, the local minister, accusing him of “using his pulpit to foment” discontent among his parishioners. Regardless of why Col. Bayliss posted the two Virginians, they responded by tacking their own note on the Town Notice Board: “The author of the above notice is a — — — liar, which the subscribers are at any time ready to prove,” and that “he [Bayliss] is a bully, and dare not engage a gentleman on equal terms.” Taking the bulletin board war one step further, Col. Bayliss soon thereafter attached an addendum: “The best proof of [their] accusation would be to present to Bayliss a pair of pistols in private.”

One of those young Virginians, John Scott, accepted the challenge and the men met before sunrise on September 4, 1765, behind the old church at Quantico: Col. Bayliss with his second and Scott, with his second, his brother-in-law, Cuthbert Bullitt. Bullitt, who had all along been trying to dissuade Scott from fighting, attempted one last time to bring about a reconciliation. Col. Bayliss then angrily turned on Bullitt, abusing him terribly, saying he would be just as happy to fight him. Bullitt accepted. Later court evidence suggested that Col. Bayliss had all along intended to “fix a quarrel” with Bullitt, whom he disliked even more than Scott.

In the ensuing duel, Col. Bayliss received a mortal wound in the thigh from which he died about five hours later. At the subsequent trial, “the examining court which consisted of seven gentlemen of character,” on a plea of self-defense “dismissed Mr. Cuthbert Bullitt from any further prosecution.”

We have evidence of a couple of other duels before the Revolutionary War, one involving John Page, a member of the Virginia Council, who challenged another English army officer, Capt. Foy, over some insulting remarks that the English officer had made. The other duel involved Joseph Calvert, the Sergeant of the Borough of Norfolk, and an up-and-coming lawyer, Thomas Burke, who would later be Governor of North Carolina during the Revolutionary War. No one was hurt in either of these last two duels. ⁸

If, as I argue, these three duels suggest that in the mid-eighteenth century public opinion on dueling had begun to change, I don’t think you can say there was a real acceptance of dueling. Public opinion was still something other than what it would be in the early 1800s. This becomes clear from a rare glimpse we have into the tavern and coffeehouse world of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. Whatever the importance of print in shaping political public opinion‑-a point stressed by historians focusing on the creation of a public sphere in 18th-century America‑-public opinion on dueling in 18th-century America seems to have been primarily shaped in the oral culture of small-group settings and institutions like taverns and coffeehouses. ⁹

Such public houses in Virginia were characterized by what Rhys Isaac called “extravagant ways of talking.” Honor comes alive when we listen to that good Baptist Morgan Edwards’s description from 1772 of “a prolonged battle of wits between himself and ‘a number of colone[l]s, captains, esquires etc., who had met [at an inn in Goochland County] for public business.” The locals clearly took great pleasure in the verbal repartee, “their skill in pressing provocation beyond permitted limits, and then seeming to step back half a pace, to within acceptable bounds.” One gentleman might say, “You lie, Sir; I mean on the bed”; to which the butt of the humour would respond, “And you lie, Sir; I mean under a mistake,” all accompanied by loud guffaws and applause. ¹⁰ One might say that a certain crude level of jocularity–albeit a tense sort of jocularity for an outsider like Morgan Edwards–seems to have been the norm at these provincial taverns. Now such joking, as Kenneth Greenberg has shown, could well be a dangerous game for highly sensitive antebellum Southerners, ready to issue a challenge at the slightest offense. ¹¹ But, in the mid-eighteenth century, such laughter served to suppress dueling.

To demonstrate this, let’s take a look at a slightly classier establishment, the Williamsburg Coffeehouse whose clientele included most of the political elite of Virginia. The Coffeehouse was William Byrd II’s favorite place to pass the time when in Williamsburg, a place to settle his business debts and catch up with his friends before attending to state business at the nearby Capitol, and a nice place to spend the evening gambling. ¹² On the porch of the Coffeehouse was also where Governor Francis Fauquier was waiting when George Mercer, newly arrived back in Virginia as the official Stamp Agent, entered Williamsburg, pursued closely by a mob demanding Mercer’s resignation or else. ¹³ It was also the court of public opinion to which James Mercer and Arthur Lee turned in one of the stranger affairs of honor in Virginia history.

James Mercer and Arthur Lee, although both members of prominent Northern Neck families, were a study in contrasts. At the time of their affair of honor in the spring of 1767, Arthur Lee, younger brother of Richard Henry Lee, had been back in Virginia less than a year. He had been shipped off to England as a ten-year-old boy and returned as a twenty-five-year-old man after receiving a thorough education, first at Eton and then Edinburgh where he studied medicine, earned an M.D., and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Upon returning to Virginia in the summer of 1776, he settled in Williamsburg as a practicing physician. ¹⁴ James Mercer, younger brother of the Stamp Agent, had on the other hand lived in Virginia all his life, received his education at the College of William and Mary, been a captain in the Continental service during the French & Indian War, become a lawyer in Fredericksburg, and been elected a burgess from Hampshire County in 1762, representing that county continuously up until the eve of the American Revolution. ¹⁵ James Mercer was perfectly at home in the tavern and coffeehouse world of mid-18th-century Virginia, frequenting the Coffeehouse when in Williamsburg. Arthur Lee, in contrast, had never really found his place in Virginia society, forever feeling himself the outsider.

Events brought these two together. James Mercer was no fan of the Stamp Act but when he heard that Richard Henry Lee had been behind the mob that attacked his brother George and had had the gall to have his brother burned in effigy on one of Lee’s plantations, James Mercer rushed to his brother’s defense with a series of letters to the Virginia Gazette attacking Richard Henry Lee’s character. James Mercer was more than ably matched by Arthur Lee who, in picking up the pen in his brother’s behalf, discovered a true talent for pseudonymous polemics that would eventually make him one of the more important penmen of the American Revolution.

Knowing the animosity between the two men, it was with great curiosity that the coffeehouse crowd must have listened to James Mercer’s strange tale one Tuesday morning in the spring of 1767. As Mercer related the story, Arthur Lee had challenged him to a duel but when Mercer got to the agreed upon spot just outside of Williamsburg shortly after dawn that morning, Lee and his second were nowhere to be seen. Lee, having gotten wind of what Mercer was reporting in the Coffeehouse, sent his second there to report their version, how they had shown up but had seen neither hide nor hair of Mercer. When Mercer refused to recant, Lee himself went down to the Coffeehouse intent on giving Mercer a caning. Instead Mercer thrashed Lee. As a pseudonymous “Essay on Pride” published in the Virginia Gazette later described the scene:

Canes and pistols are removed, by the resistless command of the surrounding croud, to fisty-cuffs go the exalted duellists. O sad, sad! the Doctor [Arthur Lee], instead of being handsomely run or fired through the body, which would have given him infinite satisfaction, is bled at the nose, and has his eyes closed, as if he had been no better than a clown or a peasant. The poor, abused, unfortunate Doctor, lifts his discomposed, tumefied, bloody, and sightless head; and, notwithstanding the inconvenience of such a situation for a display of oratory, makes a very fine harangue on the most grossly and shamefully violated laws of honour; for which, as a mischief to society, with a truly disinterested spirit, he expresses more concern than for any injury done to his own person. The Coffee-House world manifest their esteem by laughing. ¹⁶

The Coffeehouse world laughed at Lee, not really because they supposed him a coward for challenging Mercer to a duel and then failing to show up. ¹⁷ That really doesn’t seem to have been an issue. Certainly Mercer himself felt he had to go to great lengths even after the coffeehouse wrangle to prove by sworn affidavits that he had been at the right place at the right time as he had no second to vouch for him while Lee did.

Rather the denizens of the Coffeehouse laughed at Arthur Lee because his “very fine harangue on the most grossly and shamefully violated laws of honour” simply had no place in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. When they heard Lee exclaim how only the law of honor could protect one’s most valuable possession–one’s reputation–through “the shame of contempt” at being posted as a coward or the ultimate sanction of the threat of death in a duel, or how the law of honor operated even on those gentlemen who opposed dueling in principle since “the opinion of mankind, which is as forcible as a law, calls upon a man to resent an affront, and fixes the contempt of a coward upon him if he refuse,” all they could do was laugh. ¹⁸ However well such arguments worked in Europe and would later work in early national Virginia, they were nothing but aristocratic pretensions to colonial Virginians, certainly not to be taken seriously. ¹⁹

In the mid-18th century, critics of dueling, in various anonymous, pseudonymous, and signed pieces in the Virginia Gazette, condemned this barbarous practice as having no place in a civilized age, criticizing the order of chivalry as an age in which a group of “hectors”–no more than “professed bullies” or “licensed lunatics”–”strolled about from one kingdom to another, destroying their fellow creatures with impunity.” They mimicked the exchanges between duelists as “the ravings of insanity”:

Sir, you have injured me in the most outrageous manner, and I demand reparation. The reparation I demand is that you should meet me with a case of pistols, and endeavour to blow my brains out. If you do, there will be an end of the matter. If you lose your life in the attempt, I shall die with pleasure on a gibbet, having thus vindicated my honour by trespassing on the laws of my country. ²⁰

Arthur Lee was simply out of touch with public opinion in his native Virginia. Thoroughly discredited, Lee abandoned the colony the following year for England, but even there he could not escape taunts. ²¹ Needless to say he ever after had bitter feelings toward the people of Williamsburg–a place he called that “sink of idleness and vice”–for the way he had been treated there.

Nevertheless, despite such evidence of public opinion opposed to dueling, this pre-revolutionary era also marks the beginnings of a fundamental shift in public opinion that accounts for the veritable rash (compared to the earlier colonial era) of duels and near duels in the years between 1765 and 1775. This shift is seen in the failure of the authorities to take would-be duelists as seriously as they had in the past. Although, as a sitting Burgess, James Mercer had a perfect right to take Arthur Lee to court for challenging him, he made no effort to do so. In the Lee-Mercer affair, the local justice of the peace was taking sworn affidavits on Mercer’s behalf rather than arresting Lee and his second for sending and carrying challenges. Apparently the sending and carrying of challenges was no longer seen as a threat to public order. This shifting consensus is also reflected in the novel pressure on the Virginia gentry to accept a challenge. Mercer, despite his apparent aversion to dueling and all the obstacles, did feel pressure to accept Lee’s challenge, expressing publicly his fear that if he declined Lee’s challenge that Lee would have plumed himself at Mercer’s expense. ²²

Finally we turn to the third stage which Virginia reached at the end of the 18th century, in which public opinion not only continued to place great pressure on Virginians to accept challenges but now also placed increasing pressure on Virginians to issue a challenge in response to an affront. By the early 1800s, it was becoming just as dishonorable in the court of public opinion not to give a challenge when affronted as to refuse one when challenged. ²³

I have found little evidence to support the general consensus that traces the origins of this new attitude to the Revolutionary War. Assuredly Virginians in the Continental Army were involved in duels. As Charles Royster in his excellent study of the Continental Army has demonstrated, dueling was integral to the rise of military professionalism during the war. But, as we have seen, Americans did not need European officers to teach them about dueling. ²⁴

More importantly, however much their war experience might have persuaded a certain clique of officers like Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to carry the code of honor into peacetime politics, there is little evidence that there was any marked shift in public opinion in general on dueling in the immediate post-war years. In fact, the pattern of duels that we find in the 1780s and early 1790s seems overall quite similar to the pattern of the late 1760s, about one duel every other year from 1786 through 1800, only one of which ended in a death. ²⁵

The dramatic shift in public opinion on dueling does not really happen until around 1799, reflected most dramatically in evidence of a major change in the nature of the press with regard to dueling. For 1799 is when we start to see the emergence of: (1) dueling newspaper editors like the brothers Skelton and Meriwether Jones, and William Rind; (2) regularly published postings, as well as detailed descriptions of duels that had already taken place; (3) the publication of numerous letters to the editors and multipart essays on dueling; and (4) a general consensus in these letters and essays that public opinion was ultimately behind it all, forcing even men personally opposed to the code duello to send and accept challenges. ²⁶

Dueling behavior in the early nineteenth century was simply of a qualitatively different order of magnitude compared to the eighteenth century. In 1803 alone, there were at least ten challenges, six duels, and six deaths from dueling in Virginia. A very violent year indeed! ²⁷

Not that public opinion in the early 1800s demanded that an affront or a challenge had to lead necessarily to a duel. The code of honor was never and nowhere that simple. Some Virginians felt that particular circumstances absolved individuals from getting involved in duels. Thus Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1806–when it appeared that Jefferson’s son-in-law was on the verge of getting into a duel with John Randolph of Roanoke–that Jefferson believed “the mass of mankind and particularly that thinking part whose esteem we value, would condemn in a husband and father of a numerous family everything like the forwardness in this barbarous and lawful appeal.” ²⁸

We can see these tensions in public opinion as well as the underlying consensus in the early 1800s when we take a deeper look at the Jones-Selden duel with which we began this talk. It was a seemingly straightforward affair of honor. Selden had given Jones the lie, they were unable to work out a suitable apology, a duel was fought, and Selden was killed instantly. But whether the court of public opinion would honor or dishonor either of the principals was not so straightforward.

At a subsequent inquest, the court focused on whether Skelton Jones should have been satisfied with the apology that Selden had given him. One observer reported that he and everybody else who was at the inquest believed that, “considering the circumstances collectively,” Jones “might have been satisfied with the apology offered.” But this observer believed that in the final analysis none of them could condemn Jones for not accepting the apology, for, as he put it, “of this he [Jones] had the exclusive right of judging.” ²⁹

Others, however, thought that it was not that simple. James Callender, the editor of the Richmond Recorder, who was notorious for digging the skeletons out of people’s closets, launched a campaign to bring Skelton Jones to justice in 1803, a couple of years after the deadly duel. In a series of editorials in the Recorder, Callender touched on all of the circumstances that he believed made Skelton Jones culpable. He accused Jones of murder by not doing enough to find a peaceful solution, of demanding unreasonable concessions that no man of honor could submit to, and of refusing to accept an apology. Furthermore he claimed Jones and Selden were intimate friends. He said the quarrel was about something trivial. (They were arguing at a brothel over a mulatto prostitute.) On top of that, Callender accused Jones of being the sole aggressor, of fighting a duel on uneven terms, of challenging someone not accustomed to firearms, of being “a professed duellist,” of practicing with a pistol, and shame of all shames, of being “in the habit of firing at a mark.” Meriwether and Skelton Jones in their own paper, the Richmond Examiner, just as fervently denied all of these accusations, except for the part about the prostitute. ³⁰

Behind all these charges and denials, I think you can see something of the public opinion behind dueling. Callender was a staunch vocal opponent of dueling which he called “a crime of great magnitude.” Yet Callender was perhaps even more a highly skillful polemicist who knew very well which arguments would work and which would not. ³¹ He didn’t attack Jones on the fairly simple grounds that Jones had broken a state law against dueling, for Callender knew full well that such an argument was fruitless in early nineteenth-century Virginia. Rather Callender appealed to the public on the basis of the code of honor which he believed the public accepted. Thus Callender admitted that, however regrettable, one could understand duels fought because the duelist was heavily pressured to accept a challenge or when the challenger had received “excessive provocation.” But what apparently not everybody could accept is that Jones should have “the exclusive right of judging” whether Selden’s apology was sufficient. Interestingly, though, when Callender came to accept that Selden had indeed been the sole aggressor rather than Jones, he wrote an official apology to Jones that was published shortly after Callender’s death in late 1803. ³²

While one can find few defenses in the newspapers of dueling in the abstract, the newspapers in the early 1800s are filled with defenses of particular duels and duelists. And whether these pieces are critical or supportive of a particular duel or duelist rests almost always not so much on the black-and-white illegality or immorality of issuing or accepting a challenge as on subtle and complex points of socially acceptable behavior.

I suspect that is the way public opinion functioned in the 1600s and 1700s as well. For Anglo-Americans, dueling was simply too much a part of their world and too complex a phenomenon to dismiss out-of-hand. How Virginians responded to any particular challenger or duelist depended on a host of factors. But how they responded did seem to change over time. Each of the stages I have identified seems to possess a certain general consensus on dueling. Yet, without any one really being aware of it, whether gradually or dramatically, public opinion on what was socially acceptable behavior in Virginia changed. It continued to change through the antebellum and postbellum eras and, I hesitate to add, I think it is still changing. At least some gentlemen (I won’t mention names) have told me in private that they think a little dueling might be a good thing today! It would help restore a little civility to politics, they say. Personally I’m glad we live in an age fairly free from dueling but, in case you disagree, I’d just like you to know that I’m a husband and father of a numerous family–I’d say a wife, two kids, three horses, two cats, and a dog are a pretty numerous family–and I sure hope you’re part of that thinking part of mankind whose esteem Jefferson and I really do value.