So that we can acknowledge them. Where are you . Another yorkshire. I know you are here. [applause] also, a special group tonight that i would like to acknowledge, that is the simpson circle. That is a group composed of former Mary Washington b. O. D. Members. We are here tonight and we would like to have them stand so we can acknowledge them. [applause] in introducing tonights speaker, dr. Joanne freeman, i would like to mention at the outset that one of her most commendable qualifications is that she received her phd from the university. Thats right, u. V. A. [laughter] in any case, not long after receiving that degree, she was recognized already as one of the nations top young historians. She has subsequently has achieved widespread recognition as a scholar of the revolutionary and Early National periods of American History. She is the author of numerous articles on those subjects which appeared in prominent and proper academic journals including the william and mary quarterly, among others. She has written oped pieces for the New York Times and appeared on numerous documentaries on pbs, the History Channel and radio programs on npr and the bbc. You may have seen her just in the past week on the History Channels series on george washington. She has written several books, including a study of Alexander Hamilton. And her first major book titled affairs of Honor National politics in the new republic won the National Book award from the society of historians of the early american republic. Her most recent book, and the basis of tonights lecture, is titled field of blood published in 2018. With regard to that book, a historian tj stiles who some of you may recall was a former dust speaker, wrote that, quote, with insightful analysis and vivid detail she explores the , relationships of the congressmen before the civil war and finds a culture of astonishing violence in fistfights, duels and mass brawls. Her innovative account detects steps towards this union and changes how we think of political history. Another permanent historian wrote that, she describes many varieties of congressional violence including bullying, fighting in the halls of congress, fisticuffs, guns, knives, duels and threats of duels. With painstaking research, she penetrates the conspiracy of silence imposed by sources frequently reluctant to publicize the embarrassing truth. What a surprise that such an important story should have waited so long to be told. Tonight we are honored that she will share that story with us as we welcome dr. Joanna freeman to the university of Mary Washington and to the great lives podium. [applause] dr. Freeman thank you. Thank you very much. It is my great pleasure to be with you this evening to talk, as was just suggested, about something of a juicy topic, and that is american duelists. Now it probably will not , surprise you to learn that as someone who has studied Alexander Hamilton for good many decades, i have had really good reason to study dueling. Over the years, i have watched reenactments of the burrhamilton duel, in one case, standing close enough to the action to actually get splattered by hamiltons blood, which is really being up close and personal with your subject. On another occasion, i had the chance to shoot a black powder dueling pistol. Now thanks to the policeman who was supervising my target practice, i was wearing ear shields and plastic goggles at the time which kind of took something away from the historical accuracy of the moment, but still, an amazing opportunity to get some small sense of the physical sensation of firing a dueling pistol. But getting a handson sense of a duel is one thing. Understanding dueling is another, because when you get right down to it, dueling doesnt make sense. One person insults another person, and as a result, they travel to a field at the crack of dawn and fire pistols at each other. Does that solve anything . Seemingly, no. Is there risk of life and limb . Definitely, yes. So, what is the logic of dueling, and what drove americans to become duelists, or put another way, given duelings seeming lack of logic, why did hundreds and hundreds of american men in the 18th and early 19th centuries reason their way onto a dueling ground . And that is really what i want to explore with you this evening. And i am going to do that in two parts. First i am going to briefly look at how american dueling really worked, and the logic behind it. And i note that i am talking about american dueling here, because it differed from european dueling in several ways but importantly in one key way that i will talk about later. And then secondly, i will focus on some specific dualists and how they put dueling into per ractice and why. One of the first things we have to grapple with in discussing dueling is the concept of honor in early america. Any gentleman of the period considered his honor and his reputation his most valued possessions. To be dishonored was to lose your sense of self, your manhood, your status, to be ashamed to face your family and friends. Honor was even more important for politicians who based their careers on public opinion. In early america, it really was character and reputation that qualified you for public office, not job skills or talents. Elections went to the man with the best reputation. The man who the public most respected. So basically, to get voted into office, to get your friends into office or to exercise any political power or influence, you needed to have the right sort of reputation. So for an early american politician, honor wasnt some kind of vague sense of selfworth. It represented his ability to prove himself a deserving political leader. So it was practical in some ways. And in a sense that is going to be an idea i will keep coming back to. Among men who were so touchy about their reputations, rules of behavior were very important, and that makes sense if you think about it. Where insults can really have such grave consequences, where the wrong word might lead to the dueling ground, there have to be clearly defined rules and standards so that accidental insults and violence can be avoided. The rules of honor, the code of honor, set out clear standards of conduct. Certain words that you were supposed to avoid. Certain actions that you were supposed to avoid. And when a line was crossed and honor was offended, the code of honor offered a regulated way to settle the dispute. Hopefully, with negotiations, but sometimes, with gunplay on a dueling ground. For example, there were a number of what i always call, for myself, alarm bell words. Words you could never use in relation to another gentleman, because it was almost like daring that person to challenge you to a duel. These words included some that were logical like liar, coward. Those seem like they should be alarm bell words. Two have lost their zing, rascal and scoundrel. Probably not going to shoot someone over those words today, but they were serious in the 18th century. And my personal favorite alarm bell word puppy. , i guess it is insulting someone and suggesting a man is effeminate and a toy. But it was a serious insult although it is hard to consider it that today. However everyone knew that insulting a man with one of those words was as good as challenging him to a duel. It was like a dare that demanded a response, and to ignore the at kind of dare would be to dishonor yourself. I want to show you an example of one of those, actually two of those words in action. So this takes place in 1797. And Alexander Hamilton and james munro, local guy, james monroe, became involved in a controversy. Hamilton believed that monroe had leaked some damaging information to the press, and he was outraged. So he decided that he would go to monroes house to demand an explanation. He wrote a note to monroe to say, i hear you have done xyz. I am coming to your home for an explanation. I am bringing a friend. Or in other words, a second, a sort of duel assistant in case their talk ends up leading to something more serious. If you are monroe and you have a note saying that someone is coming to your house with a friend, that means you are in dueling territory. Right, monroe immediately knew that now we have moved into a realm where something bad might happen. So monroe went and got a friend for himself. And luckily for us, monroes friend, like a good second, recorded the entire conversation of what took place between hamilton and monroe. Now the first thing you can tell from the conversation is that they really, really did not like each other. Things dont start out too well. Because you can just tell right off the cuff they hate each other. Hamilton also was a really logical thinker who clearly wanted to rehearse the entire history of the controversy step by step, like a courtroom lawyer would. Monroe kept interrupting in complete frustration i know already. I lived through this. Can you get going . In which hamilton would begin again at the beginning of his account. [laughter] so things went worse as their conversation went on. It did not take long for both men ultimately to lose their patience, with hamilton clearly getting redder and redder, and monroe getting icier and icier until hamilton finally just bluntly accused monroe of leaking the information. When monroe denied it, hamilton said, and his word choice is key here, hamilton said, this as your representation is totally false. Ok. He is not using the l word, or saying you are a liar, he is basically saying you are a liar. He is just being careful with his words. Even though he did not use the buzz word, his acquisition was serious enough to have a big impact. What happened at that moment is fascinating because as soon as hamilton said that, this is your representation is false it was , clear a line had been crossed. As soon as the words left hamiltons mouth, both men jumped to their feet. Now the two men assume they are going to be involved in an affair of honor. Monroe responded by taking hamiltons dare and pushing it one step further. He said, you say i represented falsely . You are a scoundrel. [crowd gasps] dr. Freeman thank you for the sound effects. That is exactly what somebody would have said at the time. Hamilton responded by saying, i will meet you like a gentleman meaning, i am ready to duel. Monroe replied, i am ready, get your pistols. At which point the two mens friends separated them, calmed them down and basically convince them to act like what had happened had not happened so that the seconds could negotiate. As i just suggested, this incident unfolded much more quickly than most honor disputes. The two men lost their tempers, which is not help men of honor were supposed to behave. Most honor disputes followed really predictable ritualized steps. In a more conventional dispute, a person who felt insulted would have written a formal letter to the other, and it would have five basic statements. First it would say, i have been told you insulted me and you said xyz. It would suggest what that insult was. It was it very precisely it would then quote it very precisely this is what i am , told you said. Third, the letter would ask, is this true or false . Have you done this, avow it or deny it. Fourth, it would ask, do you have an explanation for this . And fifth would demand, an Immediate Response typically by saying, i demand an Immediate Response as a man of honor. If you get that letter, that is a duel to be form letter. It is an alarm bell. Whoever got it new that honor had been offended and the writer was ready to fight. You can see how the letter gave the recipient a chance to explain himself or deny the insult or apologize. And sometimes that happened. But from this point on, as soon as you receive that kind of a letter, you were engaged in an affair of honor, in which any word or action could lead to a duel. And this is typically the point where each man would appoint a second to represent him, a person who was kind of acting as a dueling lawyer negotiating terms for his client, trying to appease the offended Party Without humiliating the offender. And negotiations could take days or weeks, or even months, as, in this case, hamilton and monroe did. For months, they exchanged letters through their seconds, and each letter basically said ready to fight when you are. And then the other one would say i am ready to fight when you , are. No, i am ready to fight when you are. Nothing happens. This goes on for months and in the end both men walk away and say, well, i showed him. He is a coward. Kind of typical. It accomplished something, but certainly didnt accomplish anything easy for us to see with the distance of time. The negotiating process was extremely important and extremely ritualized because it enabled those involved to really display their honor, their superior character by being calm and passionless and even haughty in the face of death. Ideally, the rituals of dueling allowed honor to be satisfied without any violence. And here we come to an aspect of dueling that is really counterintuitive. It really does not make sense. Probably opposite of what most people think dueling is. The point of a duel was not to kill your opponent. Right . It is easy to assume that. Two men are going to a field to shoot each other, probably one wants to kill of the other. But that was not the point of a duel. The point of a duel was to prove that you were willing to die for your honor. So when you went to the dueling ground, by standing there, you were proving your willingness to risk your life for your honor as was your opponent. People didnt have to die to redeem their reputation, they didnt even have to get to the dueling ground to redeem their reputation depending on the negotiations. Obviously, in that kind of situation, deaths were relatively rare in duels. That is particularly true in duels between politicians which i will explain in a minute. Rules are usually not too serious. I remember finding a newspaper kind of poking fun at a recent duel. And it said Something Like, he suffered a wound in that fashionable area, the shin. [laughter] so there are a lot of shin wounds. The point of a duel is to prove you are willing to die for your honor. Not to kill the man who dishonored you. Whoin fact the dualist killed his opponent often fell victim to such outrage that he had to flee the state. In many ways, a duelist who killed his opponent was a failed duelist, because rather than redeeming his reputation, he risked damaging it. Now once you understand political dueling in this way, so once you see that all of these letters and negotiations are really a ritualized part of an affair of honor that might lead to a duel, you discover that there were many affairs of honor in america, more than most people assume. So for example, Alexander Hamilton was involved in at least 10 affairs of honor. So at least 10 times, he got into some kind of a dispute with someone. They had the ritualized negotiations. In some cases they came near fighting, but he did not end up going to the dueling ground. He even negotiated himself out of a fight with aaron burr before. 10 is a lot for someone to be involved in affairs of honor. Tells you something about hamilton. In new york city alone in the 12 years surrounding the burr hamilton duel, there were at least 17 other Political Affairs of honor. In other words, the burrhamilton duel was not a grand exception, but rather part of a larger trend. Now when you look at these other honor disputes and duels, look see,a historian, what do i do you see a pattern . You do see patterns. First, you noticed that a lot of these occurred shortly after an election. I actually remember discovering this with a calendar with elections on it and pinning the duels and going, this is an interesting pattern. Second, when you look at the details of these political duels you discover that many of them , were deliberately provoked. A common ploy is that someone would call another someone a selfinterested politician, and there is one obvious response to that. You are a liar. You have got yourself a duel. And in most cases, and this is the really striking point, the loser of the election, or one of his friends, would find a way to provoke the winner or one of the winners friends into a duel. What is happening here, these are duels that are not resulting from a slip of the tongue, they are deliberately provoked and strategically timed. In other words, many early american political duels were kind of like counter elections. Someone who was dishonored by a lost election, a democratic contest, tried to redeem his reputation with an aristocratic contest of honor. A duel. American duels, sometimes they would be summarized in newspapers, they would Say Something like mr. X met mr. Y on a field of honor and with men behaved honorably. The subject would be, both men behaved honorably and they are fit to be leaders and you should vote for them in a selection. That is why these details are being published. And europeans were stunned at this custom, because it seemed like americans were advertising their duels for votes, which in a way, they were. This is a really distinctly american twist on the european practice of dueling. As i just suggested, these are not impulsive or irrational duels, not guided by uncontrolled suicidal impulses or murderous rage. Early american political duels, at least for some time, or deliberate attempts to redeem an electoral loss and prove oneself eligible for future leadership. The burrhamilton duel fits perfectly into that pattern. It took place in 1804. That year, burr lost his election for governor of new york with hamilton campaigning against him. Not long after losing, burr felt compelled to redeem his name and reputation from that loss. There is actually a pamphlet written by one of his supporters at the time that says, if mr. Burr does not redeem his reputation. Why should his followers follow him . He must do something. So burr did. After losing the new york elections, he was looking for a way to redo his reputation. Low and behold, someone handed him a newspaper clipping that contained news of a dinner party were hamilton had insulted burr. Burr used the clipping to initiate an affair of honor with hamilton, who had been attacking burr for 15 years at that point. Because of some sloppy insulting exchanges between the two men during those long negotiations, along with 15 years worth of insults, hamilton couldnt exactly apologize. In the end, both men felt insulted during the negotiations and obviously, they ended up duelng. I dont think either one of them wanted to kill the other. I know people think burr was an evil guy who wanted to kill hamilton. When you look at the letters before the duel, it doesnt seem that way as well. As i suggested earlier