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

[This is the full version of the paper “Dueling and the Origins of the Old South” that I wrote for the SHEAR conference in Nashville, July 1996, but it was much too long to present.]

Well before sunrise on the morning of Tuesday the 28th of April, 1767, Dr. Arthur Lee and his second, Mr. Corbin Griffin, set out on foot from Lee’s house in Williamsburg. They had two sets of dueling pistols, one for themselves and the other for Mr. James Mercer, a Williamsburg attorney, since Mercer did not own any. They were headed across a field toward a green level spot in a valley on the left hand side of the road to Yorktown across from the race ground just outside Williamsburg in York County. They were on the spot when they heard the town clock strike five, the time they had informed Mercer they would be there to settle accounts.

As the clock struck, Mercer’s manservant entered his room to wake him as instructed the night before. Mercer got up and quickly dressed. Although Griffin the day before had promised to bring an extra set of dueling pistols, just in case, Mercer grabbed his pair of pocket pistols. He was out the door by twenty minutes past five as the sun was beginning to rise. He walked briskly through town toward the race ground and arrived at the agreed upon spot about five thirty.

Anyway that is the way that Griffin and Mercer independently recalled the events of that day later that spring and summer in accounts in the Virginia Gazette. ¹ But while we would have no trouble reconciling the two accounts in their description of events before 5:30, reconciling them on what took place between 5:30 and 6:00 is indeed difficult. If we are to believe both sets of accounts, both parties were at the green from 5:30 to 6:00, but neither saw the other.

Griffin reported that he and Lee “walked up and down the fence which leads almost directly from Mr. Mercer’s lodgings to the place appointed, and upon the plain that commands the road leading directly from the town until near 6 o’clock; when, not having seen or heard any thing of Mr. Mercer, we returned to Doctor Lee’s lodgings slowly, stopping and looking round us several times, to no purpose.” Mercer “hallooed three times” but heard no answer, sat down for three or four minutes on a dead stump at a spot where he would be sure to see them, walked through the field leading to Dr. Lee’s house, asked a couple of people over at the race ground whether they had seen a couple of gentlemen walking in the field that morning, and then walked back to his lodgings.

As far as the account of the early morning hours of April 27 goes, obviously someone was lying. But unraveling the mystery of who was lying in this farcical affair‑-these two ships passing in the dawn‑-is not my purpose in bringing up this story. ² Rather I believe the affair is interesting for the problem it poses for understanding how the practice of dueling and the principles of honor so closely associated with the Old South came to prominence. For a previously unnoted point about this affair is that it stimulated the first and only public debate of record in Virginia over the pros and cons of dueling and honor before the celebrated Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. ³ Upon returning from the field of honor both parties began immediately to taunt each other in the coffee rooms and on the streets of Williamsburg for their cowardice in failing to show up for the duel. It did not take long before the taunting moved on to the pages of the Virginia Gazette. ⁴

Lee furthermore began to send letters to the editors of the Gazette to defend the practice of dueling. ⁵ In doing so he employed all of the arguments that defenders of dueling had used in England and would later use in antebellum America. In particular he celebrated the principles of modern honor.

Englishmen in the colonies and mother country alike were quite familiar with the distinction between ancient and modern honor and the close ties between modern honor and the emergence of the private duel in the sixteenth century. The distinction was well laid out by Bernard Mandeville in his 1714 classic The Fable of the Bees. The ancient law of honor obliged the man of honor “always to be faithful to his Trust, to prefer the publick interest to his own, not to tell lies, nor defraud or wrong any Body, and from others to suffer no Affront, which is a Term of Art for every Action designedly done to undervalue him.” Mandeville noted that men of ancient honor were

very nice Observers of all these Laws…but the Moderns seem to be more remiss; they have a profound Veneration for the last of ’em [that is, to suffer no Affront]…and if the least Injury be done either to himself or his Friend, his Relation, his Servant, his Dog, or any Thing which he is pleased to take under his Honourable Protection, Satisfaction must be forthwith demanded; and if it proves an Affront, and he that gave it is likewise a Man of Honour, a Battle must ensue. ⁶

Per usual, Mandeville tended to state issues more starkly than most Englishmen were willing. For Lee, as for most defenders of dueling, modern honor did not reduce simply to a resentment to affronts. Modern like ancient honor “perpetually dictates a fairness, justice, and nobleness of conduct.” Furthermore, as both Mandeville and Lee stressed, modern honor well served the public interest. The principle of modern honor ensured “that the public good may continue to be the only motive of public measures; that her laws may be well and faithfully executed; that virtue may meet with the reward of applause; vice and baseness with the punishment of abhorrence and contempt.” He noted “the miserable circumstances of any country, wherein the principles of honour were unfelt or unexercised. So infallibly…must the want of honour in any community, be attended with the loss of virtue, wisdom, dignity, prosperity and peace.” ⁷

For Lee as for Mandeville and other defenders of dueling, modern honor was an improvement over the ancient variety. Honor was the force behind the evolution of modern Western civilization, the protector of “the most delicate feelings, the most tender interests of mankind,” cornerstone of that “bold and generous spirit of an independent Briton [that] gives his country a figure abroad, and guards her liberties at home, a spirit too impatient to brook an affront, and too noble to avenge it, like the assasinating Spaniard.” ⁸ They believed that the code of honor overall tended to prevent quarrels since otherwise resentment would lead to more undisciplined forms of violence. ⁹

Lee further claimed that espousing modern honor did not necessarily make one a duelist, rather “having spoke of honour, as a principle of the most noble and beneficial influence in society, a violation of it, not being always or adequately punishable by nations law, must, conformable to the practice of the English and French,…occasion sometimes duels.” ¹⁰ The duel served as the ultimate sanction for “base and injurious violations of honour, for which the law has devised no remedy, because they are too delicate for its touch, and shrink from the rudeness of a public trial.” ¹¹ For Lee the central concern of the law of honor was the protection of one’s most valuable possession‑-one’s reputation‑-which only the law of honor could protect, either through the fear of “the shame of contempt” at being posted as a coward or the ultimate sanction of the threat of death in a duel. ¹²

The law of honor, as Lee and later critics and apologists for dueling would acknowledge, operated even on those gentleman who opposed modern honor 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.” ¹³ Lee recognized that both common and statute law stood firmly opposed to dueling but seconded Cesare Beccaria, the leading European authority on penal reform, that “‘In vain have the laws endeavoured to abolish this custom (duelling) by punishing the offenders with death. A man of honour, deprived of the esteem of others, foresees that he must be reduced, either to a solitary existence, insupportable to a social creature, or become the object of perpetual insult; considerations sufficient to overcome the fear of death.'” ¹⁴ Honor had its own laws above all other laws, a law of nature that might go contrary to the laws of God and man when matters of honor were at stake. ¹⁵

Far from earning support for Lee’s case, these essays only aggravated Lee’s reputation as an obnoxious coward. Lee’s aristocratic pretensions seem to have become a running joke in Williamsburg after James Mercer settled the affair by beating Lee repeatedly over the head with a cane in one of the public coffee rooms in Williamsburg, after which Mercer and his friends burned Lee in effigy in front of his own door and threatened to toss him into the fire. The following year Lee left Virginia for England where he continued to be occasionally taunted and 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. ¹⁶

Modern Honor and Gentility in England and Virginia

A present consensus following the work of Rhys Isaac, Elliott Gorn, Edward Ayers, Kenneth S. Greenberg, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown suggests that dueling arose in the South out of more primitive modes of honor violence like fistfights, cartwhippings, and tavern brawls reflective of primitive frontier conditions. In this view, Virginia society began as “a violent assemblage of rough male immigrants coming from England to seek their fortunes and smashing their way into Indian territory” and remained 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 influence of Anglicization in the late eighteenth century and the particular influence of British, French, and German soldiers during the American Revolution. ¹⁷

The Lee-Mercer affair shows us that the principle of honor was quite alive among the gentry in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. We hear only second-hand accounts of what went on in the taverns and coffee rooms in Williamsburg, but what we do learn leaves no doubt about what Isaac calls the “extravagant ways of talking” that was characteristic of such places. Honor comes alive when we listen to Morgan Edwards’s report of experiencing “a prolonged battle of wits between himself and ‘a number of colone[l]s, captains, esquires &c, who had met [at an inn in Goochland County] for public business” where 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. ¹⁸

But this emphasis on aggressive and competitive behavior has blown out of proportion the role of honor in colonial Virginia. For most Englishmen, whether in the colonies or the mother country, that modern honor which Arthur Lee espoused was a false honor, unrestrained passion, mere vainglory, fashionable vice, Gothic barbarism. ¹⁹

Sir Francis Bacon had “labeled the whole business ‘a kind of satanicall illusion and apparition of honour; against religion, against lawe, against morall vertue, and against the presidents and examples of the best times and valiantest Nations.'” ²⁰

Joseph Addison, whose popular play Cato would define honor for colonial Americans from the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, condemned those “actuated by false honour,”

and these are such as establish anything to themselves for a point of honour, which is contrary to the laws of God, or of their country; who think it more honourable to revenge, than to forgive an injury; who make no scruple of telling a lie, but would put any man to death that accuses them of it; who are more careful to guard their reputation by their courage than by their virtue. True fortitude is, indeed, so becoming in human nature, that he who wants it scarce deserves the name of a man; but we find several, who so much abuse this notion, that they place the whle idea of honour in a kind of brutal courage; by which means, we have had many among us, who have called themselves men of honour, that would have been a disgrace to a gibbet. In a word, the man who sacrifices any duty of a reasonable creature to a prevailing mode or fashion, who looks upon anything as honourable that is displeasing to his Maker or destructive to society, who thinks himself obliged by this princple to the practice of some virtues and not of others, is, by no means, to be reckoned among true men of honour. ²¹

Opponents of modern honor were not unconcerned with reputation but believed the true fountain of honor was virtue not opinion. ²²

Critics of Lee’s essays in Virginia condemned the barbarous practice of dueling 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”‑-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”:

‘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.’ ²³

Thomas Burke, a physician in Williamsburg who was later to become Revolutionary governor of North Carolina, argued that dueling “will bring us back to the old feudal times, when every man was a soldier, and ignorant of all rights, but those of arms.” Furthermore such principles of honor were “destructive of every moral, christian and generous sentiment, dangerous to the peace of society, to liberty and justice,” encouraging “men to fly in the face of our most sacred laws” “subversive of magnanimity and christian heroism.” Burke also denied that public opinion supported duelists, claiming it was “the common practice for mankind to look with contempt upon him who gives an affront, not on him who tamely suffers it.” ²⁴

From the perspective of the English side of the Atlantic, it is not too surprising that such anti-dueling sentiments should be so strong in colonial Virginia. If modern honor, as Mervyn James notes, proved the dominant notion of honor among the English nobility in the medieval era, the sense of what honor meant underwent a sea change in the sixteenth century as honor was “increasingly required to adapt itself to the demands of religion, and to those of the state.” The reign of the Tudors marked the rise of a state-centered honor system under which the realm and the community of honor became identical with the Crown, “the fount of honour.” ²⁵

This transformation was aided greatly by Sir Thomas Elyot’s classic The Boke named the Governor which restated “the honour code in terms of the popularized humanism of the age.” ²⁶ Elyot’s Stoic-Christian ethic of gentility, far closer to ancient than modern honor, fundamentally challenged the chivalric warrior ethic. The Renaissance ideal of the gentleman governor was by definition a defender and servant of the common good within “a remodelled and unified community of honour: a ‘public weal’, presided over by ‘one capital and sovereign governour’, and administered by ‘inferior governours called Magistrates’, which ‘shall be appointed or chosen by the sovereign governour.'” ²⁷ Elyot’s ideas were echoed over and over again by a legion of later writers in the sixteen, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. ²⁸

Modern honor did not disappear in England. Indeed the sixteenth century saw the introduction of the private duel to England and modern honor continued strong among the military and aristocratic elements of society well into the nineteenth century. ²⁹ Yet the dominance of gentility in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England checked the prevalence of dueling despite its popularity among certain circles. The defenders of a state-centered honor system fundamentally condemned honor violence as promoting public disorder and anarchy, totally contrary to the common good. ³⁰

Nevertheless, advocates and critics alike noted the power of “the law of Public Opinion” to force even men opposed to modern honor to engage in duels. English writers from Shakespeare to Locke to Mandeville to Boswell to Carlyle lamented the practice but also believed that men were not free to ignore a challenge or redress personal affronts in courts out of fear of being labeled a coward. ³¹ Even Bacon who so roundly condemned the practice “was forced to admit that so strong was the stream of popular opinion that even staid and sober-minded men who saw rightly the vanity of dueling must conform ‘or else there is no living or looking upon mens faces.'” ³² Sir William Blackstone, who defined in no uncertain terms the common law case for dueling as murder, acknowledged

yet it requires such a degree of passive valour to comabt the dread of even undeserved contempt, arising from the false notions of honour too generally received in Europe, that the strngest prohibitions and penalties of the law will never be entirely effectual to readicate this unhappy custom; till a method be found out of compelling the original aggressor to make some other satisfaction to the affronted party, which the world shall esteem equally reputable, as that which is now given at the hazard of life and fortune, as well of the person insulted, as of him who hath given the insult. ³³

Obviously there was much tension and overlap in the minds of Englishmen between modern honor and gentility. All gentlemen whether men of gentility or modern honor were expected to serve the common good as well as maintain concern for their reputation. Even Caxton’s fourteenth-century Book of Chivalry “admonished knights that they should be lovers of the common good because the welfare of all is more important than the welfare of the individual.” Men of honor defended their actions for the most part in terms of the common good and many political duels were fought over accusations of putting particular interests or personal fame over the common good. ³⁴ Defenders of modern honor like Arthur Lee tended to lump virtue and honor together, speaking of “virtuous pride.” As George Tucker put it in the early nineteenth century, honor “if not virtue itself, (according to some codes) is an admirable substitute for it. The man of honour acts from pride or the fear of reproach, but still he acts rightly.” ³⁵

Englishmen, as David Hackett Fischer has noted, carried this same tension between modern honor and gentility to seven­teenth-century Virginia. ³⁶ However, far more than in the mother country, modern honor took a back seat to gentility. Colonial Virginians considered themselves English gentlemen leading virtuous lives, guided not by self-interest or the passion for honor but the pursuit of the common good. ³⁷ Yet one cannot ignore modern honor. Arthur Lee might have lamented in 1767 “‘that honour is become now a subject of ridicule, is either prostituted to infamous purposes, or treated as a chimera.'” ³⁸ Yet there was a tension. One can find no better example than Bacon’s Rebellion which, as Wyatt-Brown well notes, strongly paralleled revolts in Tudor England which blended the demands of modern honor with those of the new state-centered honor system. ³⁹

Colonial Virginians had their genteel vices‑-sexual misconduct, drunkenness, gambling, and certainly tobacco-smoking‑-all behaviors traditionally associated with dueling in Europe. ⁴⁰ But the colonial Virginian elite drew the line at the vice of dueling. The label “duellist” was a term of opprobrium. ⁴¹ 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. ⁴² 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 notions of modern honor, but the other colonists soon put these upstarts in their place. ⁴³

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 rough-and-tumble contests of the meaner element after the mid-eighteenth century. ⁴⁴ 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. ⁴⁵ 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 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 hung. ⁴⁶

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 in the seventeenth century.” But they believed these were proper matters only for the courts. ⁴⁷ In an era when most members of the Virginia elite served in some public capacity, they were “all quick to take offense at any word or action which indicated the least lack of respect for their official dignity” and contempts were strictly punished throughout the colonial era. ⁴⁸ 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, treated as both a civil and criminal offense. Courts awarded damages, commanded offenders to pay a fine for the public use or to perform a public service, and imposed humiliating public penances on the offender, like placing them in stocks, towing them over creeks, ducking, whipping, and ordering them to apologize in public, sometimes at church, sometimes at court, and occasionally at both. ⁴⁹ 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.” ⁵⁰

The Rise of Dueling

Yet by the early 1800s there was a widespread feeling that dueling had become a “national sin.” ⁵¹ What had happened between the late colonial and early national period to cause this? Two possible explanations stand out. First, public opinion changed in support of dueling. Second, modern honor ascended to prominence over gentility. ⁵²

As already noted, critics and advocates alike noted the power of popular opinion to force even men opposed to modern honor to engage in duels. Sermons, essays, and private letters in the early national period are filled with laments about the power of public opinion to force gentlemen to duel. ⁵³

Does the rise of dueling in the early republic suggest a change in public opinion? I think there is no doubt about it. However there is still some question about who exactly is the public in this public opinion. ⁵⁴ Some early commentators suggested that there was a fundamental Tocquevillian shift in the relationship of public opinion and the political and legal order by the early 1800s. ⁵⁵

Of course, this would raise questions of what George Tucker called the “incongruity between public opinion and the laws” since the laws universally condemned dueling; and why were so few Americans willing to defend dueling in print either in the late 1760s or the early 1800s? ⁵⁶ Some early national critics distinguished between what might best be called active and passive opposition, with most Americans only passively opposed to dueling as reflected in their continued support for and even preference for politicians who had fought duels. ⁵⁷ Some British historians have suggested that public opinion in support of dueling was in actual fact a case of the cultural hegemony of the elite. ⁵⁸

On the other hand, some Americans critics of dueling in the early 1800s, like Thomas Burke earlier, suggested that it was only the opinion of duelists, in direct opposition to the view of the masses “manifest from their law on the subject.” ⁵⁹ To the question “Who then is this public?,” Timothy Dwight answered “It is the little collection of duellists, magnified by its own voice, as every other little party is, into the splendid character of the public.” ⁶⁰ One might note that men of modern honor were perhaps the first to condemn any politician who would descend into cheap electioneering tactics‑-as one William & Mary student put it, stooping “to avail themselves of every assistance, which unmanly condescension or Whiskey can afford them”‑-and the first to deny that modern honor arose from “the giddy multitude.” ⁶¹

Nevertheless, whether the public opinion that opponents of dueling lamented reflected the populace as a whole or just a clique of duelists, I believe that the change in public opinion reflected a greater acceptance of modern honor in the post-revolutionary period. That such a false honor‑-which St. George Tucker noted “conveys no favourable impression to the ear of a republican”‑-should achieve such prominence in the post-revolutionary period might seem a little strange. ⁶² Americans committed to republicanism accepted Montesquieu’s pronouncement that the mainspring of a republic was virtue, while honor was the mainspring of monarchy. Virtue, in Montesquieu’s language, was essentially the same as English notions of gentility, stressing service to the common good. Honor, as he himelf noted, was “false honor” resting on the passion for distinction and glory, strongly linked to dueling. ⁶³

Arthur Lee himself in 1767 had defended “that honor which the illustrious Montesquieu defines to be the prevailing principle in monarchies, where it gives life to the whole body politic,and even to virtues themselves…that principle, which Montesquieu deems the parent of virtues in the best constituted form of society.” ⁶⁴ The following year Lee turned his pen to his essays in defense of colonial liberty–the famous Monitor, Junius Americanus, and other essays‑-and abandoned talk of honor for the rhetoric of virtue. ⁶⁵

Furthermore, the aristocratic pretensions inherent in modern honor were distinctly at odds with the democratic sentiments of public opinion in the early republic. Again Arthur Lee had stated the case starkly enough, lamenting that in a country without honor “there would be no distinction of ranks, no discernment of merit, every pretender would be credited, every impostor successful, slavery would be maintained, pride would be adapted for dignity and distinction, low familiarity for condescention and philanthropy.” ⁶⁶ “Mechanics, and the sons of mechanics, shall become statesmen and politicians; and those who have followed the plough, shall follow close upon the mace…In such a country, the testimony of the vilest mechanic shall be esteemed equivalent to that of a gentleman, in which they have heard are affairs of honour.” ⁶⁷ If before the war honor was highly suspect because of its close attachment to dueling, during and after the war it was further suspect because of its close attachment to dreaded monarchy and aristocracy.

So how could modern honor achieve such prominence by the early 1800s? How was the colonial elite consensus against modern honor and dueling breached in the post-Revolutionary era? I would suggest that modern honor achieved prominence because of a felt need in the early republic, all part of a general process of seeking out a mainspring for American society other than classical virtue which, despite all the rhetoric, most Americans in the early republic deemed to be insufficient to preserving the common good. For many staunch opponents of dueling the appropriate mainspring for the nation was Christian virtue. ⁶⁸ Others believed the answer lay in properly channeling and balancing the passions, including that most important and powerful passion, modern honor. As Mandeville noted, honor is to be preferred over virtue because honor “is more skilfully adapted to our inward Make.” ⁶⁹ Tocqueville feared that democracy would undermine ambition‑-by which he meant “an overweening desire for honor above all else.” ⁷⁰ Ever since Douglass Adair’s work, historians have recognized the importance of the passion for fame and glory to the Founding Fathers. ⁷¹

Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, as indeed Montesquieu himself had done, began emphasizing a role for honor as well as virtue in a republic. ⁷² Perhaps, as the Jeffersonians accused them of doing, the Federalists did indeed hope to push the country more toward a monarchy or at least a mixed government like that of Great Britain in which honor would play an important role, recognizing and accepting the occasional resort to the field of honor and the chance of death or maiming as an unfortunate if necessary concomitant. But why then would Jeffersonians who were so suspicious of such monarchical notions find themselves so often involved in affairs of honor by the turn of the century? ⁷³

To understand the Republican persuasion we can do no better than turn to the students at the College of William and Mary, an overwhelmingly Jeffersonian institution in the 1790s and early 1800s, and the breeding ground of many an antebellum southern lawyer and politician. ⁷⁴ Renowned as the birthplace of the honor system in American colleges, students took honor far farther than simply signing a pledge on examinations. The spirit dominating young students at William & Mary in the late 1790s and early 1800s may well be captured in Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s address to the Law Class of 1834:

He [the student] comes to us as a gentleman. As such we receive and treat him, and resolutely refuse to know him in any other character. He is not harassed with petty regulations; he is not insulted and annoyed with impertinent surveillance. Spies and informers have no countenance among us…His honor is the only witness to which we appeal….The effect of this system, in inspiring a high and scrupulous sense of honor, and a scorn of all disingenuous artifice, has been ascertained by long experience, and redounds to the praise of its authors. That it has not secured a regular discharge of all academical duties, or prevented the disorders which characterize the wildness of youth, is known and lamented. But we believe and know, that he who cannot be held to his duty, but by base and slavish motives, can never do honor to his instructors; while we are equally sure that such a system as keeps up a sense of responsibility to society at large, is most conducive to high excellence. ⁷⁵

The history of the honor system is obscure. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, like so many antebellum Americans who sought to explain the origins of the Old South, believed its roots lay in the great Cavalier exodus to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century. ⁷⁶ More likely it emerged in the 1780s and 1790s. Also it is not clear whether the honor system in late eighteenth century was official policy, an unofficial code among students, or some combination of the two. On one point at least there was a sharp divergence between official policy and student behavior. From 1792 on, the official policy of the College of William & Mary denounced dueling. ⁷⁷ As Nathaniel Beverley Tucker put it in 1834, “While nothing is required of him but attention to his studies, nothing is forbidden but duelling, which might be fatal to his life, and gambling and drunkenness and tavern-haunting, which must be pernicious to his health, his intellect and his morals.” ⁷⁸ Involvement in a duel in any way brought immediate expulsion.

Yet from the early 1800s William & Mary students seemed to have been driven to meet each other on the field of honor. In 1802 two students were expelled from William & Mary “on a vague report for having fought a duel” which led to a student riot and half the the student body leaving the college in protest over the expulsion. Four students were expelled in the spring of 1803 on account of a duel. An 1806 duel between Armistead T. Mason, son of Senator Stevens Thompson Mason (and later senator in his own right), and Bartholomew Henley was discovered when the Bishop James Madison, the president of the college, barged in on them as they were getting the pistols in order. The next year John T. Mason, brother of Armistead, challenged Andrew Reid, Jr. but after John was bound over to keep the peace, Armistead challenged Reid himself. In 1809 William Cabell Rives aged 16 was dismissed from William & Mary “on acc[oun]t of his yielding to that false notion of Honour, which is unfortunately, so prevalent.” ⁷⁹

As to why these students espoused modern honor and engaged in duels I do not believe there are easy answers to these questions, but I believe the appeal of modern honor to both Federalists and Republicans alike can be explained in part by the wide-open competition for membership in the post-revolutionary elite in which appeals to modern honor proved attractive to many, enough any way to undermine the consensus and force over others out of concern for public opinion.

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. ⁸⁰ 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. ⁸¹ However, I think 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.” ⁸²

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 I believe 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 Scotch-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. ⁸³

A classic pronouncement of the impact of Scotch-Irish culture can be seen in a 1786 letter from John Preston to his brother Francis, a student at the College of William & Mary) concerning a recent duel in Richmond involving their cousin James Breckenridge (a student at William & Mary the year before) 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. ⁸⁴ 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 or 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‑-I hope our Cousin will not on this Victory prid himself but endeavour to kerb that temper which nature has bestowed on him rather lavishly, tho at the same time endowed him with a more than sufficient stock of prudence (which if he will only make right use of) to prevent any dangerous effusions of it: advice him‑-he is not backward to receive instruction & pray of him not to fall into such a contest again; he may lose a life which may be servisable to his Country & a comfort to . . . relations, by a hand which nothing by infamy dire…His late resolution is highly to be commended & he will in a short time see the advantage of it. ⁸⁵

But I don’t think the cult of honor in early national Virginia was strictly a one-way street, driven by backcountry elements in Virginia society. 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 Scotch-Irish, a sense of honor epitomized, as Dickson Bruce notes, by John Randolph of Roanoke. ⁸⁶ In 1792, as a young student at William & Mary, John Randolph of Roanoke 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.” ⁸⁷

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. Not that the attitude of eastern Virginians in general changed very rapidly. Like Arthur Lee, Randolph came to hate Williamsburg for the way his conduct and character was censured following the duel, forcing him to flee the college and the city. ⁸⁸

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. ⁸⁹ The post-revolutionary revival shares many parallels with other chivalric revivals like the Elizabethan revival. ⁹⁰ Like “the aspiring mind of the Elizabethan younger generation,” “the second generation of Virginia patriots” would gravitate away from the rationalism and gentility of their parents’ generation toward their own blend of romanticism and modern honor. ⁹¹

Heroic wars have always had a tendency to stimulate chivalric revivals among the idealistic youth who come of age hearing tales of the courageous deeds of “our illustrious Heroes & patriots,” reflected most strongly in the early American republic in the veneration granted George Washington. ⁹²

Both backcountry and lowcountry sentiments fed Jeffersonian notions of honor, what might without too much exaggeration be labelled country honor in contrast to the court honor of the Federalists, in line with the court-country paradigm that J.G.A. Pocock, John M. Murrin, Lance Banning, and James H. Hutson have so neatly employed to frame the ideological tensions in the early republic. ⁹³ In this respect, perhaps one can see the rise of modern honor and dueling as part of a felt need to reinstitute some form of national honor system after the Revolution destroyed the state-centered honor system headed by the Crown. ⁹⁴ With the demise of the state-centered honor system, Americans began groping for some sort of replacement in the context of the rapidly changing legal and political culture that accompanied the American Revolution.

George Tucker well captured these national forces in support of modern honor in 1813 when, echoing Mandeville, he wrote:

Nations, in their progress towards wealth and refinement, are in danger of becoming enervated, and of losing with their ferocity, that courage and energy of character which are essential to their defence. The sense of honour, however, is found to supply their place; and, when aided by discipline, to make every modern civilized nation, however luxurious, an over match for any savage nation, however fierce and brave. Should we not be careful, then, how we weakened that sentiment which contributes so largely towards national security? And this the rather, because, insulated as we are from the rest of the world, we are not likely to be often involved in war, so that the military spirit may go to decay among us, for want of occasions to exercise it; and after a long period of time, having neither foreign wars nor sufficient causes of internal rivalship, to call forth our energies, we may gradually sink into supineness, and either become a tempting object of attack to military enterprize, or defend ourselves from subjugation, by the jealous and unsocial policy of the Chinese. ⁹⁵

But Americans differed fundamentally on what type of honor system they desired. Defenders of court honor sought merely to replace the strong state-centered honor system that had prevailed in England under a president rather than a king, while defenders of country honor fundamentally challenged that state-centered honor system seeking a far looser, feudal system. Both combined to promote a greater emphasis on vigiliance, manliness, and courage to defend the republic against internal and external enemies in the early national period. ⁹⁶

The competition for state elite status that led to the conjunction of backcountry and lowcountry elements in the rise of dueling in Virginia 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. ⁹⁷

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 ideals. The South started moving toward an ideal centered around modern honor and dueling while the North moved toward an ideal centered around Christian virtue staunchly opposed to dueling. ⁹⁸ In the eyes of the other, northerners appeared like soulless capitalists and southerners like ruthless barbarians. ⁹⁹

Contemporaries recognized the divergence. ¹⁰⁰ 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.” ¹⁰¹ James McDowell wrote in 1814 “these good people will deserve the epithet of steady, they adhere most tenaciously to their characteristic attachment of money, for…the passion for gold has predominated over every other feeling.” ¹⁰² 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. ¹⁰³

George Tucker was again one of the first to put the case in print. Quoting Goldsmith‑-‘honour sinks where commerce long prevails’‑-Tucker 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. ¹⁰⁴