Dueling at the College of William & Mary, 1800-1810 (June 1999)

[originally delivered as “Dueling at the College of William & Mary, 1800-10: A Case of Generational Revolt, Southern Honor, or Public Opinion?,” St. George Tucker Society, Lexington, Va., June 1999.]

In May 1809, William Cabell Rives, future United States senator from Virginia, turned sixteen years old. That same month he was dismissed from the College of William & Mary for‑-as Bishop James Madison, president of the college, put it in a letter to Thomas Jefferson‑-“yielding to that false notion of Honour, which is unfortunately, so prevalent.” By “that false notion of Honour,” Madison meant (and Jefferson understood) that sense of honor which forced young men to respond to verbal and physical affronts by issuing challenges and fighting duels. ¹

To an older generation of Virginians epitomized by Madison and Jefferson, such a notion of honor was indeed “false,” for they had come of age in pre-revolutionary Virginia, a time and place when challenges and dueling had been unanimously condemned and quite effectively suppressed. Indeed, in Virginia there was a long tradition of opposition to dueling in the colony dating back to the planting of Jamestown, further reinforced in the mid-eighteenth century by Enlightenment rationalism which condemned dueling as a barbarous practice hardly fit for a civilized age. ²

But, as Bishop Madison lamented, William & Mary students in 1809 seem to have rejected this inherited wisdom. William Cabell Rives was only one of over twenty-five matriculates or very recent graduates of William & Mary who took part in affairs of honor in the years between 1800 and 1810 (including another future U.S. senator from Virginia, Armistead T. Mason). The year 1809 was a particularly intense one for dueling with at least six challenges and three full-fledged duels, in one of which a recent graduate (Peyton Smith) was killed by another former student.

Why did these students, who would go on to play a major role in state and national politics, take up dueling? ³ While any full explanation is bound to be quite complex, here we might simply suggest that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, a certain critical mass of Virginians had come to believe that the pluses of dueling outweighed its minuses. However seemingly contrary to correct notions of honor and whatever the negative consequences, dueling helped to reinforce other values and behavior that Virginians considered equally if not more important. Advocates of dueling‑-through the vehicle of what contemporaries called “public opinion”‑-forced other Virginians to tolerate dueling to one degree or another as a social reality. The students at William & Mary certainly felt these changing notions of dueling and honor. Indeed, by exploring the life and times of these young Virginians, we will see that, in many ways, in their rebellion against tradition they were simply fulfilling parental and societal expectations. Let us begin by taking a close look at a riot that rocked the college in the winter of 1802.

Of Duels and Riots

In February 1802 a rumor started circulating around Williamsburg that two students had violated a statute of the college by fighting a duel. After getting wind of this rumor, Bishop Madison and the faculty summoned the two students to the Blue Room for questioning. Although the students refused to testify, the professors voted to expel them both from the college, upon “the evidence of common fame, and the wound of one of the parties.” ⁴

The sentence sent shock waves through the student body as they rallied round the expelled duelists. The students frankly could not fathom how the faculty could vote to expel students on such flimsy evidence. Forty-six students (out of around seventy-two students attending the college at the time) signed a petition objecting to the proceedings. The faculty answered the student remonstrance by alledging their incapacity to obtain any more positive evidence, since no one apart from the student duelists themselves had actually seen the duel, the duelists refused to testify, and the faculty “had not thought it right to compel them” to testify. In such a situation, the faculty had no choice but to “proceed upon evidence of the common report” or else do nothing and, in this case, the faculty had no doubts about the guilt of the two students. Many students were still not satisifed and about thirty of them signed a second petition. But, whereas the first petition had been fairly respectful, the second was downright insulting, and “it met the silent contempt of the professors,” who reaffirmed their sentence of expulsion. ⁵

After hearing the final word from the faculty, four or five of the students who had been most vocal in their opposition to the faculty, withdrew from the college. That evening, a small group of outraged students (observers agree there were no more than five or six) took their frustrations even farther by going on the warpath. They defaced the college chapel and the Bruton parish church, tore up the bibles and prayer books, broke the windows of professors, assailed the houses and shops of one or two citizens of the town, and “committed every act of impropriety they could think of.”

However much the students in general may have supported the remonstrances, they “almost universally” condemned the rioters. One recent graduate of William & Mary tried to defend “the rebellious spirit of the students,” suggesting that the ties of friendship naturally tend to make students upset when one of their numbers is expelled. After all, he noted, ever “since the first institution of Colleges, the riotous disposition of students has grown into a proverb.” But a more typical comment was that of Thomas L. Preston, a recent transfer from Washington Academy in Lexington, who attributed the riot to the intolerable dissipation and disgusting irregularity of the William & Mary students. Although he had signed the remonstrances and openly expressed his dislike for the procedure of the professors, Preston drew the line at “injuring the college or the property of any one.”

On March 24, 1802, the Board of Visitors, undoubtedly at the behest of Bishop Madison, responded to the unrest by passing “A Statute for the Wholesome Government of the College.” The statute ordained “that in all cases in which the President and masters or professors shall have reasonable cause to believe any student or students to have been concerned in duelling, gaming, riot, drunkenness, profane swearing, or any other act in violation of the college, or any breach of decorum,” they “shall call on the students to declare individually, whether they can give any information respecting the offence of which any student or students may be accused.” Then if “upon the best proof that can be had,” the faculty should be satisfied that a student has committed the said offence, “they shall proceed to censure, suspend, or expel such student or students in their discretion.” Students who refused to give evidence would either have to “sign a solemn declaration of his own innocence touching said offence” or be found guilty of contumacy and forever expelled from the college. “Knowingly and wilfully aiding, assisting, counselling, advising or provoking any other student to the commission of any of the offences above-mentioned; or combining, confederating or agreeing with any person to conceal or prevent the discovery of the said offences” was equally an offence punishable by censure, suspension, or expulsion. Furthermore, the President would report any expulsion to all the other American colleges and publish it in the newspapers. The statute also cracked down on some bad habits that students had developed by putting taverns off-limits and compelling students to attend lectures. Finally, each student had to sign a solemn pledge in the matriculation book that he would conform to the statute while a student at the college. ⁶

Whether it was the statute, or as Thomas Preston suggests the egression of nearly half the student body in protest over the expulsion and its aftermath, by April 1802 “peace and harmony” seem to have returned to the campus. Indeed by the following winter term, Preston reported that numbers at the college had returned to normal and proclaimed that “never has [there] been seen greater order, industry and economy among the students than at this time.” ⁷

Nevertheless, however effective the new governance was in suppressing dissipation among students, it did little to suppress dueling. Indeed, just two months after reporting how well things were going, Thomas Preston would find himself being expelled along with three other students “on account of a late duel,” as reported in the Richmond Examiner and other public papers pursuant to the 1802 statute. ⁸

“A Bastion of Republicanism”

Why is it that students at William & Mary were so driven to the field of honor in the first decade of the 1800s? It was not because William & Mary students had always dueled. Although there had been a couple of earlier duels involving William & Mary students, one in 1786 and another in 1792, dueling in the first decade of the 1800s was simply of another order of magnitude. ⁹

Perhaps we might write this dueling craze off as a case of student rebelliousness against authority. The 1802 riot at William & Mary was part of a rash of rebellions that broke out on college campuses across the United States in the years 1798-1815 over judgments and policies that students found demeaning and unjust. In defending themselves, college youth everywhere appealed to revolutionary principles to justify the rash of riots. ¹⁰ “The sons of the founders,” Steven Novak concludes, rebelled to claim “the rights of youth,” just as their fathers had done to claim the rights of Americans. ¹¹

Administrators, of course, did not see things quite this way. Timothy Dwight of Yale, commenting on the “Great Rebellion” at Princeton in 1807, could only attribute such student behavior to “that impatience of controul which [was] a strong characteristic of the rising generation.” ¹² For such administrators, this “breakdown of social deference” had far less to do with the American Revolution than the French Revolution, the creeping cancer of “jacobinic and anti-religious principles” that they saw infecting the country. ¹³

But rampant student rebelliousness and decline in deference toward one’s elders does not explain why it was only at William & Mary that the students were, as Novak puts it, “addicted to dueling” in the first decade of the 1800s. ¹⁴ What was special about William & Mary? We do not have to look very long and hard to find peculiarities aplenty.

Led by such ardent Republicans as Bishop Madison, George Wythe, and St. George Tucker, William & Mary “stood as a bastion of Republicanism,” an overwhelmingly Jeffersonian institution at a time when all other major American colleges were staunchly Federalist. During the crisis of 1798, while students at Harvard, Dartmouth, Williams, Carlisle, Princeton, North Carolina, and Brown, were rallying behind President John Adams, students at William & Mary were hanging and burning Adams in effigy and sending a petition (subsequently published in newspapers around the nation) to the Virginia Congressional delegation opposing any war with France. ¹⁵

But to many contemporaries, William & Mary went much farther than mere Jeffersonian republicanism. Federalists attacked “Mr. Jefferson’s college” (as William & Mary was known in these years) as a hotbed of Jacobinism and deism. And, however much Bishop Madison would publicly deny it, reality was not that far off from Federalist suspicions. Students at William & Mary had a lasting love affair with the French Revolution, imbibing Paine’s The Rights of Man and William Godwin’s Inquiry into Political Justice, addressing each other as “citizen,” dating their letters using the (American) Revolutionary calendar, and extolling heroes of the French Revolution throughout the 1790s and into the 1800s. ¹⁶

But while Republicanism, Jacobinism, and Godwinism made William & Mary different, they still do not amount to any explanation for the prevalence of dueling at William & Mary in the first decade of the nineteenth century. ¹⁷ No one in the early American republic equated Republicanism, Jacobinism, or Godwinism‑-or student rebelliousness in general‑-with dueling. Indeed, Godwin, Paine, Jefferson, Bishop Madison, and all the major leaders of the Revolutionary Enlightenment stood as staunch critics of dueling. Dueling for them was not only totally irrational, but also horribly aristocratic. ¹⁸ Furthermore dueling was hardly just a radical Republican phenomenon. Numerous Federalist politicians as well as more conservative Republicans were also engaged in affairs of honor at the turn of the nineteenth century. ¹⁹ And, as we saw at William & Mary in 1802, students themselves could be quite critical of riotous behavior at the same they were defending duelists and participating in duels.

“This School of Honor”

Yet there is a less direct link between dueling and rioting. For, however much William & Mary officials might publicly condemn both dueling and rioting and back up that condemnation with severe penalties like expulsion, privately there was much toleration for both dueling and rioting in Virginia. These young men, whether duelist or rioter, were each in their own way attempting to fulfill parental and societal expectations.

John Augustine Smith, a student at the College of William & Mary in 1800 and later President of the College from 1814-1826, lamented in 1814 the lack of student discipline, but saw the problem as rooted deep in Virginia society. He claimed that young Virginians “sucked in with their mother’s milk, such high spirited notions, as to be ever after ungovernable.” For Smith, such tendencies were only made worse by the way the public celebrated those two ideals of the French Revolution, “Liberty and Equality, the latter exempting beardless citizens from parental, and of course collegiate authority, the former allowing them to indulge in every untoward propensity.” These “young men, wherever they went, heard from those whom they respected, that resistance to musty statutes and formal gownsmen were meritorious, while submission shewed them mean-spirited and above all unmindful of their rights.” ²⁰ Jefferson similarly lamented in 1822 that “premature ideas of independence, too little repressed by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination,” a spirit that he feared would undermine his nicely laid out plans for the future University of Virginia. ²¹

Undoubtedly Presidents Smith and Jefferson were exaggerating. But to the degree that what they were saying is true, then these young men were hardly simply rebelling against parental authority. Such pervasive attitudes in Virginia perhaps explain the proportionately great role that young Virginians seem to played in many student rebellions at Northern universities like Princeton. ²²

But President Smith could have gone farther to examine what role the institution of William & Mary itself played in fostering these sentiments among the students. Students there, as one recent graduate noted, were indoctrinated to believe that “the powers that be are not thought to be spotless in virtue, or infallible in wisdom.” While the faculty at William & Mary might have wished to instill these ideas to encourage students to challenge Federalist authority, the same ideas could certainly easily have been turned on the faculty themselves.

This pressure on college students to question authority seems to have been part of several dramatically changing notions about education in post-Revolutionary Virginia. ²³ One of the more dramatic innovations at William & Mary was the introduction of an “honor system” built around the idea that students should be treated like gentlemen, not‑-as other colleges were wont‑-like children. Beverley Tucker, newly appointed Professor of Law at William & Mary described the system in his maiden lecture 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. ²⁴

The history of this honor system is obscure. Beverley Tucker seems to suggest that the system was in place at William & Mary before he was a student there over thirty years earlier. But no one knows for sure how the honor system at William & Mary began. ²⁵ As another president of William & Mary, Lyon G. Tyler, put it many years later, “the principle grew up outside of the rules.” ²⁶

Some scholars believe that the honor system was part and parcel of Jefferson’s 1779 reform program for the College of William & Mary which abandoned the classical approach to education for a more liberal curriculum emphasizing useful subjects like science and mathematics and introducing an elective system permitting student to choose for themselves the subjects most pertinent to their needs. ²⁷ We certainly saw evidence of something like an honor system at the time of the 1802 riot when the faculty “had not thought it right to compel” the suspected duelists to testify against themselves. But the earliest printed formal declaration of something akin to Beverley Tucker’s honor system was a resolution approved by a convocation of the Visitors and Governors of the College held on the 4th of July in 1815:

To supercede, if possible, the necessity of an interference on the part of Parents which is always painful, and of a severity on the part of the Society which is always disagreeable, and at the same time, to give to Virtue, every practicable support, an appeal is made to that high sense of Honor, which is well known to characterize the youth of Virginia. On the Saturday subsequent to the opening of College, the Students are assembled, and are required to sign, in the presence of all the Professor, and of some of the most respectable Gentlemen of the Town, the following declaration, viz.:‑-“We, whose names are hereunto subscribed, do acknowledge ourselves to be Students of the College of William and Mary, and do consequently promise to obey all the regulations passed for the government of the said College, and in a more especial manner, each of us does most solemnly engage and pledge his word and honor as a gentleman, never while he remains a student of the said College, either to game in any way or to any amount, or to be in the slightest degree intoxicated, or to go into a Tavern, without express permission from the President, or one of the Professors. ²⁸

Yet at the same time that we find these incipient statements of Tucker’s honor system, we also find numerous seemingly contrary statutes like the 1802 “Statute for the Wholesome Government of the College” which seem to countervene the notion of treating student as gentlemen. Were such statutes a sop to the critics of the college, as historian J. E. Morpurgo believes? ²⁹ Or did the statutes represent a lack of faith in the ability of students to behave in the way that the administrators thought they should? Undoubtedly the honor system had its ups and downs. But such a system would certainly be consistent with much else that we know about William & Mary, like the encouragement of free thinking and the lack of close faculty supervision over students who were scattered throughout the town of Williamsburg in boarding houses. ³⁰

Shift in Public Opinion

And yet the expectation that students would act like gentlemen still does not provide us a complete explanation for the prevalence of dueling at William & Mary in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For Virginians did not generally believe that gentility necessarily demanded young men issue and accept challenges. As for the honor system itself, as Beverley Tucker put it in a later address to the students at William & Mary in 1847, “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.” ³¹

In the views of Jefferson, Bishop Madison, St. George Tucker, and others of the Revolutionary generation, dueling was quite inconsistent with their notions of gentility. The honor that led young men to duel was emphatically false honor. And as adamantly as these student turned to dueling, Bishop Madison just as adamantly carried through his threat to expel any and all students found guilty of acting as a principal or second in a duel. ³² Why with so thorough a public condemnation and punishment by college administrators would student turn to dueling?

A pseudonymous apologist for the 1802 rioters offered a possible explanation when he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Richmond Examiner: “It ought not to be forgotten, that the offence [dueling] for which those men were punished, is one which the youth of this country are taught, though theoretically to condemn, yet practically to applaud.” ³³

It is unclear in this statement who he is suggesting did the teaching: parents? professors? peers? society as a whole? And how did such ambivalent lessons translate into the dueling phenomenon we observe at William & Mary? However equivocal, nevertheless, such an explanation of student dueling captures the entire tone of contemporaneous public discussion on dueling. By the first decade of the 1800s, when William & Mary students began to duel in earnest, one can find in the newspapers nary an essay or letter defending dueling in the abstract; yet these newspapers are filled with defenses of particular duels and duelists. Furthermore, while killing someone in a duel was officially condemned as murder, none of these “murderers” (numbering at least a dozen) was ever brought to trial. The papers were filled with laments that public opinion fully supported dueling, and yet legislators successfully pushed through additional legislation to clamp down on duelists. All at the same time that Virginians were marching to the field of honor in unprecedented numbers. What kind of message were young Virginians getting?

Grymes-Terrell Duel of 1803

The best example of the kind of public discussion that could have led young Virginians to believe that dueling was something to be condemned in theory but applauded in practice comes from the extensive newspaper discussion of a duel which took place in April, 1803, between a couple of law students in Richmond, Charles Wyndham Grymes and Keeling Terrell. ³⁴ While not William & Mary matriculants, these young men in Richmond certainly faced a similar set of expectations and constraints as students in Williamsburg.

Grymes and Terrell were actually pretty good friends, although they were of opposite political persuasions: Grymes a Republican, Terrell a Federalist. But Grymes went along with his Republican buddies one night when they decided to play a joke on Terrell, whom some of them suspected of snitching on their conversations to the leaders of the Federalist faction. While Terrell was sleeping, they locked him in his boardinghouse room, stuck a pipe full of cayenne pepper through the keyhole, and started blowing the noxious smoke into the room. Terrell awoke with a start, found the door locked, and threw open the window to get some fresh air. Down on the street the young Republicans, all of whom Terrell recognized, were taunting him. Someone even fired a couple of bullets, although it is not clear whether they were aimed at Terrell or simply shot into the air.

The next day, Terrell went down to the courthouse to lodge a complaint and all of the Republican youth who were involved in the fumigation were forthwith brought before the court. Three of them were bound to the peace for twelve months under a penalty of five hundred dollars and, at Terrell’s request, the others were discharged. Although he was one of those whom Terrell had discharged, Grymes‑-incensed at what he consider an act of injustice for being dragged before the court for disturbing the peace and “the rascally manner in which Tyrrel has conducted himself towards me”‑-challenged Terrell to a duel. The duel was fought, Grymes was shot in the stomach and died about one in the afternoon the following day, “in agonies of the most inexpressible pain.” ³⁵

Because the two young duelists had been of opposite politics and one had died, the duel naturally became fodder for the partisan press in Richmond. For present purposes, the political repercussions are not significant. What is significant is what the letters and editorials suggest about attitudes toward dueling.

None of the writers defended dueling in the abstract; they would agree with Bishop Madison that false honor lay at the heart of dueling. ³⁶ Yet their treatment of the individual duelists suggests a profound ambivalence toward dueling. “Timoleon,” writing in the Republican Examiner, attacked the Federalist Terrell as a coward, noting how, in his first quarrel upon coming to Richmond, a fellow Federalist youth had beaten him “with impunity.” Another time a Republican youth gave Terrell the lie and “branded him to his face, with every opprobrious epithet which the English language affords.” Yet Terrell took all this with a “philosophic patience,” which according to “Timoleon” had “terminated…to his [Terrell’s] disgrace.” “He was the scorn, the butt and the ridicule of all who pretend to generous or manly thinking.” “Timoleon” believed that “if he [Terrell] had not been deficient in courage,” Terrell would have challenged those who had verbally or physically affronted him. ³⁷

For their part, the Federalist-leaning Virginia Gazette & General Advertiser and Recorder staunchly denied the charges of cowardice against Keeling Terrell. The Federalist “Verax” defended both Terrell and Grymes as “men of correct manners, of mild dispositions, as men of honor and honesty, and well fitted to make good members of society.” Both papers observed that Grymes would never have challenged Terrell if Grymes had believed Terrell a coward. The Federalist “Amicus” claimed that such charges of cowardice ignored “the very firm and manly demeanor of Mr. Tyrrel at the court house, and on the fatal scene of action.” “Verax” believed

Mr. Terrell to be a man of calm, cool, deliberate, and determined courage, one who is ever willing to avoid and never seeks a quarrel; and one too, who would not calmly take the lie, except from a drunken man, a fool, or a blackguard, and one who would not receive a beating, even from a federalist, without opposition, unless the federalist had been a Hercules, and, in that case, I think the boasts of the latter character, would have been ill timed. ³⁸

All of these writers took different stances in trying to shape public opinion but they also all reflect an underlying consensus. They seem to operate according to the principle, as summed up by another Virginian (George Tucker) a few years later, that “whoever engages in a duel, if the occasion be of suitable gravity and importance, and he act both with moderation and firmness, rather raises than lowers himself in the general estimation: and even those who conscientiously disapprove the practice find in the act more to respect than blame.” ³⁹ In the end, all the writers celebrated the bravery of those who would defend their honor and condemned the cowardice of those who would not. To refuse a challenge or to ignore a verbal or physical affront was tantamount to being considered a coward, unless “Timoleon” observed, one could demonstrate “a magnanimous hostility” to dueling or religious qualms. Perhaps an elder statesman might be able to claim a “magnanimous hostility” and an evangelical Christian might be able to claim religious qualms, but for most young Virginians neither was a very believeable claim.

“So Strong is the Force of Imperious Opinion”

The parents of the William & Mary students in the first decade of the 1800s surely did not celebrate or even condone dueling any more than Bishop Madison. Student duelists did not write home bragging about their first duel; if they were not too embarrassed to tell the parents at all, they did so with great sorrow for the pain they knew it would cause their family. All William & Mary student Samuel Myers could do in defense of his conduct after his unfortunate affair was to assure his father “that the conduct of your Son has been only such as an adherence to the path of honor wd. dictate.” ⁴⁰

But parents were very attuned to public opinion. And however much they might personally oppose dueling, they understood that public opinion sanctioned it. After students at William & Mary dueled, fathers, brothers, and friends were intensely interested in knowing where public opinion, quite distinct from anyone’s personal opinion, stood on the affair. And the question foremost in their minds was: Did their son, brother, or friend act honorably? ⁴¹

Even those who might themselves be able to resist the calls of the heart out of magnanimity or Christian virtue often came to accept that other people might have no alternative but to issue or accept a challenge. However adamant he was about expelling any student duelist, Bishop Madison, himself a father of a young William & Mary student, could perfectly sympathize with students’ “yielding to the dreadful Custom” and thus continue to serve as a mentor to expelled students like William Cabell Rives in their post-college life. ⁴²

Surely parents realized that while they themselves might be mature enough to know the subtle ways of how to avoid getting drawn into an affair of honor, young men might not know. Some parents must have tried to instruct their children in these subtleties, as Senator (and later President) John Tyler did in a letter to his son Robert, a student at the College of William & Mary in the mid-1830s:

You should, above all things, study the temper of your associates, and, while you are on terms of respectful intercourse with all your fellow students, make intimates of none who are either easy to take offence or are more disposed to be on the qui vive for offence than to put a proper construction on things. In advanced life, very few occurrences can justify a resort to pistols or duels; but at college nothing short of absolute disgrace can do so. I repeat, therefore, that I entirely approve what you did, and trust that you will preserve the same line of conduct throughout and towards all. At all events, if you should unfortunately be involved in a serious quarrel, let me know the circumstances connected with it before things are pushed to any extremity. Your honor will always be safe in my hands. ⁴³

Some of the Visitors of the College by 1809, a year of intense dueling among students, supposedly had concluded that the college statute against dueling was so counterproductive‑-by leading to the expulsion of some of the best students‑-that they were ready to drop it from the books. ⁴⁴

One cannot find any stauncher opponent of dueling and false honor than Thomas Jefferson who had proposed a bill in 1779 for proportioning crimes and punishments that condemned duelists to being hanged, drawn, and quartered. ⁴⁵ Yet when his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph became engaged in an affair of honor with John Randolph of Roanoke in 1806, Jefferson did not resort to talk about hanging, drawing, and quartering to try to dissuade his son-in-law from dueling. No, Jefferson offered instead an extensive analysis of public opinion. ⁴⁶ As Jefferson observed, “it is not inclination in any body, but a fear of the opinion of the world which leads men to the absurd and immoral decision of differences by duel.” Furthermore, Jefferson blamed the newspapers for endeavoring to manipulate public opinion in such a way as to revive the affair. To combat this baleful influence, Jefferson attempted to convince his son-in-law (both directly and indirectly through intermediaries) that “general opinion” opposed dueling in his particular case. For one thing, Jefferson did a little informal polling of his own and found “but one sentiment prevailing (and I have that from very many) that the thing may stop where it now is with entire honour to yourself.” But he went further to claim that public opinion absolved his son-in-law from dueling in general. As Jefferson put it,

the greatest service…which Mr. T. M. Randolph’s friends can render him is to convince him that although the world esteems courage and disapproves of the want of it, yet in a case like his, and especially where it has been before put out of doubt, 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 forwardness in this barbarous and lawless appeal. ⁴⁷

Of course, one could ask, what does Jefferson’s advice say to a young man, unmarried, without a numerous family, where courage has not been “before put out of doubt,” the very situation that so many young Virginians found themselves in?

Reasoned Responses or Passions Run Amok?

So did young Virginians duel out of fear of public opinion? Perhaps some. But explanations based on public opinion are clearly insufficient because there were similar laments about public opinion throughout the nation. Sermons, essays, and private letters, critics and advocates, North and South alike, over and over in the early republic noted the power of public opinion to force even men opposed to the code of honor to engage in duels. A man in the early republic believed, wrote New Englander Lyman Beecher in 1806, that if he did not “resent an insult by calling out its author, or should decline a challenge from another, he would become an object of universal contempt, liable to the meanest affronts, and incapable of retaining his place among men of dignity and spirit.” ⁴⁸ Yet, among American college students, it was only at William & Mary that students dueled in earnest. Why was it only here that this public opinion on dueling was so strongly felt?

Here we might return again to how William & Mary was different. Perhaps being a Republican institution made students more sensitive to public opinion? Certainly Jeffersonians, like Jefferson himself, saw public opinion‑-as the tribunal before which all governments sat‑-in a more positive light than Federalists. ⁴⁹ Perhaps it was because there was no alternative value system like evangelicalism for William & Mary students? As contemporaries often noted, strong religious values might lead to both principled opposition to dueling and freedom from charges of cowardice. ⁵⁰ Certainly William & Mary was no hotbed of evangelicalism; students seem to have imbibed aversion to religion more than celebration of reason from the Revolutionary Enlightenment. Perhaps public opinion affected William & Mary students to a greater degree because there was greater pressure to grow up and act like gentlemen, ever moreso because so many of the students aspired to become professionals (especially lawyers) whose livelihoods depended greatly on reputation.

But we would be wrong to attribute dueling solely to such “rational” calculations. Indeed, parents, administrators, and students alike were wont to attribute student affairs of honor to youthful passions, a case of their hearts getting the better of their heads. As one Virginian put it after a fatal duel involving a couple of young Virginians in 1801, “We have to regret that the ardor of youth will hurry young men of spirit to extremities so fatal.” ⁵¹

Samuel Myers, in describing to his father his conduct in an affair with another student, William Sommerville, lamented that “in the agitation of my feelings and the ardour of that conduct to which the dictates of honour impelled me, I had forgot that my duty to myself had urged me to an infraction of the College rules in giving the challenge.” A local magistrate, Littleton Tazewell, after discovering the serious rupture between Myers and Sommerville, requested and obtained “a private conversation” with Samuel to try “to dissuade him from an act which appeared to me unnecessary and one which would materially injure his future prospects, as well as give great pain to his father Mother and the family.” But, Tazewell lamented, “the arguments of a man forty years old seemed illy to accord with the youthful opinions of one then considerably agitated by the impulse of a perturbed mind.” After the two young men were brought into court, bound to the peace, and the matter settled peaceably, Tazewell wrote the whole affair off to youthful ardour (in a letter to Samuel’s brother): “For two days your Brother was not himself. The heat of youth seemed in a perfect blaze. He has become cool.” ⁵²

Nevertheless, to dismiss dueling as a case of “passion run amok” would also be too simplistic. For the entire purpose of having a “code” of honor, rather than resorting to more immediate and barbaric means of honor violence, was to restrain those very passions, a point thoroughly recognized by contemporary Virginians. ⁵³ “If the present mode of deciding controversies [i.e., dueling] is abolished,” an anonymous author wrote to the Richmond Enquirer after the Hamilton-Burr duel, “recourse may be had to measures still more dreadful…Weapons of defense will be worn, which will be used on the spot, under the influence of every angry and vindictive passion.” ⁵⁴ Indeed, in stark contrast to the ubiquitous brawling with pistols and dirks among students at the University of Virginia later in the antebellum era, there is not a single record of a student brawl at William & Mary in the first decade of the 1800s when dueling was so prevalent. ⁵⁵

Furthermore, legal measures designed to check youthful passions did have some impact. One very effective means of preventing a duel, for students as for older Virginians‑-if law officers could discover the affair in its early stages‑-was simply to drag the would-be duelists before the magistrates and bind them over to keep the peace. Armistead T. Mason and Bartholomew Henley, students at William & Mary, were all set to fight their duel in late April 1806. As Mason’s second later related, “They were to have fought with two pistols each, ten steps distance, advance and fire when they pleased.” But as Mason and his second were in Mason’s room getting the pistols in order the night before the duel, Bishop Madison with a magistrate in tow entered the house. Mason escaped but was later tracked down by William Wirt, a good friend of Mason’s father, who was able to persuade Mason‑-through an appeal so emotional “as to draw tears from every person present”‑-to go before a justice where Wirt became his security in the sum of $7500. Perhaps some students actually hoped that such duels would be prevented. Indeed, Mason’s second, while applauding the bravery of the student duelists, seemed quite relieved that the affair was discovered. ⁵⁶

Of course, students could work around such legal constraints on dueling as effectively as older Virginians who fought duels despite their illegality. For instance, because college statutes outlawed dueling during the school term, some students decided to wait until after the college term was over to fight their duels. Binding to keep the peace also only had a limited effect on preventing student duels. Bishop Madison in 1809 feared that a couple of students would fight their duel in Tennessee “at the Expiration of their respective Recognizance.” ⁵⁷ Because his brother John was bound over to keep the peace in an 1807 affair with fellow student Andrew Reid, Jr., Armistead T. Mason (less than a year after he himself was bound) challenged Reid in his brother’s lieu. ⁵⁸ With such rules and rules for breaking rules, clearly an explanation of student dueling as passion run amok is too simplistic. ⁵⁹

“The tablets of the heart”

The students, for their part, did not seem to believe that fear of public opinion or passion run amok was what motivated them. Indeed, it seems clear that, for a significant number of young Virginians, their own opinions fully supported the code of honor. For these students, a duel was the ultimate test of one’s bravery. In January 1809, after William Sommerville refused to give satisfaction to Samuel Myers, Myers posted Sommerville as a “poltroon.” ⁶⁰ Although most of those familiar with the situation believed that Myers had been a little hot-headed in posting Sommerville, still Severn Eyre Parker, a housemate of both Myers and Sommerville, criticized Sommerville’s lack of firmness in ignoring the posting: “Somerville’s too pacific conduct in this stage of the business I did not nor ever shall approve.” ⁶¹ Sommerville, like Keeling Terrell before him, would have to live down such suspicions of cowardice. On the other hand, students who never flinched in their willingness to abide by the code could expect to receive the highest compliment‑-recognition as “young men of undaunted courage.” ⁶²

Furthermore, when young Virginians wrote of why they entered the lists, they almost always suggested not so much “passion” or “fear,” as “duty” and “sensibility.” Amicus speaks of “the most extreme reluctance that Mr. Terrel and his friend undertook the sad duty that then devolved on them” to accept the challenge to duel Grymes. “From principles both of reason and urbanity, he [Terrell’s friend] was most decidedly averse from the practice of duelling in all its forms and parts, and that nothing short of the imperious calls of friendship, duty, or insulted honor, can ever induce him to lend it the small countenance.” ⁶³ Samuel Myers, a year before his own affair of honor, in commenting on the famous 1808 duel between John Daly Burk and Felix Coquebert in Petersburg (in which Burk was slain), observed that although “Mr. Coquebert was the successfull adversary of Burke, the latter is so great a favorite here, that Mr. C. is reprobated & execrated in the most malevolent manner, but I am neverthless persuaded that he [Coquebert] had the justest cause of provocation & deported himself a gentleman of sensibility and honor.” ⁶⁴

No one in the early years of the republic captured these new sentiments any better than George Tucker, himself a William & Mary graduate, A.B. 1797, who later would write in his autobiography “I had always determined to preserve my honor untarnished, according to the prevailing code.” ⁶⁵ In a series of pseudonymous essays published in the Richmond Examiner and Enquirer between 1803 and 1805, Tucker observed “It must be admitted, that when tried by the standard of impartial reason and immutable justice, no practice [such as dueling] can appear more absurd, barbarous and abominable.” And yet

the laws of honour, inscribed not on mouldering parchment, but on the tablets of the heart, proclaimed, not by the voice of the detested despot, the venal legislator, or the giddy multitude, but by the principle of honour in the inmost recesses of the soul, command every gallant and generous spirit, to expose his life, and shed his blood in defence of his reputation. ⁶⁶

To the degree that these sentiments capture the mindset of young Virginians, it is quite clear that the definition of a gentleman was changing from that of their fathers’ generation.

One might see in this shift in values evidence of the “Romantic reaction” against the Enlightenment‑-the triumph of heart over head‑‑that numerous scholars of Virginia and the antebellum South have highlighted. ⁶⁷ Yet, at least among the students at William & Mary in the first decade of the 1800s, there does not seem to have been much of a “reaction.” The Revolutionary Enlightenment still had far more appeal to idealistic youth at William & Mary than Burkean conservatism. New notions of honor were intricately intertwined with older Enlightenment values without any seeming disjuncture. But then the old Revolutionary Enlightenment with its “quasi-romantic, millenial, supremely optimistic dream of the universal republican future” had never been so purely rational anyway. ⁶⁸

Conclusion

At some level, students at William & Mary like William Cabell Rives yielded to “that false notion of honor” because they were fulfilling parental and societal expectations. Not that their parents or society wanted them to duel. Although they undoubtedly disagreed about whether and how student duelists should be punished, almost all Virginians would have preferred that students not duel. But, in the end, Virginians resigned themselves to student dueling, just as they accepted dueling in general.

Virginians could resign themselves to student dueling because, however lamentable the means, dueling helped reinforce values that Virginians believed important. Among post-revolutionary Virginians‑-at least among that class of gentry whose children attended William & Mary‑-there was a general consensus on the values they wanted to instill: Jeffersonian values of free thinking, republican vigilance, manly pride, and physical bravery. These Virginians socialized their children in these values and expected to have the values reinforced at William & Mary.

By the turn of the nineteenth century a critical mass of Virginians had come to believe that dueling helped to reinforce these values. As George Tucker put it, “a quick sense of honor” “if not virtue itself,…is an admirable substitute for it. The man of honour acts from pride or the fear of reproach, but still he acts rightly.” ⁶⁹ Confronted with such opinion, other Virginians, who would have preferred to hold out for “true honor,” were forced to tolerate dueling to one degree or another as a social reality.

Young Virginians, particularly the kind who attended William & Mary, idealistic in nature, weak in religion, aspiring to the professions, naturally gravitated to the more positive view of dueling. Despite the very real threat of expulsion and the troubles and unease it could bring their family, William & Mary students were driven to the field of honor in the first decade of the nineteenth century in record numbers. Although we cannot properly label this shift a Romantic reaction, clearly new values of sensibility and changing notions of honor were at play, romantic values that would continue to play a major role in shaping that culture which we have come to associate with antebellum Virginia and the rest of the Old South.