Virginia and the Origins of the Violent South

Historians and social scientists have long been fascinated by the image of a violent South, the South of duels, bloody feuds, vicious rough-and-tumble contests, bushwhackings, and lynchings. For some this interest arises from a curiosity about what makes the South unique. But others have sought in an understanding of the historically higher levels of violent behavior in the South some partial explanation for the plague of violence in modern America.[ref]H. V. Redfield, Homicide, North and South: Being a Comparative View of Crime Against the Person in Several Parts of the United States (Philadelphia, 1880); H. C. Brearley, “The Pattern of Violence,” Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934) 678-92; Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,” American Historical Review 74 (1969): 906-25; Raymond D. Gastil, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” American Sociological Review 36 (1971): 412-27; John Shelton Reed, “To Live‑-and Die‑-in Dixie: A Contribution to the Study of Southern Violence,” Political Science Quarterly 86 (1971): 429-43; Colin Loftin and Robert H. Hill, “Regional Subculture and Homicide: An Examination of the Gastil-Hackney Thesis,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 714-24; Howard S. Erlanger, “Is There a ‘Subculture of Violence’ in the South?,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 66 (1975): 483-90; Richard Maxwell Brown, “Southern Violence‑-Regional Problem of National Nemesis?: Legal Attitudes Toward Southern Homicide in Historical Perspective,” Vanderbilt Law Review 32 (1979): 225-50; William G. Doerner, “Trends in Southern Homicide: Is the South a ‘Regional Culture of Violence?,'” Journal of Crime and Justice 3 (1980): 83-84; John Shelton Reed, “Below the Smith and Wesson Line: Reflections on Southern Violence,” Perspectives on the American South, Vol. 1, eds. Merle Black and John Shelton Reed (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1981) 9-22; H. David Allen and William B. Bankston, “Another Look at the Southern Culture of Violence Hypothesis: The Case of Louisiana,” Southern Studies 20 (1981): 55-66; Steven F. Messner, “Regional and Racial Effects on the Urban Homicide Rate: The Subculture of Violence Revisited,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1983): 997-1007; Edward L. Ayers, “Legacy of Violence,” American Heritage 42,6 (October 1991): 102-9; John Shelton Reed, “The Mind of the South and Southern Distinctiveness,” The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992) 147-8; Christopher G. Ellison, “An Eye for an Eye?: A Note on the Southern Subculture of Violence Thesis,” Social Forces 69 (1991): 1223-39; Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).[/ref]

As to the ultimate source of this violence, there are many different theories.[ref]Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979) 5-7; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) 10-2; Darden Asbury Pyron, “Lawlessness and Culture in the American South,” Virginia Quarterly Review 61 (1985): 741-7.[/ref] Numerous Northern abolitionists and visitors to the antebellum South believed the Southern propensity for violence was simply one of the evil outgrowths of the institution of slavery, a view brought home for modern audiences by John Hope Franklin’s The Militant South (1956).[ref]John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (New York, 1964); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965) 199-212; Fred Hobson, “The Savage South: An Inquiry into the Origins, Endurance, and Presumed Demise of an Image,” Virginia Quarterly Review 61 (1985): 384-6.[/ref] Another long-standing tradition, most closely associated with W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941), locates the roots of the “savage ideal” in the American frontier which has always been a violent place. The effects of the frontier simply lingered longer in the South than in the North because of lower population densities and the relative absence of towns and cities.[ref]Avery Craven, “The ‘Turner Theories’ and the South,” Journal of Southern History 5 (1939): 305-7; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941); Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957) 110‑2.[/ref] More recently Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s seminal Southern Honor (1982) stressed cultural rather than institutional or environmental origins, much older and deeper than slavery or the frontier. He proposed the thesis that Northern and Southern colonists alike carried ideas of honor‑-with its inherent propensity for violence in defense of reputation‑-in their common Anglo-Saxon cultural baggage. But the two regions began to diverge by the early nineteenth century as the North rejected honor in favor of Christian piety, relegating honor violence to the South.[ref]Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1860,” Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, eds. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 106-8; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.[/ref] Nevertheless, while tending to stress one or the other of these factors, Franklin, Cash, and Wyatt-Brown, like most other students of the South, recognize that in actual practice honor, slavery, and the frontier intricately intertwined and one cannot really understand the violent South without taking all three into account.

Unfortunately none of these theories, all based primarily on interpretations of the antebellum South, fits well the evidence from colonial Virginia, a time and place where honor, slavery, and the frontier all flourished. For example, historians have long acknowledged that dueling was exceedingly rare in the colonial era but have typically explained this away by hypothesizing that dueling evolved out of more primitive modes of honor violence under the general civilizing influence of Anglicization in the late eighteenth century and the particular influence of British, French, and German officers during the American Revolution. However, contrary to this scholarly consensus, not only was dueling rare in the colonial era but so was honor violence in general, universally condemned and effectively suppressed, at least before the mid-eighteenth century. Such evidential problems suggest that historians like Rhys Isaac who like to speak of “the transformation of Virginia” have unjustly underplayed the dramatic significance of the emergence of dueling in the post-revolutionary era, reflective of far greater changes than they have been willing to credit.[ref]Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775,” Shaping Southern Society: The Colonial Experience, ed. T. H. Breen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 249‑53; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 95-8, 319, 322, 373n11; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 15, 20-1; Elliott J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 19-22; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 57-74; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Honour and American Republicanism: A Neglected Corollary,” Ideology and the Historians, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991) 59-60.[/ref]

The Primacy of Law

Environmental, institutional, and cultural hypotheses have all contributed to the view of colonial Virginia as a competitive, honorific society which naturally erupted, at times, in violence.[ref]Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistance in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).[/ref] But this scholarly consensus stands greatly at odds with the work of seventeenth-century Chesapeake historians like Arthur Scott, Bradley Chapin, Lois Green Carr, Jon Kukla, James Perry, and James Horn who have taken a close look at seventeenth-century records and have conclusively rejected the view of the colonial Chesapeake as a violent and chaotic frontier. They find Virginia and Maryland to be “intensely governed societies” remarkable for “the primacy of law” and their social and political stability.[ref]Lois Green Carr, “The Foundations of Social Order: Local Government in Colonial Maryland,” Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978) 72-110; Jon Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration Virginia,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 275-98; James R. Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615‑1655 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) 237; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth‑Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 334-80, quote 380.[/ref]

Colonial Virginians had their genteel vices‑-sexual misconduct, drunkenness, gambling, and certainly tobacco-smoking‑-all behaviors traditionally associated with dueling in Europe.[ref]Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929) 105; George C. Brauer, Jr., The Education of a Gentle­man: Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England, 1660-1775 (New York: Bookman, 1959) 16-8; Bruce, Violence and Culture 31; V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 8, 81-2, 87, 120-1, 153-5.[/ref] But the colonial Virginian elite drew the line at the vice of dueling, with any challenger almost always dragged into court for disturbing the peace or contempt of authority.[ref][William G. Stanard,] Rev. Barons of the Potomac and Rappahannock, by Moncure D. Conway, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 216; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1910; New York: Russell & Russell, 1958) 75-80; Arthur P. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930) 178-9. For colonial America in general, see Evarts B. Greene, “The Code of Honor in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, with Special Reference to New England,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 26 (1927): 367-88; James Truslow Adams, Provincial Society, 1690-1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 161-2; William Oliver Stevens, Pistols at Ten Paces: The Story of the Code of Honor in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940) 9-14; Mary Patterson Clarke, Parliamentary Privilege in the American Colonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943) 112-3; W. J. Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel in the Early Republic: Burr v. Hamilton,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 14n33.[/ref] Occasionally one notes a Giles Bland or a Daniel Parke who‑-because of some combination of their individual personality, education, and experience‑-had absorbed aristocratic notions of honor and dueling, but the other gentry soon put these upstarts in their place.[ref]On Bland, see “The Case of Giles Bland, 1676,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1913): 126-35. On Parke, see William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections relating to the American Colonial Church, Vol. I.‑-Virginia (Privately published, 1870) 23-9 ; “Virginia Gleanings in England,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 20 (1912): 372-81; Louis B. Wright, “William Byrd’s Defense of Sir Edmund Andros,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 2 (1945): 58-9; Ruth Bourne, “John Evelyn, the Diarist, and his Cousin Daniel Parke II,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78 (1970): 3-33; Parke Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971) 103-8; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 318-9.[/ref]

As for the more primitive forms of honor violence from which historians suggest dueling emerged, there is only sketchy evidence and that restricted almost totally to the lower classes after the mid-eighteenth century. One cannot even say that the lower classes in Virginia were particularly violent. The number of trials of free persons 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.[ref]Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 200-5; Marion Dargan, Crime and the Virginia Gazette, 1736-1775, University of New Mexico Bulletin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1934); Hugh F. Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings in the General Court of Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1965) 204-15. Scott also notes that no more than two or three slaves were tried for murder in any one year. See Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 203-4.[/ref] What violence there was in colonial Virginia‑-that directed at Native Americans, felons, servants, and slaves‑-was strictly controlled by the elite in order to maintain the hierarchical order.[ref]Timothy E. Morgan, “Turmoil in an Orderly Society: Colonial Virginia, 1607-1754; A History and Analysis,” diss., College of William and Mary, 1976; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 398-405.[/ref]

This does not mean that Virginians were unconcerned about their reputations. As James Horn observes 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.”[ref]Horn, Adapting to a New World 363.[/ref] 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, brought by individuals from all walks of life. 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, such as 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.[ref]Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1910; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964) 1: 50-2; Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 181-3; Clara Ann Bowler, “Carted Whores and White Shrouded Apologies: Slander in the County Courts of Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 411‑26; Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983) 51-2, 76-7, 85-9, 131-4; Mary Beth Norton, “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 3-39; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 396-7; Perry, Formation of a Society 113‑4, 201‑2; Horn, Adapting to a New World 363-8. See also Roger Thompson, “‘Holy Watchfulness’ and Communal Conformism: The Functions of Defamation in Early New England Communities,” New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 504-22; Norman L. Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 16-9.[/ref] 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 regularly punished throughout the colonial era.[ref]Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 164‑74; David A. Williams, Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia Politics, 1698-1750 (New York: Garland, 1989) 325-6; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) 81-3, 118-19, 174; Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 28-30.[/ref]

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.”[ref]Horn, Adapting to a New World 367.[/ref] But honor violence did not even raise its head after the courts‑-overloaded by personal defamation suits‑-adopted procedural and substantive barriers against litigation in the late seventeenth century, a move which led to “a marked decrease in the number of private defamation actions, civil and criminal.”[ref]Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 185; Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 26-7 (quote). Larry D. Eldridge notes a similar evolving leniency toward seditious speech. See Larry D. Eldridge, A Distant Heritage: The Growth of Free Speech in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1994).[/ref] And at other times the colonial elite seemed quite content to ignore personal affronts. Politics in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centry Virginia could be anything but genteel. David A. Williams notes that in this rough-and-tumble politics, “public oaths and remarks such as ‘scurrilous,’ ‘Dogg,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘Fifth Monarchist,’ ‘notorious liar,’ ‘Beelzebub,’ ‘mutinous,’ ‘treasonous,’ ‘son of whore,’ which would be considered by later generations as libelous and justifications for a defense of honor, were hurled with relative abandon.”[ref]Williams, Political Alignments 3, 47, 56, 364-6.[/ref] Yet colonial Virginians could agree that whether one chose to ignore or prosecute an insult, these were proper matters for the courts or one’s conscience, not for the field of honor or the streets.

Nevertheless, sometime in the eighteenth century this societal consensus began to fall apart. By mid-century Virginians began to hear of gouged eyes and chewed-off ears in vicious rough-and-tumble contests, moving the Assembly in 1752 “to re-enact the 22 and 23 Charles II, chapter I, preamble and all, with practically no changes” making it “a felony to put out an eye, slit a nose, bite or cut off the nose or lip, or to cut off or disable any limb or member.”[ref]Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 205 (quote); Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings 200.[/ref] By the early nineteenth century dueling had become firmly entrenched among the Virginia elite. How had this transformation in attitudes toward honor violence come about?

The Scotch-Irish

One interesting possibility emerges out of the work of Grady McWhiney, David Hackett Fischer, and others which traces Southern violence not to Anglo-Saxon but to Celtic or British borderland roots.[ref]Grady McWhiney, “Ethnic Roots of Southern Violence,” A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, eds. William J. Cooper, Jr., Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) 112-37; Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988) 146-70; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 689-90, 735-8, 764-71; David Hackett Fischer, “Albion and Appalachia,” Appalachian Journal 19 (1992): 185-6; Grady McWhiney, “The South’s Celtic Heritage,” North Louisiana Historical Association Journal 24 (1993): 140; Fox Butterfield, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 3-18; Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor 4-9. This view has received sharp criticism from students of Appalachia. See “Culture Wars: David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, Appalachian Journal 19 (1992): 161-200; Altina L. Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia: Evolution of a Cultural Stereotype,” Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 347-76.[/ref] Although none of these scholars explore the exact nature of the timing and impact of the cultural interaction between the different population elements, the emergence of honor violence in Virginia is certainly consistent with the arrival of the Scotch-Irish in the Virginia backcountry in large numbers in the mid-eighteenth century.

If medieval notions of honor violence had begun to fade among the English middling classes with the rise of a state-centered honor system during the reign of the Tudors, the same could not be said of England’s neighbor to the North, Scotland.[ref]Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 12, 309, 320, 328-38, 381; Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986) 17-8.[/ref] Under the influence of Sir Thomas Elyot and other humanists, English honor was “increasingly required to adapt itself to the demands of religion, and to those of the state” and honor violence was unequivocably condemned as promoting public disorder and anarchy, totally contrary to the common good.[ref]Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929) 102; Donna T. Andrew, “The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850,” Social History 5 (1980): 409-34; James 322, 338, 379 394, 410; Kiernan, Duel in European History 89; François Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 30-3.[/ref] But in Scotland they seem to have maintained, writes James G. Leyburn, their traditional “addiction…to fighting and violence.” By the early sixteenth century, “the pride and touchiness of the Scot had already become proverbial. There was something in his character like ‘quills upon the fretful porpentine.'” With lex talionis the law of the land, the national emblem the thistle, and “its motto Nemo me impune lacessit‑-no one attacks me with impunity,” “the Scot was quick to take offense, lest any man consider him a weakling.”[ref]James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962) 6-7, 9, 68-70. See also Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573-1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986); Fischer, Albion’s Seed 623-9.[/ref]

However influenced by institutional and environmental factors, the Scotch-Irish carried similar cultural attitudes toward honor violence to America. The early reputation of the Ulstermen in the American colonies for being a pugnacious people was one rooted in fact.[ref]Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York: Atheneum, 1966) 133; E. Estyn Evans, “The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation and Heritage in the American Old West,” Essays in Scotch-Irish History, ed. E. R. R. Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) 75-6; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Southern Colonial Grotesque: Robert Bolling’s ‘Neanthe’,” Mississippi Quarterly 35 (1982) 109; James C. Klotter, “Feuds in Appalachia: An Overview,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 56 (1982): 307-10.[/ref] Crevecoeur noted the Irish “love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious, and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything.”[ref]J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957) 58.[/ref] As David Hackett Fisher observes, in the backcountry “the prevailing principle was lex talionis, the rule of retaliation. It held that a good man must seek to do right in the world, but when wrong was done to him he must punish the wrongdoer himself by an act of retribution that restored order and justice in the world.”[ref]Fischer, Albion’s Seed 765-71, quote 765.[/ref]

Although dueling was a form of honor violence practically unknown in Ulster, the no-holds-barred fighting which disgusted so many visitors to the South was clearly imported by Ulstermen.[ref]Leroy V. Eid, “Irish, Scotch and Scotch-Irish, A Reconsideration,” American Presbyterians 64 (1986): 220-1; Leroy V. Eid, “The Colonial Scotch-Irish: A View Accepted Too Readily,” Eíre-Ireland 21 (1986): 83; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 735-8. On dueling in Ulster, see James Kelly, “That Damn’d Thing Called Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995) 63, 80.[/ref] The Scotch-Irish shocked Bostonians in the 1720s with their barbarous fighting style, revealed “most graphically in the practice of biting off ears in the course of fights.”[ref]Maldwyn A. Jones, “Scotch-Irish,” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980) 899.[/ref] In Pennsylvania in the early 1740s, the Scotch-Irish, besides spontaneous brawls, engaged in scheduled, deliberate “riots” at fairs and other public places involving rival groups of men.[ref]Carlton Jackson, A Social History of the Scotch-Irish (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993) 70-1.[/ref]

In Virginia, the Scotch-Irish provided the inspiration in the early 1760s for Robert Bolling’s poem “Neanthe,” “the first appearance in American literature of the brutal ‘fight’ story that eventually became a staple of Southern frontier humor.” The poem highlights a vicious fight between Euphenor and Dolon on the Eastern Shore in which the opponents bite, squeeze testicles, gouge, and knee-in-the-face, until finally Euphenor kicks Dolon to death.[ref]Lemay, “Southern Colonial Grotesque” 109; Robert D. Arner, “The Muse of History: Robert Bolling’s Verses on the Norfolk Inoculation Riots of 1768-1769,” Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole, ed. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992) 165.[/ref] At one point in the poem, as J. A. Leo Lemay observes, “Bolling interrupts the narrative to find an Irish (rather than English) origin for ‘our good Planters fisticuff'”:

As Bolling shows, by the time he was writing in the early 1760s, many Anglo-Americans had adopted Scotch-Irish modes of fighting. The rather rapid spread of these new or revived attitudes toward honor violence among backwoodsmen and the lower classes and even among the planter class explains why so few references to maiming and gouging associate the practice with the Scotch-Irish. Indeed when Revd. Charles Woodmason wrote his famous “Burlesque Sermon” in the late 1760s condemning equally the litigiousness and no-holds-barred “fisty Cuffs” of the backcountry South Carolina settlers, he singled out not the Scotch-Irish but “Virginians.” He warned his parishioners to avoid getting entangled with “the Virginian Crackers–for they’l bluster amd make a Noise about a Turd‑-And they’l think they have a Right because they are American born to do as they please and what they please and say what they please to any Body.” “Only I would advise You when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these Virginians do‑-Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one another‑-that is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods, to the Great damage of many a Poor Woman.”[ref]Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmasion, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953) 154-9.[/ref]

It could be that Woodmason in this classic description of lex talionis in the backcountry was poking fun at the pretentiousness of the Virginian-born Scotch-Irish like the Chesnuts to whom the sermon was addressed. Certainly his journal abounds with criticisms of “these Northern Scotch Irish”‑-whom he thought “the worst Vermin on Earth,” “the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind,” “these wild Peoples”‑-while mentioning nary a word about Virginians.[ref]Hooker, Carolina Backcountry 50, 60-1, 142.[/ref] Of the Waxhaws District itself, the setting of the “Burlesque Sermon,” Woodmason in his journal entry of January 25, 1767, notes “it is occupied by a Sett of the most lowest vilest Crew breathing‑-Scotch Irish Presbyterians from the North of Ireland.”[ref]Hooker, Carolina Backcountry xxiv, 13-4.[/ref] The Scotch-Irish from Augusta County, Virginia, dominated the settlement of the South Carolina backcountry but especially the Waxhaws and were the source of much violence and threats of violence.[ref]Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729-1765 (Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1940) 134-46, 160. In contrast, Richard Maxwell Brown seems to believe Woodmason’s references to violent Virginians refer principally to “British stock from the older sections of the Old Dominion‑-were especially prominent in the Back Country,” although he says he draws heavily on Meriwether. See Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963) 2, 27, 179n2.[/ref] Yet, whether the Virginians that Woodmason described were Scotch-Irish or lower-class Englishmen, all of the evidence suggests that by the late 1760s rough-and-tumble fighting in Virginia was no longer strictly a Scotch-Irish phenomenon and, although Arthur Scott asserts otherwise, hardly just a frontier phenomenon.[ref]Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October, 25, November 8, 1770; October 17, November 7, 1771; April 23, May 7, 1772; Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 205-7; Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1965) 164-7; Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings 199-202. The offenders mentioned in these sources, with all incidents occurring in the years 1770-2, hail from Price William, Augusta, Prince Edward, Frederick, Lunenburg, and Botetourt counties.[/ref] Just how pervasive the Scotch-Irish influence over Virginia society had come is well shown in Philip Vickers Fithian’s classic account of a planned “riot” in Westmoreland County in the Northern Neck in 1774‑-very much like those the Scotch-Irish were engaging in back in Pennsylvania in the 1740s:

By appointment is to be fought this Day near Mr Lanes two fist Battles between four young Fellows. The Cause of the battles I have not yet known; I suppose either that they are lovers, & one has in Jest or reality some way supplanted the other; or has in a marry housr call’d him a Lubber, or a thick-Skull, or a Buckskin, or a Scotchman, or perhaps one has mislaid the others hat, or knocked a peach out of his Hand, or offered him a dram without wiping the mouth of the Bottle; all these, & ten thousand more quite as triffling & ridiculous, are thought & accepted as just Causes of immediate Quarrels, in which every diabolical Strategem for Mastery is allowed & practised, of Bruising, Kicking, Scratching, Pinching, Biting, Butting, Tripping, Throtling, Gouging, Cursing, Dismembring, Howling, &c. This spectacle, (so loathsome & horrible!) generally is attended with a crowd of People![ref]Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fitihian, 1773-1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1943) 240-1.[/ref]

Although Fithian looked upon “animals which seek after & relish such odious and filthy amusements [as] not of the human species,” his description captures the growing support of a large segment of Virginia society for displays of honor violence in the pre-revolutionary years.

Breakdown of Deference

Other forces were at work in the mid-eighteenth century contributing to the increased levels of violence in Virginia. In the 1730s and 1740s, about the same time as the Scotch-Irish were arriving in the backcountry, politics in some Virginia counties was getting quite heated. County elections became “boisterous affairs with liquor flowing freely, with jeering, fighting, and riots.”[ref]Charles S. Sydnor, American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (New York: Free Press, 1952) 24-6; Williams, Political Alignments 122, 280-2 (quote); Richard R. Beeman, “Robert Munfourd and the Political Culture of Frontier Virginia,” Journal of American Studies 12 (1978): 181; T. Morgan, “Turmoil in an Orderly Society” 282-6.[/ref] For the most part, however, Virginia as a whole remained fairly calm.

But in the peculiar political climate of the late 1760s‑-where as Governor Fauquier reported ‘Every Thing is become a Matter of heat and Party Faction’‑-we start to see a colony-wide turn to political violence.[ref]On the heated political atmosphere of later 1760s, see David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1721-1803: A Biography, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952) 1: 156-208; William M. Dabney, “John Robinson and the Fall of the Conservative Virginia Oligarchy,” Dargan Historical Essays, eds. William M. Dabney and Josiah C. Russell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952) 55-64; Carl Bridenbaugh, Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1958) 67-71; Williams, Political Alignments 308, 318-20, 327-37, 357-8; Carl Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virginia in Virginia, 1766; or, The Importance of the Trivial,” Early Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 192-4, 206 (quote); Joseph Albert Ernst, “The Robinson Scandal Redivivus: Money Debts, and Politics in Revolutionary Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 77 (1969): 146-73; J. A. Leo Lemay, “Robert Bolling and the Bailment of Colonel Chiswell,” Early American Literature 6 (1971): 101-3; John Sayle Watterson, Thomas Burke, Restless Revolutionary (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980) 6; Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, NY: KTO Press, 1986) 285-335.[/ref] Much of this was spurred on by Virginia’s first newspaper war. From the establishment of the Virginia Gazette in 1736 until May 1766 Virginia was served by only one newspaper and that newspaper generally understood to be under the thumb of the governor while the editors followed a policy of avoiding “Scandal and Detraction.”[ref]William H. Castles, Jr., “The Virginia Gazette, 1736-1766: Its Editors, Editorial Policies, and Literary Content,” diss., University of Tennessee, 1962, 26-8, 70-3; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 102, 115, 119-20n7; J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Rev. Samuel Davies’ Essay Series: The Virginia Centinel, 1756-1757,” Essays in Early Virginia Literature honoring Richard Beale Davis (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977) 131-2, 160n15. For earlier and later paper wars in Virginia, see Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960) 2: 800-19; Castles 89-92, 170-3, 273-8; Homer Dale Kemp, “The Pre-Revolutionary Virginia Polemical Essay: The Pistole Fee and the Two-Penny Acts Controversies,” diss., University of Tennessee, 1972; J. E. Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge: William and Mary in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Williamsburg: Endowment Association of the College of William and Mary of Virginia, 1976) 150-3, 162-5; Lemay, “Rev. Samuel Davies” 130-5. For similar developments in other colonies, see Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689-1775 (New York: Oxford, 1962) 138-68, 218-29, 288-313, 316-23; Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 35, 41; Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 3; Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 124-36.[/ref] Following the Stamp Act crisis and the death of the old printer Joseph Royle, some of the Burgesses decided to bring in their own printer, William Rind, to establish a more independent Gazette. At the same time Royle’s old foreman, Alexander Purdie, and his partner John Dixon, in an attempt to win the support of other Burgesses for the public printing contract, resumed publication of the original Gazette.

With the rivalry between the two Virginia Gazettes, “the excited inhabitants of the Old Dominion [had] what they had never before experienced, the sensations and sensationalism of a free press.”[ref]Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue” 199-200; J. A. Leo Lemay, “John Mercer and the Stamp Act in Virginia, 1764-1765,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 91 (1983): 24-5; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 101-2, 116, 126n42. On similar developments in other colonies, see Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 44.[/ref] And in 1766 there was much to cover: the issue of whether the Burgesses should split the positions of Speaker and Treasurer controlled for nearly a quarter of a century by John Robinson and now left open by his death; allegations of Robinson’s embezzlement of funds funneled to his friends and relations; the murder of Robert Routledge by John Chiswell (Robinson’s father-in-law) and the furor over Chiswell’s bailment by Robinson cronies; and the feud between the Lee and Mercer clans over Richard Henry Lee’s attacks on George Mercer, the would-be Stamp Agent, and the Mercers’ revelation that Lee himself had also applied for the position.[ref]Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue”; Ernst 162; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 99-103; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 309-14.[/ref]

In such a heated political atmosphere, once the dike of deference had been breached, the walls came a-tumbling down. “Our writers,” as one anonymous Virginian put it, “are generally such as have been very little used to Contradiction, and know not how to bear it from one another; and when they find their Writings not treated with that Respect they have been accustomed to in their private Characters, they grow angry, and sometimes abuse one another.”[ref]Letter from Virginia, October 25, 1766, The New York Journal or General Advertiser, November 27, 1766. See also Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue” 206.[/ref] Thus the free press gave rise to “a vastly different, more openly combative style of politics.”[ref]Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 313. For examples of regular poetical attacks on Landon Carter, see Watterson, Thomas Burke 5-8; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 114, 117. For a similar rise in partisanship and decline in deference in other colonies, see Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 45-7.[/ref]

Members of the Virginia gentry responded to newspaper attacks in many different ways. While none dared to condemn outright the freedom of the press‑-an idea so closely tied to the Patriot cause and traditional British liberty‑-some complained that freedom of the press was being too easily turned into license. At the same time they often answered in kind with their own anonymous and pseudonymous calumny.[ref]”To the Printer,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, September 26, 1766; Dikephilos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 6, 1766; Amicus, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, March 5, 1767; “On Calumny,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 19, 1767; John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, reprinted in Lois Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954) 204. On the overwhelming popular support for “the present Freedom of the Press,” see “An Ode, Occasioned by the Repeal of the Stamp Act, and the present Freedom of the Press,” Rind’s Virginia Gazette, August 15, 1766; Philanthropos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 22, 1766; A Man of Principle, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 22, 1766; A Freeman of Virginia, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 6, 1766; Letter to Editor, The New York Journal or General Advertiser, November 27, 1766; A Lover of My Country, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, March 24, 1768; Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue” 206, 209-10. On mixed feelings about freedom of the press across the colonies, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764-1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958) 61-2; Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 29-55; John Nerone, Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 18-52.[/ref] Still others appealed to the public by publishing signed statements or affidavits refuting the charges against them. Indeed a concern for honor or reputation was at the heart of most of the signed letters to the editor of the Virginia Gazette.[ref]John Blair, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 4, 1766; Richard Henry Lee, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, August 8, 1766; John Mercer, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, September 26, 1766; James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October 3, 1766; Benjamin Grymes, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, May 21, 1767; Corbin Griffin, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, May 28, 1767; James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767; Benjamin Grymes, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 6, 1767.[/ref]

A couple of Virginians decided to sue their critics. William Byrd III sued Robert Bolling for libel after somehow finding out that Bolling was responsible for the anonymous insinuations in the Gazette about Byrd’s role in the bailment of Chiswell. John Wayles‑-unable to identify his pseudonymous critic “R. M.”‑-filed a suit against both Purdie & Dixon and Rind for libel.[ref]Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 99-142. Bolling reported that “For this endeavour hath he been traduced (by a Gentleman [Byrd], without much gentleness) and threatened with prosecution. See [Robert Bolling], “To J. B. Esquire,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 25, 1766.[/ref] But in the spirit of the times few “Friends of Liberty” would even consider such an indictment of libel against authors or newspapers publishing pieces aimed at “correcting the haughty Spirits of some of our great Men, who, from their Fortunes, Connections, and Stations, had conceived very high Ideas of Self Importance.” The grand jury returned the indictments against Bolling, Purdie & Dixon, and Rind, “not true bills.”[ref]Philanthropos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 22, 1766; Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October 17, 1766; Maryland Gazette, October 30, 1766; Dikephilos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 6, 1766; A Freeman of Virginia, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 6, 1766 (quote); R. R., Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 6, 1766; Letter to Editor, The New York Journal or General Advertiser, November 27, 1766 (quote); Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 115-6, 126n43. For similar developments across the colonies, see Harold L. Nelson, “Seditious Libel in Colonial America,” American Journal of Legal History 3 (1959): 160-72; Richard Buel, Jr., “Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America: The Evolution of Libertarianism, 1760-1820,” The Press and the American Revolution, eds. Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1980) 73-4; Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 34-5, 45-8; Nerone, Violence Against the Press 26. Norman L. Rosenberg suggests based on fragmentary evidence that prosecutions for contempt of authority also became more difficult to obtain by the middle of the eighteenth century than they had been in the seventeenth. See Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 286n45.[/ref]

As a last resort some Virginia gentlemen turned to physical violence or the threat of physical violence. Indeed the wide open press in conjunction with the heated politics lay behind the three challenges of record in the late 1760s. When justice failed Byrd, he challenged Bolling to a duel the following day.[ref]Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 105, 109, 116, 142n141. Byrd’s son, Thomas Taylor Byrd, acted similarly when, standing accused of riotous behavior before the meeting of the President and Masters of William and Mary College in April 1769, he admitted some of the accusations levelled at him but denied others. Byrd “averr’d that his Father would believe him concerning any Complaints of his Conduct.” He further “wish’d to know who they [the witnesses] were, declar’d that let them be who they would (the President and Masters excepted) he would call them to account, & on being asked what he meant by calling them to account, he explain’d it by saying that he would knock them down.” He felt “the he was unjustly order’d to be punish’d, that he was a capable Judge, & would be the Judge himself when he deserved to be punish’d,” announced he would never allow himself to be whipped and, if he were expelled, threatened the President that he “would be sorry for it; and when he was ask’d the Meaning of such Threats, and whether he design’d to challenge the President answer’d that if he was expell’d he should consider the President as any other Person.” See “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 13 (1904): 134; Jane Carson, James Innes and His Brothers of the F. H. C. (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1965) 66-7; Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776, 2 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977) 2: 778n.[/ref] Similarly frustrated, Dr. Arthur Lee challenged James Mercer in April 1767 and Joseph Calvert challenged Thomas Burke in the summer of 1769, all of whom had actively engaged in libelous attacks on their opponents in the pages of the Gazette.[ref]There is no mention in the record of the particular affront that spurred Lee and Calvert to issue challenges. On the Lee-Mercer affair, see Corbin Griffin, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, May 28, 1767; James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767; John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, in Mulkearn 203-4; Louis W. Potts, Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary (1981) 42. On the Calvert-Burke affair, see below.[/ref]

The times tended to encourage physical violence, reflected most clearly in regular outbreaks of mob violence.[ref]Patrick Henderson, “Smallpox and Patriotism: The Norfolk Riots, 1768-1769,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 73 (1965): 412-24; Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge 145; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 304-6; Thomas C. Parramore, Norfolk: The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994) 79-85. For a recent overview of the literature, see Thomas P. Slaughter, “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115(1) (Jan 1991): 3-34.[/ref] If mob violence represented an old English tradition, there is also a strong hint of Scotch-Irish honor violence in the air. There appears to have been a major rash of maiming and gouging in the years 1770-2, leading the Assembly to strengthen and broaden the 1752 statute for cases of wounding by “gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stamping upon any of his majesty’s subjects.”[ref]Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 206; Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings 201.[/ref] Notions of lex talionis could even sway the gentry. Thus James Mercer attacked Richard Henry Lee’s libels against Mercer’s brother by threatening that “had the same facts been sworn to before a tribunal having jurisdiction, I could legally have got the author’s ears condemned; indeed, had I known him in due time, I would have attempted it by force of arms.”[ref]James Mercer, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October 3, 1766. His father, John Mercer, the week before had made a similar threat to a pseudonymous critic, calling him “a vile malicious incendiary, villainous detractor, and infamous liar” who deserves to have his ears cut off and his nose slit, “which sentence perhaps Col. [George] Mercer, whom you have drawn into the dispute, would have caused to have been executed on you if you had dared to have said in his hearing what you have dared to publish.” See John Mercer, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, September 26, 1766.[/ref] When in Williamsburg, Mercer had begun to carry around a pair of pocket pistols that he said were “sufficient to protect me from Dr. Lee’s attacks in the streets, or in company.”[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767. In the depression summer of 1764 with resentment mounting against merchants who pressed for payment of debts, “William Allason, a Scottish merchant who operated on the Rappahannock River, ordered a pair of pistols, explaining that ‘it is sometimes Dangerous in Travelling through our wooden Country, Particularly at this time when the Planters are pressed for old Ballances.'” Quoted in Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 296.[/ref]

Virginians in the mid-eighteenth century spoke much of their honor. Although we rarely hear what went on in the taverns, inns, and coffee rooms of Williamsburg and the rest of Virginia, what we do hear leaves no doubt that what Rhys Isaac calls “extravagant ways of talking” were quite 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.[ref]Isaac, Transformation 95.[/ref]

Such an environment undoubtedly led to scuffles at times. But what is more impressive are the severe restraints placed on honor violence in the colonial era. However much they spoke of their honor, colonial Virginians almost always seemed to know where to draw the line.

The Lee-Mercer affair reveals most clearly the limits on honor violence in this tavern/coffeehouse world even in their breach.[ref]Although in England there were fairly sharp distinctions between coffeehouses, inns, taverns, etc., the distinctions were rather ambiguous in colonial Virginia. See James M. Davis, Jr., “The Colonial Coffeehouse,” Early American Life 9 (1978): 26-9, 86; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983). On the importance of coffeehouses in political developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and its central role in the formation of what Jurgen Habermas and others have called “the public sphere,” see Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 148-51; Steve Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807-34; C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).[/ref] As it turns out Lee and Mercer never did meet on the field of honor. Each later claimed to have shown up at the agreed upon spot but found no sign of the other. Lee told his second Corbin Griffin “that a person who could act in such a manner he should not think worthy his notice for the future.” But upon hearing that Mercer was telling everyone that Lee had failed to meet him, Lee went to the public coffee room intent on giving Mercer a caning.[ref]Corbin Griffin, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, May 28, 1767.[/ref] As a pseudonymous critic of Lee’s pride later described the scene:

Canes and pistols are removed, by the resistless command of the surrounding croud, to fisty-cuffs go the exalted duellists. O sad, sad! the Doctor [Arthur Lee], instead of being handsomely run or fired through the body, which would have given him infinite satisfaction, is bled at the nose, and has his eyes closed, as if he had been no better than a clown or a peasant. The poor, abused, unfortunate Doctor, lifts his discomposed, tumefied, bloody, and sightless head; and, notwithstanding the inconvenience of such a situation for a display of oratory, makes a very fine harangue on the most grossly and shamefully violated laws of honour; for which, as a mischief to society, with a truly disinterested spirit, he expresses more concern than for any injury done to his own person. The Coffee-House world manifest their esteem by laughing.[ref]Amicus Superbiae, “An Essay on Pride,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 30, 1767. See also John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, in Mulkearn 203-4. For other examples of coffee house violence across the colonies, see Nerone, Violence Against the Press 25-6.[/ref]

And the Coffee-House world did indeed laugh at the Arthur Lees of this world and their aristocratic notions of honor and dueling. Attempts to defend dueling in the Virginia Gazette brought only condemnation and ridicule. In defending dueling Lee and the anonymous author of the “Essay on Honour” (which most Virginians assumed was written by Arthur Lee) employed all of the arguments that defenders of dueling were using in England and would later use in the antebellum South.[ref]Only two letters were written in defense of dueling: the anonymous “Essay on Honour” published in Rind’s Virginia Gazette sometime in July 1767 and a letter written in December 1767 at the end of the print controversy signed “L. O.” Unfortunately there are no extant copies of the “Essay on Honour” but the much of it is reprinted in the latter essay. “L. O.” explicitly states that he is not the author of the “Essay on Honour” but admits that the earlier essay “contains principles, by which I always hope to regulate my life; and which I therefore cannot see injured without concern.” See L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767. William Rind in Purdie and Dixon’s Gazette explicitly denied that Lee was the author of the “Essay on Honour.” See Rind, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 13, 1767. The essay signed “L. O.” was quite likely the work of Arthur Lee. In an essay “On Behaviour & Conversation” signed “A Friend to Society,” the author makes the comment “should Mr. O. L. or L. O. or some more masterly hand than mine, take up the pen, I shall very readily make room for him in the field, abundantly happy in having roused an abler champion to the combat.” See A Friend to Society, “On Behavior & Conversation,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 5, 1767. This literary dueling analogy seems strikingly close to one employed by John Camm five months later to belittle Arthur Lee as “a literary coward.” See John Camm, Letter to the Editor, Virginia Gazette, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, April 7, 1768.[/ref] In particular these defenders of dueling celebrated the principles of “modern honour” that Englishmen associated with chivalrous knights, principles that “perpetually dictates a fairness, justice, and nobleness of conduct,” the protector 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.[ref]On contemporaneous references to “modern honour,” see the lengthy excerpt from “a very celebrated Author” [Bernard Mandeville], in Letter to Editor, Virginia Gazette, August 3, 1739; and the letter from the Bishop of Carlisle to the Earl of Bellamont, published in Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, November 18, 1773. On defamation and protection of reputation, see “Difference between Resentment and Revenge” Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1772; Letter to the Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, August 19, 1773.[/ref]

I mean, Sir,…that honour 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 of honour, upon which the lives of Peers depend; that principle which the British constitution considers in the highest degree, sacred and inviolable…in fine, that principle, which Montesquieu deems the parent of virtues in the best constituted form of society.[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767.[/ref]

The law of honor, Lee argued, as had English writers from Shakespeare to Bacon to Locke to Mandeville to Boswell, operated even on those gentleman who opposed dueling in principle since “the opinion of mankind, which is as forcible as a law, calls upon a man to resent an affront, and fixes the contempt of a coward upon him if he refuse.”[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767. Lee also refers to “the opinion of the world.” See John Locke, The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823) 2: 106; Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman 102, 104; Kiernan, Duel in European History 11.[/ref] 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.'”[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767.[/ref] 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.[ref]See, e.g., Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 2 vols. (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1832) 2: 152; “Difference between Resentment and Revenge” 11. See also Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman 99-105; Kiernan, Duel in European History 53, 100-5, 153; Billacois, The Duel 127-8, 206-7; Joanne B. Freeman, “Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 53 (1996): 315.[/ref]

Far from earning support for Lee’s case, these essays only aggravated Lee’s reputation as an obnoxious gadfly and made him the butt of a running joke.[ref]John Camm, Letter to the Editor, Virginia Gazette, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, April 7, 1768; Andromachus, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October 31, 1771.[/ref] As John Mercer summarized general opinion in a letter to his son George:

The F. R. S. Doctor [Arthur Lee], whose pride woud not permit him to acquiesce took such liberties with some of the gent. of the town who took your brother’s [James Mercer’s] part, as gave general offence, in so much that they burn’d him in effigy before his own door, & if he had confind himself to his house it is very probable that they woud have tossed him into the fire. In short he has lost his credit (if he had any to lose) and, what I dare say he values much more, his practice is much hurt, as will very probably dwindle to nothing as his immoderate pride & self-conceit will not suffer him to open his eyes & see how much, how very much, he is fallen into contempt.[ref]John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, in Mulkearn 203-4.[/ref]

The following year Lee left Virginia for England where he continued to be occasionally taunted. Needless to say he ever after had bitter feelings toward the people of Williamsburg–a place he called that “sink of idleness and vice”‑-for the way he had been treated.[ref]A. R. Riggs, The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot (Williamsburg, VA: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1976) 19-20; Potts, Arthur Lee 42-4.[/ref]

For most Englishmen, whether in the colonies or the mother country, that honor which Arthur Lee espoused was a false honor, unrestrained passion, mere vainglory, fashionable vice, Gothic barbarism. Lee himself lamented sometime after the “coffee house wrangle” “‘that honour is become now a subject of ridicule, is either prostituted to infamous purposes, or treated as a chimera.'”[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767.[/ref] Opponents of dueling were not unconcerned with reputation but believed the true fountain of honor was virtue and character not opinion.[ref]See, e.g., Amicus Superbiae, “An Essay on Pride,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 30, 1767; “A Discourse on Virtue,” Rind’s Virginia Gazette, March 7, 1771; “On the Motives to Virtue from Personal Happiness,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, January 28, 1773; Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, November 18, 1773; “On Slander,” Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, December 1, 1774.[/ref] Virginian critics 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”‑-“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.[ref]”An Essay on Duelling,” Virginia Gazette, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 27, 1767.[/ref]

Friends, relatives, and concerned citizens went out of their way to prevent duels. At 2 o’clock the night before their scheduled duel, Byrd and Bolling were both arrested and sworn over to keep the peace, apparently turned in to authorities by the storekeeper from whom Byrd purchased the pistols.[ref]Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 116, 142n141.[/ref] Mercer, with all of his many coffeehouse comrades, could not get anyone to serve as his second.[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767.[/ref] He tried to get his friend Dr. William Pasteur to attend him as a witness and surgeon in case an accident happened to him. At first Pasteur refused to be concerned at all. Then “at his [Mercer’s] earnest request,” he promised to go with him but only “to be in hearing of the pistols, so as to be ready, if necessary; but he positively refused to be an eye witness of Dr. Lee’s or my throwing away our lives, as he termed it.”[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767.[/ref] Mercer’s friends later insisted that he ignore any implied challenge in Griffin’s account of the duel and simply “publish a true account of the affair.”[ref]John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, in Mulkearn 203-4.[/ref] Mercer’s cousin, Thomson Mason, had a pair of pistols that, as he put it, could “hit the bigness of a dollar many yards” but he refused to lend them to Mercer since they would surely kill Lee and then Mercer “shou’d be guilty of murder.” Instead, Mason, like Byrd’s storekeeper, informed the authorities to prevent the duel.[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767. The affidavit from Mercer merely mentions a Mr. Mason who was an attorney working in Williamsburg and suggests there was some kind of “relationship and connexion between us.” Mr. Mason must be one of Mercer’s two male cousins, Thomson or George Mason, both attorneys. Since Thomson was a Burgess for Stafford County during the year 1767 while George was likely at home at Gunston Hall in Fairfax County, I suggest Mr. Mason was Thomson Mason.[/ref]

The Virginia gentry also found more primitive modes of honor violence unacceptable. Despite his blustering about cutting Richard Henry Lee’s ears off, James Mercer well understood the need for “a more eligible reprisal, and such as is agreeable to the laws of God and man. Lex talionis is of higher authority than human law, and the vengeance denounced against whomsoever should slay Cain, whome the Almighty preserved from death to perpetuate his torments, determines me not to attempt to shorten this Proteus’s life.”[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, October 3, 1766.[/ref] Members of the elite, like Benjamin Grymes, who resorted to bullying tactics, were regularly ridiculed just like Arthur Lee.[ref]Dikephilos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, August 29, 1766; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 110, 124n26.[/ref]

Fresh in the mind of all Virginians in the late 1760s was the notorious affray‑-not a duel‑-in which John Chiswell stabbed and killed Robert Routledge in a quarrel precipitated over some debts. Despite the fact that, after being thoroughly abused by Chiswell, an intoxicated Routledge had thrown wine out of his glass into Chiswell’s face‑-an indignity which even Chiswell’s most severe critics acknowledged any man of honor might react to violently‑‑no Virginian was willing to excuse Chiswell’s stabbing to death an unarmed Routledge or claim in print that this was an affair of honor. Indeed Chiswell was roundly condemned as a murderer and luckily, for him, died before he could be tried and hanged.[ref]Dikephilos, Letter to Editor, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, July 18, 1766; Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue” 188-212; Lemay, “Robert Bolling” 114-5, 125-6n36.[/ref]

Compared to the similar heated political atmosphere of post-revolutionary Virginia what stands out most clearly in pre-revolutionary Virginia is the rarity of honor violence. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the earlier colonial era, what is remarkable about the late 1760s is the seeming greater pressure to accept a challenge in the face of public opinion so set against and every obstacle placed in the way of dueling. This is not to say that challenges always led to acceptance. Despite a general understanding by the Mercers that Griffin’s published account of the duel was a second challenge and Mercer’s giving the lie to Griffin and Lee in print, no duel ever took place between Lee, Mercer, or Griffin.[ref]James Mercer, Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, July 23, 1767; John Mercer to George Mercer, Dec. 22, 1767-Jan. 28, 1768, in Mulkearn 203-4.[/ref] But Bolling, Mercer, and Burke, despite their apparent aversion to dueling, did feel pressure to accept the challenges sent by Byrd, Lee, and Calvert.

This is quite striking in the case of Thomas Burke who in the aftermath of the Lee-Mercer affair published in the Gazette a signed essay condemning dueling as “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 furthermore 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.”[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767.[/ref] Yet in 1769, less than two years after he wrote that essay, Burke fought a duel with Calvert, indeed the only affair of honor in the late 1760s to culminate in an actual duel.[ref]Watterson, Thomas Burke 7-10; Arner, “Muse of History” 165-83, esp. 168-9.[/ref]

The Revolution in Public Opinion

If dueling was practically unknown in the colonial era, by the early 1800s there was a widespread feeling in America that dueling had become a “national sin.”[ref]Samuel Low, A Discourse on Duelling; Preached on Sunday, March 4, 1810, at the Capitol in the City of Washington, and on Sunday, January 6, 1811, at the Capitol in the City of Richmond (Richmond: John O’Lynch, 1811) 3; Lyman Beecher, The Remedy for Duelling. A Sermon delivered before the Presbytery of Long‑Island…April 16, 1806 (New York: J. Seymour for Williams and Whiting, 1809). For examples of earlier criticisms of dueling, see Lyon G. Richardson, A History of Early American Magazines, 1741-1789 (1931; New York: Octagon Books, 1966) 181-2n86, 210n248.[/ref] What had happened between the late colonial and early national period to cause such a change? Historians, ever since they realized back in the 1890s that dueling was quite uncommon in the colonial era, have looked to the obvious answer: the Revolutionary War. In particular, these scholars have stressed that the direct personal experience of Continental and militia officers with traditional military notions of honor and dueling‑-through contact with British, French, and German officers well versed in affairs of honor‑-promoted a post-revolutionary dueling fad in America.[ref]Besides the studies mentioned in n.4 above, see also Stanard 216; Greene, “Code of Honor” 376; Dixon Ryan Fox, Ideas in Motion (New York, 1935) 58-9; Stevens, Pistols at Ten Paces 12-6, 30; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nation­al­ism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949) 96; Boorstin, Americans: The National Experience 207; James T. Moore, “The Death of the Duel: The Code Duello in Readjustor Virginia, 1879‑1883,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 259n1; Robert M. Weir, “The Last of American Freemen”: Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986) 228; Kiernan, Duel in European History 304-5.[/ref] Yet they have offered exceedingly little proof connecting this war experience with the later outbreak of peacetime dueling.

Although the Revolutionary War was undoubtedly central to the transformation in Virginian attitudes toward dueling and honor violence, the impact was not as direct as these historians would have it. Charles Royster in his excellent A Revolutionary People at War (1979) has well documented that the code of honor was integral to the rise of military professionalism in the Continental army. Nevertheless, Royster observes that “descriptions and criticisms of duelling mention not the example of Europeans but the pride and sentiment of the officers, whether the writers thought them honorable or foolish.”[ref]Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) 210. See also Greene, “Code of Honor” 379-84.[/ref] It is hardly a fact that colonial Virginians did not know about dueling. The gentlemen of Virginia throughout the colonial era well understood the general rules of dueling although they may have been uncertain about the fine particulars.[ref]The Virginia Gazettes throughout the colonial era were filled with stories about dueling in England, the Continent, and around the World. See the numerous references in Lester J. Cappon and Stella F. Duff, eds., Virginia Gazette Index, 1736-1780, 2 vols. (Williamsburg, VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1950) 1: 325-6.[/ref] Furthermore, earlier contact with British officers during the French & Indian War, despite accusations by Revd. Samuel Davies that dueling ran rampant among Virginia provincials, did not translate into peacetime dueling.[ref]Lemay, “Rev. Samuel Davies” 130-1, 134, 155. Indeed New England soldiers who experienced the greatest contact with British officers during the French & Indian War fairly unanimously condemned dueling and aristocratic notions of honor and continued to do so through the Revolutionary War. See Greene, “Code of Honor” 381-4; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) 111-7, 127. On the more general negative reaction of colonists to the British regulars, see Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755-1763 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). On the war in Virginia, see James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).[/ref] Indeed, the reigning military image in both pre- and post-revolutionary America was that of Cincinnatus, the citizen-soldier who reluctantly accepts military duty and promptly returns to the plow once the war is over.[ref]James Joseph Schramer, “The Myth of Cincinnatus: The Citizen-Soldier in Early American Literature,” diss., University of Minnesota, 1987, 2-3.[/ref]

The notion of the direct impact of wartime experience on the rise of post-revolutionary dueling perhaps rests on the observation that several of the major political affairs of honor of 1790s and early 1800s‑-as epitomized by the Hamilton-Burr duel‑-engaged men who had been officers in the war.[ref]Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) 98-100.[/ref] One might further note that during the Revolutionary War the line between military and civilian official was not always that distinct. Thus for Thomas Burke, as a delegate from North Carolina to the Continental Congress, political opposition to the military decisions of General James Sullivan led to a dragged-out affair of honor.[ref]Greene, “Code of Honor” 384; Watterson, Thomas Burke 82-8, 158-9. Burke as governor of North Carolina was also forced to abide by the military code of honor for prisoners of war after he was captured. See Watterson, Thomas Burke 187-93, 199-200, 203-6.[/ref] Burke may very well have felt like William Duer, delegate from New York, did in a letter he wrote to his fellow delegate Philip Schuyler, June 19, 1777, reporting a heated argument with General Gates: “‘Perhaps,’ Duer wrote, ‘he [Gates] may take it into his head to call me out…Should this be the case, I am determined not to shelter myself under Priviledge, being convinced of the necessity there is to act with spirit, to enable me to discharge with Fidelity the Trust reposed in me.'”[ref]Greene, “Code of Honor” 384.[/ref] But, as with the French & Indian War, wartime experience did not necessarily translate into peacetime practice.

To answer the question of why there was such a proliferation of dueling and honor violence in the early republic we would do best to focus on what numerous observers saw as the root of the problem: public opinion. Sermons, essays, and private letters, critics and advocates alike, in the early national period noted the power of popular opinion to force even men opposed to dueling to engage in duels.[ref]See, e.g., Timothy Dwight, The Folly, Guilt, and Mischiefs of Duelling: A Sermon, Preached in the College Chapel at New Haven, on the Sabbath preceding the Annual Commencement, September, 1804 (Hartford: Hudson and Company, 1805) 7, 15; G., “On Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, January 5, 1805; “Reflections on Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, January 18, 1805; X. [George Tucker], “Vindication of Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, March 30, 1805; Thomas Jefferson to James Ogilvie, June 23, 1806, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905) 18: 247; Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, July 13, 1806, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols., ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905) 10: 274-5; Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 11-2, 21-3, 43; Tucker, Essays 249-50, 257-8, 262, 265‑7; Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling (Boston, 1856) 42-3. See also D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 28, 42; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 13-4; Freeman, “Dueling as Politics” 292-3, 315-6.[/ref] There can be little doubt that the post-revolutionary era saw a fundamental transformation in both attitudes toward and actual levels of dueling and honor violence, in Virginia as in the rest of America. Richard Maxwell Brown, particularly in his most recent book No Duty to Retreat (1991), has shown how Americans‑-not just in the South but throughout the nation and across all classes‑-grew increasingly acceptant after the American Revolution of many forms of “justifiable” violence they had previously rejected.[ref]Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957) 266-90; Jack Kenny Williams, Vogues in Villainy: Crime and Retribution in Ante-Bellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959) 31-9.[/ref] The more difficult question, of course, is identifying the causes of this change in such a notoriously tricky subject as public opinion in a single state let alone an entire nation in this pre-Gallup era.

Some Northern opponents of dueling, like Thomas Burke earlier, argued that the public opinion in support of dueling was only the opinion of duelists, in direct opposition to the view of the masses.[ref]See, e.g., Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 7, 19, 21, 44.[/ref] 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.”[ref]Dwight, Folly, Guilt, and Mischiefs of Duelling 14-5.[/ref]

For explanations of why the elite might have independently turned to honor violence we have several different possibilities. Some scholars have suggested that in the 1790s and early 1800s the United States faced the political equivalent of war culminating in 1798 when “bands of Jeffersonian militia, formed in the various states and cities from Baltimore to Boston, armed and openly drilling, preparing to stand against the Federalist army.”[ref]”Letters from William and Mary College, 1798-1801” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 29 (1921): 171-9; Marshall Smelser, “The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,” American Quarterly 10 (1958): 391-419; David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 185-7; Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969); John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” National Unity on Trial, 1781-1816, ed. E. James Ferguson (New York: Random House, 1970) 73-92, quote 75; Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975); Steven H. Hochman, “On the Liberty of the Press in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1976): 431-45; Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 228-30; Royster 340-1; Wiebe, Opening 16-7, 59-60, 90-109, 183-8; David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750-1800 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) 177; Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 58-60, 120-8; David Paul Nord, Newspapers and American Nationhood, 1776-1826 (Arlington, VA: Gannett Foundation Freedom Center, 1990); Nerone, Violence Against the Press 53-83; James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Jan Lewis, “‘The Blessings of Domestic Society’: Thomas Jefferson’s Family and the Transformation of American Politics,” Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) 118-9; Joanne B. Freeman, “Slander, Poison, Whispers, and Fame: Jefferson’s ‘Anas’ and Political Gossip in the Early Republic,” JER 15 (1995): 25-57.[/ref] If the proliferation of honor violence in the early republic was not a direct carryover from the Revolutionary War, it does appear a rather conscious reincarnation on the part of politicians. What stands out most starkly and paradoxically in the early republic is the central political role played by honor in an age when Americans committed to republicanism accepted without hesitation‑-as had Arthur Lee in defending monarchy in 1767‑-Montesquieu’s pronouncement that honor was the mainspring of monarchy, as if Federalists were seeking to find some sort of replacement for the Tudor state-centered honor system and Republicans were harping back to a pre-Tudor feudal system of honor.[ref]Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and eds. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 21-30; Paul Merrill Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760-1801 (University, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1940) 171-4, 218, 232-3, 246-52, 255-7, 261-2; Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 15; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 40; Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993) 13-4, 241-9; Gordon S. Wood, “Launching the ‘Extended Republic’: The Federalist Era,” Launching the ‘Extended Republic’: The Federalist Era, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) 5-9. Interestingly, as part of the reasons why they suggest the Founding Fathers dismissed Montesquieu’s monarchic honor as a mainspring for the early republic, Pangle and Pangle note “honor inclines men to regard peace less as a time for productivity than as a time for indulging in fanatic duelling, along with imaginative luxuries and gallant love affairs” (p. 242). John Howe, on the other hand, attributes the “brutality both of expression and behavior” of the 1790s to the “republican set of mind” which following Montesquieu held public virtue as the animating spirit of republics. See Howe, “Republican Thought” 77, 81-2, 89.[/ref]

Numerous 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.[ref]Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman 19, 96-7, 319; Kiernan, Duel in European History vii, 1-5, 7, 49-54, 82, 91, 152-3, 159-60; Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin‑de‑Siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 3, 12, 35.[/ref] Perhaps then 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 American Revolution. For ambitious young men, appeals to honor may have proven attractive as a means of asserting one’s right to membership in the post-revolutionary elite.[ref]Brugger, Beverley Tucker 35-41; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 16-7.[/ref] Such a view is consistent with expressions of aristocratic attitudes toward the people and distrust of public opinion that run rampant in the writings of the Founding Fathers.[ref]Paul Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution: A Reinterpretation of the Intentions of the Founding Fathers (New York: Free Press, 1968) 97-9, 196-7; Wiebe, Opening 37-41; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 614.[/ref]

Nevertheless, however much the resort to dueling may have reflected an effort to create an American aristocracy, Northern and Federalist critics noted that, in a republic, changes in elite views toward honor violence were bound to spread downward. As Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina in condemning dueling phrased it:

In countries where distinctions of rank are sanctioned, a pernicious custom may exist, and be confined to the higher orders of society, and be comparatively little destructive;‑-but that, in our country of equal laws, rights, and rank, such custom, if unchecked by the laws, will necessarily become general, and spread its destructive effects far and wide in the community, to the desolation of thousands of families.[ref]Sabine, Notes on Duels 41-4, 343-5, quote 345; Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 22‑3.[/ref]

Some already noted a passive acceptance among the general public in not speaking out for enforcement of laws and continuing to support and even positively preferring politicians who had fought duels.[ref]Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 4, 10, 21-2, 25; Sabine, Notes on Duels 352-5.[/ref]

If Northern and Federalist critics tended to see public opinion in support of dueling restricted to the elite and trickling down to the masses, Southern and Republican critics tended to see widespread (if corrupt) public opinion sanctioned by the entire community working its way up to the elite.[ref]Low, Discourse on Duelling 7; Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) 182-3; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 30-1.[/ref] The anonymous author of “Reflections on Duelling,” in reversing Pinckney’s conception of public opinion in a republic, put the case as well as anyone:

The greatest of all punishments is the contempt of our fellowmen…This observation applies with peculiar force to the citizens of a republican government. In Great Britain and in other European countries, rank and wealth place many of the leading members of society, beyond the reach of censure. The hiss and clamor of the lowly multitude reach not the elevated regions in which they move. The dependence which they feel, is upon the government, and not on the people. But in this country, where our government leaves us perfect freedom, every individual feels his absolute dependence on public opinion. Here every man is accessible to all. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the polite and the vulgar, are perpetually thrown together in society, on the level plain of equality, and all act towards each other with that candor and sincerity, which a sense of equality never fails to inspire. Every man, therefore, not only sees but feels the opinion of the public, and he is compelled to pursue such a system of conduct as will either engage affection, or command respect.[ref]”Reflections on Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, January 18, 1805.[/ref]

This view of public opinion is in line with historians who have suggested that there was a democratization of public opinion accompanying the rise of popular sovereignty, a fundamental Tocquevillian shift in the relationship between public opinion and the political and legal order by the early 1800s.[ref]See, e.g., Richard Buel, Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789-1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972) 91-112; Wood, Radicalism 360-4; Freeman, “Dueling as Politics” 295-7. Forrest McDonald makes the classical case that “public” referred to independent adult males while “popular” “comprehended everybody, or at least all adult males, including the propertyless rabble.” See McDonald 70-1, 164. On Tocqueville and public opinion, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 2: 10-2, 26-8, 257-62; James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) 191-6, 205-7, 212-23, 252-3, 337n19; Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 20, 65-8. However, Tocqueville, in his discussion of honor in the United States, seems to suggest that public opinion is a more powerful force in aristocratic societies. “In democratic states, on the contrary, where all the members of the community are mingled in the same crowd and in constant agitation, public opinion has no hold on men; they disappear at every instant and elude its power. Consequently the dictates of honor will be there less imperious and less stringent, for honor acts solely for the public eye.” See Tocqueville, Democracy in America 2: 241. Although Tocqueville recorded in his notebook a fascinating conversation with a lawyer from Montgomery, Alabama, on the relationship between honor violence and public opinion in the South, he did not incorporate these subjects into his accounts of either public opinion or honor in the United States. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960) 107-10.[/ref] Although Europeans had long used public opinion to mean “a collective judgment in matters of morality, reputation, and taste” and the ultimate foundation for the code of honor, by the late eighteenth century these ideas began to merge with and become superseded by Enlightenment ideas of public opinion as the tribunal at which government sat.[ref]Keith Michael Baker, “Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,” Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, eds. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 232-4, 241-5; J. A. W. Gunn, “Public Opinion,” Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 261-3; Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 58-96. Cf. James Madison in Federalist No. 49. See Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961) 314-5.[/ref] However much politicians may have disdained kowtowing to public opinion, one cannot deny the power of the electorate in what Ronald P. Formisano has aptly termed the “deferential-participant politics” of the early republic.[ref]Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789-1840,” American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 473-87. See also Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts, 1790s-1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 128-48; Richard R. Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 49 (1992): 401-30.[/ref]

In Virginia the transformation in public opinion undoubtedly combined both top-down and bottom-up elements. At least since the 1740s and 1750s, as Jack P. Greene has observed and Thad Tate seconded, “two poorly delineated but recognizable postures or styles of leadership” had emerged: the “responsible” style emphasizing “a strongly moral stance and maximum independence of the electorate,” and the “representative” style of leadership emphasizing practical politics and giving “greater attention to the will of one’s constituents.” The two styles were forever captured in the contrast between the characters of Worthy and Strutabout in Robert Munford’s farce The Candidates, or, the Humours of a Virginia Election, written about 1770. But, as both Greene and Tate acknowledge, “few men fitted either model exactly.”[ref]Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, ed.. Richard M. Jellison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976) 54-7; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 266-71, 311, 313-4. See also Sydnor, American Revolutionaries 44-59; Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964) 151-68; Lucille Griffith, The Virginia House of Burgesses, 1750-1774, rev. ed. (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1970) 61-4; Beeman, “Robert Munford” 169-83.[/ref]

It could be that, in the face of a wider acceptance of honor violence among the lower and middle classes, some Virginia politicians felt obliged, as one Virginian critic put it, to succumb to the “general prejudice” in order “to obtain the applause, or avert the contempt of the giddy multitude.”[ref]G., “On Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, January 5, 1805. For an example of such a bottom-up process among upland southerners in the Old Northwest, see Nicole Etcheson, “Manliness and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1790-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 59-77.[/ref] But the duel undoubtedly also provided a means to set the elite apart from the more barbarous modes of honor violence of the masses. Indeed one of the major justifications for dueling among its supporters had always been that it actually reduced the prevalence of such undisciplined forms of violence.[ref]L. O. [Arthur Lee], Letter to Editor, Rind’s Virginia Gazette, December 24, 1767; [George Tucker], “For the Enquirer,” Richmond Enquirer, August 11, 1804; “Reflections on Duelling,” Richmond Enquirer, January 18, 1805; Lyman Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 27, 29n; [George Tucker], Essays on Various Subjects of Taste Morals, and National Policy…By a Citizen of Virginia (Georgetown, D.C.: J. Milligan, 1822) 264‑5, 271. See also Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman 103; Bruce, Violence and Culture 29; Andrew, “Code of Honour” 414-5; Freeman, “Dueling as Politics” 297.[/ref] Dickson D. Bruce has ably demonstrated the general post-revolutionary acceptance across all classes in the South of the inevitability of violence, so firmly rooted in the passions, while gentlemen proved themselves distinct from the lower orders by “an ability, carefully cultivated, to control one’s own passions,” a self-control epitomized by the duel.[ref]D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 6-20, 31-41, quote 40. See also Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, eds. George M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson, Jr. (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1987) 162-4.[/ref] Furthermore one cannot deny Charles Sydnor’s classic observation that the code duello provided the glue for Southern planters and their associates, “a relatively small group of men maintaining a superior position out of all proportion to their numerical power…in the face of a constant threat by the subordinate forces” of slaves, non-slaveholding Southerners, and the North.[ref]Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,” Journal of Southern History 6 (1940): 15. Richard Buel hypothesizes that dueling became fashionable among the Southern elite in part because the “social instability” in the early republic “created the need for a means of distinguishing the gentry,” but suggests further that the key quetion “was not so much elite rule as who was to exercise it. No elite not completely secure in its institutional foundations could tolerate such a mode of designation.” See Buel, Securing the Revolution 80-1; D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 40.[/ref]

Tuckahoe and Cohee

While such political factors played an important role in the popularization of dueling in the early republic, more subtle cultural forces were also at work in Virginia. We have already seen how the influence of the Scotch-Irish promoted a greater acceptance of honor violence among the common folk of Virginia. By the late eighteenth century a similar process was at work among the Virginia elite as the second generation of backcountry leaders‑-a tight network of intermarried families highly conscious of their Ulster heritage‑-began to make their presence felt, determined to take their proper place in the new state leadership.[ref]Patricia Givens Johnson, James Patton and the Appalachian Colonists (Verona, VA: McClure Printing Company, 1973) 3-26; Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988) 146-70; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 690, 764-71; Albert H. Tillson, Jr., “The Southern Backcountry: A Survey of Current Research,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1990): 394-6.[/ref]

Historians have concluded that sectional animosity in Virginia was not as severe in revolutionary Virginia as it was in the Carolinas.[ref]Williams, Political Alignments 318-9; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish 299-304; Richard R. Beeman, “The Political Response to Social Conflict in the Southern Backcountry: A Comparative View of Virginia and the Carolinas during the Revolution,” An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985) 213-39; Albert H. Tillson, Jr., Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginian Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Tillson, “Southern Backcountry” 397-405.[/ref] Nevertheless one cannot deny sectional let alone cultural tensions between the Valley and the rest of Virginia. As Charles Ambler long ago discovered, antebellum East-West party sectionalism had long roots going back at least to 1765.[ref]Charles Henry Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (1910; New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) 13-23; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961) 156; Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982) xv, 1-7; Daniel P. Jordan, Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983) 6-13, 34-71.[/ref] Contemporary observers indeed spoke of inhabitants of “Old Virginia” and “New Virginia” as two distinct cultures: Tuckahoe and Cohee.[ref]James Kirke Paulding, Letters from the South, 2 vols. (1817; New York: AMS Press, 1973) 1: 111-5; William E. Dodd, Statesmen of the Old South, or From Radicalism to Conservative Revolt (1911; New York: Book League of America, 1929) 15-6. The term Cohee, derived from the Scotch-Irish phrase “Quo’he” which apparently sprinkled much of their conversation, goes back at least to the late 1760s. Charles Woodmason made a joking reference in 1769 to translating his sermon into “the Quohee Language” so that John Chesnut’s mother‑-who had come with her husband from the north of Ireland to the Shenandoah Valley sometime before 1743‑-might better understand it. See Hooker, Carolina Backcountry 136n, 149, 150n. See also Mitford M. Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1951) 1: 386.[/ref]

For Tuckahoes like Henry St. George Tucker, pressed by necessity to move to the backcountry, “the center of his civilization was the Tidewater, its capital was Williamsburg. He was completely convinced that no other place could possibly be possessed of ‘all the elements of a good society in as high a degree as Williamsburg.'” “To him Williamsburg alone remained the center of true education, not merely because it was the seat of the College of William and Mary but because it was the center of ‘genteel society,’ of the manners and refinement so necessary to the gentleman’s life. Only the ‘Lowland’ afforded the graces implied in the one word, ‘breeding’…Society diminished in refinement in proportion to its distance from Williamsburg.”[ref]Willard F. Bliss, “The Tuckahoe in New Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 59 (1951): 390, 393-4.[/ref]

Cohees resented the condescension of the Tuckahoes feeling that “the ‘real friendship’ of his own society was far preferable to the ‘finery and gallants’ of the Tuckahoes.”[ref]Bliss, “Tuckahoe in New Virginia” 395.[/ref] When these Cohee gentry traveled to the lowcountry they were particularly sensitive to insults, and ready to engage in a duel or more primitive forms of violence to defend their honor.[ref]Lyman Butterfield, following up an observation suggested to him by Lacy K. Ford, suggests that one of the reasons for the tremendous level of violence in Edgefield County, South Carolina, was “that it was a major point of contact between the up-country Scotch-Irish settlers, who were Presbyterians and Baptists, and the low-country gentry, who were of English stock and Episcopalian. These two people each brought its own culture of honor, one coarser, one seemingly more genteel; the resulting mixture was highly combustible, producing a level of tension absent elsewhere in South Carolina.” See Butterfield, All God’s Children 15 (quote), 338.[/ref] A classic pronouncement of the impact of backcountry culture can be found in a 1786 letter from John Preston to his brother Francis concerning a recent duel in Richmond involving their cousin James Breckenridge in which Francis had apparently served as a second. John and Francis were the sons of William Preston who had emigrated from Ulster, settled and become a prominent leader in the Upper Valley of Virginia, and whose siblings and children had intermarried with many of the other Scotch-Irish families of the Upper Valley.[ref]Tillson, Gentry and Common Folk 8-9, 21-2, 34.[/ref] About the duel, John Preston wrote:

Jamy is a wrong person to triffle with on the subject of batteling. I hope he has come off with honour & convinced his adversary together with the rest of our lowland Gents, that politeness blended with true courage can be found in a back woodsman, this will teach such Gentleman to be a little more reserve in casting their particarly or ever general reffections on a man or sett of men who in my opinion nature has been far more bountifull to than themselves, if art is not so much practised & now they find themselves attacked in any Character they choose & worsted at either.[ref]John Preston to Francis Preston, 26 Dec. 1786, “Some Letters of John Preston,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 1 (1921): 48-9. John Preston himself in 1794 served as a second in a duel in which he noted the seconds after the first round “interposed & compromised the difference amicably & honorably…They both behaved bravely & stood very firm.” See John Preston to Francis Preston, 25 Nov. 1794, “Letters of John Preston,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 2 (1922): 187.[/ref]

The thick brogue that imbues this passage brings alive the Scotch-Irish legacy of lex talionis among the post-revolutionary backcountry elite.

Gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, Virginia society merged elements of Tuckahoe and Cohee as Tuckahoes adopted elements of Cohee culture and Cohees elements of Tuckahoe culture and gradually the sharp division between the two cultures disappeared. A major outcome of that convergence was a greater acceptance of honor violence among all classes of Virginia society.

John Randolph and Chivalric Romanticism

But the cult of honor in early national Virginia was hardly strictly backcountry in origins. An independent force stemmed from the lowcountry, a force far closer to the modern honor espoused by Arthur Lee than the primal honor of the Scotch-Irish, a sense of honor epitomized by John Randolph of Roanoke.[ref]D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 41; Jordan, Political Leadership 166; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 412.[/ref] In 1792, as a young student at William & Mary, Randolph engaged in the first of his many duels, with Robert Barraud Taylor (afterward a leading Virginia Federalist), following an intense debate over the pronunciation of some word. As Lemuel Sawyer, one of Randolph’s biographers and a member of Congress with him for sixteen years, described the affair, “they had taken opposite sides in politics and were both fiery spirits and full of Virginia pride of chivalry.”[ref]William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833, 2 vols. (1922; New York: Octagon Books, 1970) 1: 123-6.[/ref] Randolph’s aristocratic view of honor might have been out of place in colonial America but not among certain elements of Virginia society in the early republic. In retrospect we can see Randolph as a harbinger of the chivalric romanticism that would sweep the South and the rest of the United States in the nineteenth century.[ref]Vernon Louis Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927) iii-ix; Cash, Mind of the South; Osterweis, Romanticism and Nation­al­ism; Earl E. Thorpe, Eros and Freedom in Southern Life and Thought (Durham, NC: Seeman Printery, 1967) 10-2; Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) 399-412; Dorothy Ann Gay, “The Tangled Skein of Romanticism and Violence in the Old South: The Southern Response to Abolitionism and Feminism, 1830-1861,” diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975; Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life 1600-1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976) 147-8; Brugger, Beverley Tucker 123-6, 163-6, 172; John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 5, 38-56; Eugene D. Genovese, “The Southern Slaveholders’ View of the Middle Ages,” Medievalism in American Culture: Papers of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, eds. Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989) 31-52; Jean V. Matthews, Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800-1830 (Boston: Twayne, 1991) 118-23.[/ref]

For the origins of this chivalric revival one might not have to look any farther than the American Revolution. Adminstrators bemoaned the way the youth on college campuses across the nation appealed to revolutionary principles to justify a rash of riots in the years 1798-1815.[ref]Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746-1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946) 135-43; Edgar W. Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953) 4: 274-7; Howard Miller, The Revolutionary College: American Presbyterian Higher Education, 1707-1837 (New York: New York University Press, 1976) 259-68; Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); Brugger, Beverley Tucker 41-3; Noll, Princeton 150-2, 214-43; Harold Hellenbrand, The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990) 147-9; Pangle and Pangle, Learning of Liberty 163-6.[/ref] Heroic wars have always had a tendency to put chivalric ideas in the heads of idealistic youth who come of age hearing tales of the courageous deeds of “our illustrious Heroes & patriots,” reflected most strongly in the veneration bestowed on the great American warrior George Washington in the early American republic.[ref]Kiernan, Duel in European History 80-1. On Washington, see I. A. Coles to Henry St. George Tucker, July 20, 1799, “Original Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 4 (1895): 107; Charles A. Stuart to Andrew Reid, Jr., 24 Dec. 1799, “Glimpses of Old College Life,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 8 (1900): 214; Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985) 191-5; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987) 162-70; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) 152-3; Pangle and Pangle, Learning of Liberty 231-49. However, one may note that the most “Jacobinical” students at William & Mary had little respect for Washington as a Federalist. See Joseph Shelton Watston to David Watson, 24 Dec. 1799, “Letters to David Watson,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 29 (1921): 152.[/ref] “The generation which grew to manhood in this interval [the twenty-five years following the Revolution],” recalled John Pendleton Kennedy in the 1840s, “were educated in all the reminiscences of the war of Seventy-six, which, fresh in the narratives of every fireside, flamed the imagination of the young with its thousand marvels of soldierlike adventure. These were told with the amplification and the unction characteristic of the veteran, and were heard by his youthful listener, with many a secret sign, that such days of heroic hazard were not to return for him.”[ref]John Pendleton Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt (Philadelphia, 186) 1: 192-3, quoted in Jordan, Political Leadership 30.[/ref]

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

The post-revolutionary revival shares many parallels with other chivalric revivals like the Elizabethan revival of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh, in which dueling likewise played an important role.[ref]Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960); Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966); Ferguson, Chivalric Tradition 66-82; James, Society, Politics and Culture 387-91. For later revivals in England and America, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry.[/ref] Like “the aspiring mind of the Elizabethan younger generation,” the second generation of Virginia patriots believed new circumstances demanded new principles. Reacting against the rationalism of their parents’ generation, they sought solutions in romanticism.[ref]The contrast between the first and second generation of Virginia patriots is well shown in the Tucker family by comparing and contrasting the rationalist views of St. George Tucker with the romantic views of his son Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, his stepson John Randolph of Roanoke, and his younger cousin George Tucker. See W. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke 2: 379-83; Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker: Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) 212-6; D. Bruce, Rhetoric 166-9; Charles T. Cullen, St. George Tucker and Law in Virginia, 1772-1804 (New York: Garland, 1987); Brugger, Beverley Tucker 18-9, 41-3, 126, 204-9; Phillip Forrest Hamilton, “The Tucker Family and the Dynamics of Generational Change in Jeffersonian Virginia, 1775-1830,” Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1995, 450-9. On the earlier dominance of rationalism in Virginian thought from John Smith to Thomas Jefferson, see Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978) 1: xxix-xxx.[/ref] “While critics condemned dueling as “passion run amok,” Dickson D. Bruce writes, this generation would come to assert that “passion, in its noblest form, was the major force leading men to resent aspersions on their characters, as well it should.”[ref]D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 31.[/ref]

One can find no better evidence of such a younger generation in Virginia than the tight network of correspondence among students and former students of the College of William & Mary, the birthplace of the honor system in American colleges and the breeding ground of many an antebellum Virginian lawyer and politician.[ref]Jordan, Political Leadership 45. On the influence of William & Mary, see Herbert B. Adams, The College of William and Mary: A Contribution to the History of Higher Education, with Suggestions for its National Promotion (Washington: GPO, 1887) 48-54; “Education in Colonial Virginia, Part v: Influence of William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 7 (1898): 1-9; Sydnor, American Revolutionaries 15; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964) 49-54; Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge 170; Jordan, Political Leadership 44, 211.[/ref] Nathaniel Beverley Tucker in his address to the Law Class of 1834 described the honor system that he believed had been in place at William & Mary at least since the time he was a student in the late 1790s and early 1800s:

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.[ref]Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “The Honor System at William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 18 (1910): 165-6. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker had been a student at William & Mary in the late 1790s at a time when his father St. George Tucker was the law professor there.[/ref]

The history of this honor system is obscure. Tucker, like so many antebellum Americans who sought to explain the origins of the Old South, thought its roots lay in the great Cavalier exodus to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century.[ref]Tucker, “Honor System” 168-9. On the myth of the great Cavalier exodus, see Bruce Chandler Baird, Jr., “Ideology, Behavior, and Necessity in Seventeenth-Century England and America,” diss., University of Florida, 1995, 15-19.[/ref] More likely it emerged in the 1780s and 1790s.[ref]There has still been no thorough study of the origins of the honor system and the role of the College of William & Mary. See, e.g., “Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 9 (1901): 194-5; “The Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 14 (1906): 216; “The Honor System in American Colleges,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 23 (1914): 6-9; “The Honor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 23 (1914): 219-20; “The Honor System at William and Mary,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 24 (1915): 31-4; “College Papers,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 25 (1917): 238-40; Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge 218-20. On the honor system at the University of Virginia, see Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., “Honor and Dishonor at Mr. Jefferson’s University: The Antebellum Years,” History of Education Quarterly 26 (1986): 155-79; Pangle and Pangle, Learning of Liberty 163-6.[/ref] Also it is not clear whether the honor system in the late eighteenth century was official policy, an unofficial code among students, or some combination of the two.[ref]There is evidence of an incipient code of honor among students in the heated political atmosphere of the late 1760s, but one hardly receiving official sanction. The minutes of a meeting of President and Masters of William & Mary College in April 1769, held “on Occasion of some riotous Behaviour in the Hall after Dinner” reported: “whereas in the Examination of several Students and Scholars it appear’d that the Youth of this College, some from a false Notion of Honour, & others from Fear of being beaten & abused by the Delinquents among them, have made a general Determination rather to maintain a Falsehood than to utter any Evidence concerning Facts by which their Companion or Companions may be affected; it is therefore resolved, that the Names of the Persons who afforded any Evidence concerning what pass’d in the College on the eleventh of this Month be kept an inviolable Secret, in Order to secure the said persons from violence & affronts, & agreeable to the promise made them to draw from them their testimony.” See “Journal of the Meetings of the President and Masters of William and Mary College,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 13 (1904): 134.[/ref]

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.[ref]”Statutes of the College in 1792,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 20 (1911): 53; “Punishment for Duelling,” William and Mary Quarterly 1st ser. 16 (1907): 126.[/ref] As 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.”[ref]Tucker, “Honor System” 169.[/ref] 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‑-William Chapman, James Breckenridge, James B. Gilmer, and Thomas Preston‑-were expelled in the spring of 1803 on account of a duel. An 1806 duel between Armistead T. Mason, son of U.S. Senator Stevens Thomson 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, another future senator, 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.” William & Mary students obviously took honor far more seriously than simply signing a pledge on examinations.[ref]Thomas L. Preston to Andrew Reid, Jr., 22 Feb. 1802, 15 Apr. 1802, “Glimpses” 216-7; “The Yates Family,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 7 (1899): 91; Richmond Examiner, 9 Apr. 1803, “Punishment for Duelling,” William and Mary Quarterly 16 (1907): 126; W. Radford to Andrew Reid, Jr., 1 May 1806, “Glimpses” 220; “Glimpses” 213; Rev. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 31 May 1809, “Letters of Rev. James Madison, President of William and Mary College, to Thomas Jefferson,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 5 (1925): 156. Dueling also made its appearance on at least one northern college, Princeton, where the Southern presence was quite strong. See Wertenbaker, Princeton 135; Noll, Princeton 151.[/ref]

The matriculation at the College of William & Mary of Scotch-Irish students like the Prestons and Breckenridges undoubtedly played an important role in fostering a greater acceptance of honor violence among students. But the origins of the romantic aura surrounding this chivlary, with its air of pessimism about the future of the natural aristocrat and longing for “a never-to-be-recovered Golden Age,” lay, not in the Valley, but the Tidewater.

Indeed one can date the origins of the romantic period in Virginia with some precision to 1780, the year of the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. After the removal and the subsequent loss of population and business, a romantic melancholy pervades most of the descriptions of the town by visitors to Williamsburg.[ref]See comments by Asbury, Schoepf, Webster, Hunter, Winsor, Morse, in Jane Carson, We Were There: Descriptions of Williamsburg, 1699-1859 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1965) 67, 73-4, 76, 78-81, 94-5. See also Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge 200, 209-10; Jordan, Political Leadership 211-2.[/ref] As Johann David Schoepf observed of Williamsburg in 1783: “Thus, like so many older ones in Europe, do cities in this new world lament for the uncertain fate of a past glory.”[ref]Carson, We Were There 74.[/ref] William Taylor Barry, a student at William & Mary, in 1804 wrote:

The appearance that Williamsburg makes now is not very pleasing. The site of the town is handsome; indeed, I never saw, and I think there cannot be a more elegant street anywhere than the Main street is…The prospect which they [the decaying houses] present is gloomy and melancholy; everything seems on the decline; “desolation has saddened all the green;” the ravages of the rude hand of time meet the eye in every quarter of the town; many of the houses have tumbled down, and others are daily crumbling into ruins. I never walk the streets without experiencing the most gloomy sensations; but it is a kind of pleasing melancholy, that the mind rather courts than despises. It is a dignified pleasure that is always excited in the mind when viewing the vestiges of departed grandeur.[ref]Carson, We Were There 94.[/ref]

The demise of Williamsburg was simply the most dramatic step in the more general “sense of crisis” of the Tidewater region‑-the decline of population, loss of political influence, severe economic problems‑-a sense of crisis that would increasingly spread to the rest of Virginia society in the post-revolutionary period.[ref]Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 146-7, 154-6; Robert P. Sutton, “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise: The Doomed Aristocrat in Late-Jeffersonian Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 41-55, quote 41; Jordan, Political Leadership 7-8; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 43; Phillip Hamilton, “Education in the St. George Tucker Household: Change and Continuity in Jeffersonian Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102 (1994): 183-90.[/ref]

Against such a background, it is no wonder that the image of John Randolph appealed to so many. William R. Taylor in his still seminal Cavalier and Yankee (1961) laid out the case as well as anyone:

Although he was in almost every respect an unrepresentative Virginian and Southerner, Randolph set the pattern for the doomed Southerner in the same way that Franklin had earlier set the pattern for the emergent Yankee. Everything about him‑-his rakish youth, his fierce Virginian patriotism, his touchy pride, his arrogant aristocratic manner, his high sense of integrity, his rapier-like wit, his consumptive appearance, his hypochondria, his final madness and even his impotence‑-fitted him for the role. More than almost anyone else he possessed a tortured consciousness of Virginia’s tragic decline.[ref]Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 158. For more on Randolph as a prototypical yet unrepresentative Virginian and Southerner, see Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 157-71; Sutton, “Nostalgia” 55; Jordan, Political Leadership 157-70; Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 176-99; Reed, “The Mind of the South and Southern Distinctiveness” 146; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Commentary,” The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992) 162.[/ref]

But we would be wrong to think that we could explain the rise of chivalric romanticism and dueling in Virginia from strictly local factors. The early nineteenth century also saw the introduction or revival of dueling in many parts of the English-speaking world including England, Upper Canada, the West Indies, and other English colonies, as well as in post-revolutionary France.[ref]Antony E. Simpson, “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99-155; Kiernan, Duel in European History 185-203, 293-314; Billacois, The Duel 187-8; Wyatt-Brown, “Honour and American Republicanism” 60; Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Cecilia Morgan, “‘In Search of the Phantom Misnamed Honour’: Duelling in Upper Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 529-62. On the other hand, the heyday of dueling in Ireland began about the 1760s and was in decline by the 1790s and in Germany would not begin until the 1880s. See Kelly, “That Damn’d Thing Called Honour”; McAleer, Dueling.[/ref] Bourgeois German university students in the early nineteenth century created for themselves a world bound by a code of honor and regulated by the duel, much as William & Mary students.[ref]Wilson D. Wallis, “Duelling,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (New York: Macmillan, 1931) 5: 269-70; Osterweis 96; Ute Frevert, “Bourgeois Honour: Middle-Class Duellists in Germany from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, eds. David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (London: Routledge, 1991) 277-82. For a comparison between Prussian and Southern atttitudes toward honor that finds little direct influence, see Shearer Davis Bowman, “Honor and Martialism in the U. S. South and Prussian East Elbia during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” What Made the South Different?, ed. Kees Gispen (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990) 19-40.[/ref]

Although the timing of the rise of dueling in America can hardly be explained, as some historians are wont, by the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott‑-“the Sir Walter disease” as Mark Twain put it‑-which came much later, one cannot deny that European opinions and fashions had a significant direct and indirect impact on notions of honor and dueling in America.[ref]Tucker, Essays 266-7. On Sir Walter Scott, see Hamilton J. Eckenrode, “Sir Walter Scott and the South,” North American Review 206 (1917): 595-603; Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies 1607‑1763 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) 6; Kiernan, Duel in European History 223-57, 312.[/ref] The romanticism of Virginia youth has to be seen as part of the Romantic Movement that swept Europe and America. These young Virginians’ volte-face on the French Revolution paralleled those of the European Romantics like Wordsworth, Blake, Southey, Coleridge and Hölderin swinging from the pro-revolutionary “millenarian excitement”–calling each other “citizen,” using the Revolutionary calendar, extolling Godwin, Paine, and Volney‑-to Burkean conservatism.[ref]On pro-revolutionary enthusiasm, see May, Enlightenment in America 245-7, 332-3; Robson, Educating Republicans 171, 176. On the shift to Burkean conservatism, see Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 23, 156; Sutton, “Nostalgia” 46-55; D. Bruce, Rhetoric 87-9, 166-9; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 44, 54; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “Political Virtue and the Lessons of the French Revolution: The View from the Slaveholding South,” Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994) 202-17; Hamilton, “Tucker Family” 456-8.[/ref]

Again John Randolph captures perfectly the tremendous swing in opinion.[ref]Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics (Chicago, 1964) 12-3; Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).[/ref] In 1793, the year after being expelled from William & Mary for dueling, he wrote to his stepfather, St. George Tucker, asking permission

to go immediately to France, and to enter into the army of the Republic….My wish is to serve the noblest cause in the world….What life can be so glorious what death so honorable? how preferable to the pursuits of a miserable attorney who stoops to a thousand petty villainies in order to earn the sum of fifteen shillings….I feel the most ardent enthusiasm for the cause. I dream of nothing else. I think of nothing else; what [word blotted] do you suppose, then, I should make of old Coke, when my thoughts are dwelling on the plains of Flanders?[ref]May, Enlightenment in America 246, cites Randolph to Tucker, May 25, 1793, Randolph Papers, Library of Congress.[/ref]

Yet by the second administration of Thomas Jefferson, Randolph had converted “from a partisan to an enemy of the French Revolution and of all revolution” and his rereading of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution had led him “‘to suspect that there may be something in the enjoyment of liberty which soon disqualifies a people for self-government, which is but another name for freedom.'”[ref]Dawidoff, Education of John Randolph 158, 217-20, 322-3n15, quotes Beverley Tucker, “Garland’s Life of Randolph,” Southern Quarterly Review 4 (July 1851): 43. See also May, Enlightenment in America 329.[/ref]

Southern romanticism, as Michael O’Brien has well shown, was hardly just a simple spreading out of ideas from Europe to America, rather both involved independent intellectual development emerging out of “specific social and political crises.” But the parallels with European romanticism are indeed striking, such as the increased emphasis on emotion, passion, and introspection; a focus on provincial self-justification; and a shared melancholy emerging at first out of reaction to the French Revolution but sustained by “the permanent crisis of modern industrial society.”[ref]O’Brien, Rethinking the South 42-3, 49-52; Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 4-5. On the European context, see Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), esp. 251-74; M. H. Abrams, “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) 26-72; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Stephen Prickett, “Introduction,” The Romantics, ed. Stephen Prickett (London: Methuen, 1981) 1-14.[/ref]

Yankee and Cavalier

The last point must be emphasized because many Virginians laid the cause of their crisis at the doorstep, not of Napoleon and France, but of New England. Virginians saw in the acquisitive value system and industrial free-labor society they associated with New England, a major source of the decline of the Tidewater. New England came to symbolize abolitionism, monarchism, and all those other dangerous isms that so threatened Virginia independence.[ref]Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 147; Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 22-30; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 42-4.[/ref]

The seeds of future mutual contempt were already well laid by 1785. In his journal entry of December 7, 1785, during a week stay in Williamsburg in which he read lectures attended by only a handful of students, Noah Webster concluded “Several causes may be assigned for this inattention. I am a Stranger, & a Yankee, tho wel introduced; the Virginians have little money & great pride, contempt of Northern men & great fondness for dissipated life. They do not understand Grammar.”[ref]Noah Webster, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster, comp. Emily Ellsworth Fowler Ford, ed. Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel (New York: Privately Printed, 1912) 144. The briefer diary entry reads “The Virginians have much pride, little money on hand, great contempt for Northern people, & amazing fondness for Dissipation.” See also Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge 218.[/ref]

Virginians and New Englanders alike in the early republic described a clash of cultures as great if not greater than that between Tuckahoe and Cohee. Another young New Englander visiting Virginia in 1798, William Ellery Channing, in letters home fleshed out the different value systems:

They [Virginians] address each other and converse together with the same familiarity and frankness which they used to do when they were boys. How different from our Northern manners! There, avarice and ceremony at the age of twenty graft the coldness and unfeelingness of age on the disinterested ardor of youth…I blush for my own people, when I compare the selfish prudence of a Yankee with the generous confidence of a Virginian…They love money less than we do. They are more disinterested. Their patriotism is not tied to their purse-strings. Could I only take from the Virginians their sensuality and their slaves, I should think them the greatest people in the world.[ref]Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1954) 205.[/ref]

Virginians echoed similar views.[ref]Besides the references below, see Cecil D. Eby, Jr., “The ‘Old Virginia Gentleman’ in New England,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 92-4. One might also note Thomas Jefferson’s negative views about New Englanders in an anonymous essay published in the Richmond Enquirer in 1816. See Robert Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976): 539-42.[/ref] 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.[ref]Charles Buford to Samuel McDowell Reid, 19 Jan. 1816, “Glimpses” 224.[/ref]

William Wirt responded to Yankee aspersions against Virginians in 1814 by claiming that:

their faults are counterbalanced by many of the noblest qualities that can adorn the human character‑-A hospitality, the genuine offspring of the heart‑-unbounded generosity‑-a courage superior to all difficulties, and an instinctice abhorrence of every little, mean artifice, the miserable expedients of vulgar minds, are mong the number‑-If any thing indeed peculiarly distinguishes the Virginia, from his confederated Brethren, it is a lofty and chivalrous spirit, which perhaps the high character of his state has contributed to keep alive‑-this spirit may betray him into errors and vices‑-but if properly directed, is the parent of the fairest virtues‑-and I am persuaded that nothing is wanting, to make this the Athens of our confederation than a greater attention to the business of Education and a more equal diffusion of its benefits.[ref]William Wirt, The Old Bachelor (1814; Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1985) 172.[/ref]

Of course, as with Tuckahoe and Cohee, Yankee and Cavalier were not completely antithetical. As demonstrated by these letters, Virginians admired New England virtues and New Englanders admired Southern virtues, at least for a time.[ref]Hubbell, South in American Literature 198-211; Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 146-8.[/ref]

But already in the comment of Channing we see the great debate over slavery looming in the background. While many Virginians and New Englanders alike in the post-revolutionary period would long regard slavery as a moral and political evil, and many Northerners and Southerners would throughout the antebellum period continue to defend slavery as superior to other alternatives, Yankee and Cavalier had already begun to diverge fundamentally over the degree to which slavery was a necessary versus an unpardonable evil.[ref]Jack P. Greene, “The Constitution of 1787 and the Question of Southern Distinctiveness,” Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 337-40; Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).[/ref] Indeed, such opposing views on slavery undoubtedly played an important role in fostering notions of chivalric honor as a counter to Yankee aspersions well before abolitionist attacks of the 1830s. George Tucker in 1813 warned Southerners 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 [i.e., slavery], that has been so lavishly heaped upon them.”[ref]G. Tucker, Essays 270-1. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. Henry Reeves, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 2: 230-42, esp. 235-8; McLean, George Tucker 212-6; Roeber, Faithful Magistrates 258-9. On the tension between bourgeois and aristocratic attitudes toward honor and dueling, cf. Donna T. Andrew, “The Code of Honour and Its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850,” Social History 5 (1980): 409-34; Kiernan, Duel in European History 152-3, 159, 163.[/ref]

Ever so gradually New England-Virginian cultural tensions expanded to a national scale in the tensions between the Yankee North and the Cavalier South, and Virginia nationalism metamorphosed into Southern nationalism.[ref]Cash, Mind of the South 67-70, 81-102; Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee; Brugger, Beverley Tucker 163-6; Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Percep­tion of Con­trasting Traditions,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 597-614; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 11-21; Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 161-4; Jan C. Dawson, The Unusable Past: America’s Puritan Tradition, 1830 to 1930 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984) 61-75; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr, The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); R. Gray, Writing the South 31-74; O’Brien, Idea of the American South 3-4. On a similar tension between Cavalier and Puritan images in seventeenth-century England, see William Lamont and Sybil Oldfield, eds., Politics, Religion and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (London: Dent, 1975) 59-121.[/ref] Some Virginians as early as 1800, like Charles Stuart writing home from Yale College, were contrasting “southerners” with “yankees.”[ref]Charles A. Stuart to Andrew Reid, Jr., 10 July 1800, “Glimpses” 214. A few historians have argued that sharp sectional divisions first emerged in the debate over the Constitution. See Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority 1789-1861: A Study in Political Thought (New York City: New York University Press, 1930); John R. Alden, The First South (Baton Rouge, 1961). Wiebe notes that “the common use of ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ to designate leaders and interests dated from the 18th century, and the white settlers in the early 19th retained these labels as they followed the lines of western migration.” See Wiebe, Opening 355. Jack Greene believes that Virginians only began to identify themselves as southern with their fall from national prominence after 1815 and then only gradually. See Greene, “Constitution of 1787” 327-47, esp. 342.[/ref] As Tuckahoe and Cohee moved southward and westward, writes Michael O’Brien, they carried “the especial crisis of the revolutionary tradition in Virginia” with them. Romantic images of Southern decay very much like images of post-revolutionary Williamsburg filled Southern essays and novels. As Richard Gray observes, “what Virginia started, it was left to the South as a whole to finish.” The Cavalier ideal of these Virginians became the dominant ideal among the antebellum Southern gentry.[ref]Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee 154-5; Richard Beale Davis, “The Jeffersonian Expatriate in the Building of the Nation,” Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973) 306-24; J. V. Ridgely, Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980) 32; Richard Gray, Writing the South 1-30, quote 30; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 43 (quote), 51; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest’s Fictional Road to Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Joan E. Cashin, “Landscape and Memory in Antebellum Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102 (1994): 497-8.[/ref]

Such North-South cultural tensions emerge quite clearly in the diverging views on dueling. If dueling in the early 1800s had indeed become a national sin, it was a sin far more easily exorcised in the North than the South. Well before slavery became a mighty wedge between North and South‑-driving the South even further in the direction of chivalric romanticism‑-the national debate over dueling that followed the Hamilton-Burr duel brought out into the open the sharp difference between the sections, a debate which echoed many of the arguments raised by Arthur Lee and his opponents in the late 1760s.

In defending and condemning dueling, the two sections gravitated toward opposing notions of right conduct. The South started moving toward an ideal centered around romanticized honor and dueling, while the North aspired to an ideal of Christian virtue in which dueling was considered pagan.[ref]Low, Discourse on Duelling 13-7; Beecher, Remedy for Duelling 7; Sabine, Notes on Duels 42, 344, 351, 354[/ref] And thus we come full circle to Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s thesis of North-South differences, but by a far more circuitous route than he proposed.

Basing such ideals on attitudes toward dueling does not deny the persistence and/or revival of honor in the North or Christian piety in the South.[ref]See, e.g., Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987) 7-16; R. Don Higginbotham, “The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South: Some Further Speculations in a National Context,” Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 25-6. Much work has been done on Southern religion and relationship between Southern honor and evangelicalism. See, e.g., May, Enlightenment in America 327-34; Loveland, Southern Evangelicals 180-5; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 27-31; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 45; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “God and Honor in the Old South,” Southern Review 25 (1989): 283-96; Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Edward R. Crother, “Holy Honor: Sacred and Secular in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 58 (1992): 619-36; Frederick A. Bode, “The Formation of Evangelical Communities in Middle George: Twiggs County, 1820-1861,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 711-48. For an overview of recent literature on Southern religion, see John B. Boles, “The Discovery of Southern Religious History,” Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 510-48. On persistent Northern conceptions of honor much more work still needs to be done building upon the contributions of Robert Wiebe, Randolph Roth, and Joanne B. Freeman. See Wiebe, Opening 183-6; Randolph Roth, “Why Northern New Englanders Seldom Commit Murder,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Philadelphia, July 1987; Joanne B. Freeman, “Aristocratic Murder and Democratic Fury: Honor and Politics in Early National New England,” Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Nashville, July 1996. See also Peter Charles Hoffer, “Honor and the Roots of American Litigiousness,” American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989): 295-319.[/ref] Any tension between honor violence and Christian piety had never seemed to bother the colonial Scotch-Irish.[ref]On Scotch-Irish religiosity, see Henry Jones Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915) 325-446; Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) 201-17; Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949); Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish 273-95; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Fischer, Albion’s Seed 703-8; Jackson, Social History of the Scotch-Irish 64-73, 95-102.[/ref] As for the more Cavalier element in Virginia society, as Henry F. May suggests, again John Randolph provides us “the most instructive example.” Brought up without religion and in his youth “the most extreme example of slaveholding pro-Jacobin deist,” his views on religion had undergone a conversion for the conservative‑-just as his views had on the French Revolution‑-becoming “a convinced adherent of the evangelical branch of the Episcopal Church, maintaining cordial relations with a number of Presbyterians but a continuing hostility to cant and undue enthusiasm, especially when associated with New England.”[ref]May, Enlightenment in America 141-3, 329-31. On possible links between romanticism and evangelicalism, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism 65-70; O’Brien, Rethinking the South 45.[/ref]

“Southern opinion,” as Dickson D. Bruce correctly observes, “was anything but unanimous on the propriety of dueling.” Obviously there were many tensions in Southern views toward honor violence when few were willing “to leap to a defense of dueling in abstract terms, apart from the particulars of a unique event” and many Southern newspapers, periodicals, ministers, and antidueling societies were vocal in their opposition.[ref]D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 27. See also Guy A. Cardwell, “The Duel in the Old South: Crux of a Concept,” South Atlantic Quarterly 66 (1967): 50-69. This raises interesting questions for those early American scholars who have focused too exclusively on the role of print in the emergence of public opinion in the eighteenth century. See Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 30; Warner, Letters of the Republic; Wood, Radicalism 363-4; Clark, Public Prints 4, 208. For suggestive approaches emphasizing non-print public spheres in early America, see Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men 44-5, 285n3; David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 175-82; John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” Launching the ‘Extended Republic’: The Federalist Era, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) 273-377.[/ref] And then, of course, there is the whole issue of what George Tucker termed the “incongruity between public opinion and the laws,” since the laws of all the Southern states universally condemned dueling. Was this a situation, as noted by many contemporaries and historians, akin to prohibition, ideal laws for an ideal people or, as Tucker believed, simply a means to check evil excesses of an accepted practice?[ref]Tucker, Essays 250n, 258-9; “Reflections on Duelling”; Greene, “Code of Honor” 368, 383-4; Loveland, Southern Evangelicals 182-3, 185.[/ref]

Whatever their similarities, one cannot deny that on the issue of dueling and honor violence, North and South sharply divided, much as they sharply divided on slavery. As they did, North and South began forming two distinct visions of each other. In the eyes of the other, northerners appeared like soulless capitalists and southerners like ruthless barbarians.[ref]Boorstin, Americans: The National Experience 207-8; D. Bruce, Violence and Culture 41-2; Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767‑1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) 42; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice 19-20; Kiernan, Duel in European History 306, 309; Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel” 19-23.[/ref]

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