Tonight that i would like to acknowledge and that the the simpson circle and that is a group composed of former Mary Washington b. O. V. Members and theyre here tonight and wed like to have them stand so we could acknowledge them. [ applause ] in introducing tonights speaker, dr. Joann freeman, would you like to mention at the outset that one of her most commendable qualifications is that she received her ph. D from the university. Thats right. Uva, right. In any case, not long after receiving that degree she was recognized already as one of the nations top young historians. She subsequently has achieved widespread recognition as a scholar of the revolutionary American History. Shes the author of numerous articles in those subjects which include the journal including the william and mary journal and the yale law journal among others. Shes written oped pieces for the New York Times and has appeared in numerous documentaries on pbs and the History Channel and on radio programs for npr and the bbc. And you may have seen her just in the past week on the History Channel series on George Washington. Shes written several books including study of Alexander Hamilton and her first book kiteled affairs of honor, National Politics in the new republic from the early american republic. Her most recent book and the basis of tonights lecture is titled the field of blood published in 2018. With regard to that book, historian tj styles who you may recall as a former great live speaker wrote that, quote, with ininsightful analysis and vivid detail she explores the human relationships among congressman before the civil war and finds a culture of astonishing violence in fistfights, duels and mass brawls. Her innovative account detects steps toward disunion and changes how we think of political history. Another prominent historian wrote that, quote, she describes many varieties of congressional violence, including bullying, fighting in the halls of congress, fistacuffs, guns, knives and threats of duels. With painstaking research she penetrates the silence imposed by sources frequently reluctant to publicize the em bears truth and what a surprise an important story should wait so long to be told. Tonight were honored to share is that story with us as we welcome dr. Joann freeman to the university of washington and the great lives podium. [ applause ] 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 duellists. Now, it probably wont surprise you to learn that as someone who has studied Alexander Hamilton for a good many decades, ive had really good reason to study duelling. Over the years, ive watched reenactments of the burr hamilton duel 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 powdered duelling now thanks to the policeman who was supervising my target practice, i was wearing ear shields and plastic goggles, which kind of took something away from the accuracy of the historical moment, but still, it was 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 a 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 of american men in the 18th and early 19th centuries reason their way onto a dueling ground . That is what i want to explore with you this evening. I will do that in two parts. First i will briefly look at how american dueling really worked, and the logic behind it. Id note that i am talking about american dueling here, because it differed from european dueling in several ways, that in one key way that i will talk about later. Secondly, i will focus on specific duelists, and talk about how they put dueling into practice 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 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. In a sense, that is 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 you were supposed to avoid. Certain actions 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 a most like daring that person to challenge you to a duel. These words included some that were logical like liar, coward. Two have lost their zing. Rascal and scoundrel. They were serious in the 18th century. And my personal favorite, puppy. I guess it is insulting someone and suggesting a man is effeminate and a toy. It was a serious insult although it is hard to consider 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 kind of dare would be to dishonor yourself. I want to show you an example of one or two of those words in action. So this takes place in 1797. Alexander hamilton and james monroe, 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 explanation, and he wrote a note saying i hear you have done x, y and z. Im coming to your home for an explanation, and im bringing a friend. Or in other words, a second, a duel assistant in case they are talking and it lead 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. Monroe immediately knew that now we moved into the realm where something bad might happen. So monroe went and got a friend for himself. Luckily for us, monroes friend recorded the entire conversation of what took place between hamilton and monroe. The first thing you can tell from the conversation is that they did not like each other. Things dont start out too well, you can tell right off the cuff that they hate each other. Hamilton 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 . At 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 bluntly accused monroe of leaking the information. When monroe denied it, hamilton said, this as your representation is totally false. Hes not using the l word, not saying youre a liar, but hes just being careful with his words. Even though he did not use the buzz word, the accusation was serious enough to have a big impact. What happened at that moment is fascinating because as soon as hamilton said that, it was clear that a line had been crossed. As soon as the words left hamiltons mouth, both men jumped to their feet. Now the two men assumed theyll be involved in an affair of honor. Monroe responded by taking hamiltons dare and pushing it one step further. He said, do you say i represented falsely, you are a scoundrel. Thank you for the sound effects. Thats what someone would have said at the time. Hamilton responded by saying, i will meet you like a gentleman. Meaning, im ready to duel. Monroe replied, im ready, get your pistols. At which point the two mens friends, their seconds, separated them, calmed them down and convinced them to act as though some of what had happened had not happened so the seconds could negotiate. Now, as i just suggested, this incident unfolded much more quickly than most honor disputes. The two men lost their tempers, which is not how a man of honor was supposed to behave. Most disputes followed really predictable ritualist steps. In a more conventional dispute, a gentleman would have written a form letter to the other with five basic statements. First it would say, i have been told you insulted me and said x, y and z. And it would suggest what that insult was. And it would have quoted precisely the words quoted to me are this is what im told you have said. Third, the letter would ask, is this true or false . 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 knew honor was defended and the writer was ready to fight. It 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 letter, you were engaged in an affair of honor in which any word or action could lead to a duel. 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. 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. Each one said, ready to fight when you are. The other one said, i am ready to fight when you are. No, i am ready to fight when you are. Nothing happens in the end. This goes on for months and in the end both men walk away and say, well, i showed him. Hes a coward. Kind of typical. It accomplished something but 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, being calm and passionless and even haughty in the face of death. Ideally, the ritual 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 to what people think dueling is. The point of a duel was not to kill your opponent. It is easy to assume that. Two men going into a field to shoot each other, probably one wants to kill the other. But that was not the point. 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 with your opponent. People didnt had 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. Wounds were usually not too serious. I remember finding a newspaper poking fun at a recent duel. It said Something Like, he suffered a wound in that fashionable area, the shin. 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. The opponents often fell victim to such outrage that he had to leave the state. In many ways, a duelist who killed his opponent was a failed duellist, because rather than redeeming his reputation, he risked damaging it. Once you understand political dueling in this way, when you see that all the letters and negotiations are really a ritualistic part of an affair of honor that might lead to a duel, you discovered there were many affairs of honor in america, more than people assume. For example, Alexander Hamilton was involved in at least 10 affairs of honor. At least 10 times, he got into some kind of dispute with someone. They had a ritualized negotiation. 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, i think once before. Burr says twice, hamilton says once. Ten is a lot of times to be involved in an affair of honor. Tells you something about hamilton. In new york city alone, there were at least 17 other Political Affairs of honor. At least three actual duels. So, in other words, the burrhamilton duel was not a grand exception, but rather part of a larger trend. When you look at these honor disputes and duels, you do see patterns. First, you notice a lot of these duels 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 many of them were 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 got yourself a duel. In most cases, and this is the striking point, the loser of the election, or one of his friends, would find a way to provoke a 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 tong, 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. Now, in american duels, often the results were published in newspapers. Sometimes they would be summarized, Say Something like mr. X met mr. Y on the field of honor, and both men behaved honorably. The subtext of that would be both men behaved honorably, both are fit to be leaders so vote for them in the next election. 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 a time were 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 didnt redeem his reputation, why should his followers follow him . What does he have to offer . He must prove hes a leader to offer something to his followers, so he has to do something. So burr did. After losing the new york election, he was looking for a way to redeem his reputation, lo 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 really apologize. In the end, both men felt insulted during the negotiations and obviously, they ended up dueling. 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 at well. But they did end up dueling and there were tragic consequences. As i suggested earlier, this does not mean that burr won the duel. In some ways, he lost it. He fled town as did a flurry of his supporters, his newspaper editor, and the man who rode them across the river to the dueling ground. Now new york is upset. He has killed somebody. His enemies united against him to basically condemn him as a murderer and press murder charges. He was vulnerable and for some time, he hid in South Carolina, where people were less upset about hamiltons death and more comfortable with dueling. After several months, he vicepresident of the United States, because he was vicepresident when he killed hamilton. He was finishing up his term and not coming back for a second term. Given that deaths occasionally happened in dueling, he just back to his job, once he felt the coast was clear. Its easy to assume he strolled his way back into the senate and went back to work, but over the years, in reading the letters of men who were in the room, congressmen and senators who were in the room when burr came back, its really interesting. A lot of them say things like, looked