Page 4 - Demo

John Randolph
and the Field of Honor
BY JOHN D’ENTREMONT
At 4:30 p.m. on April 8, 1826, near the Chain Bridge on the Virginia shore of the Potomac, the United States secretary of state kept an engagement with a famous United States senator from Virginia. The cabinet officer had not come to chat; this was not a social call. He had not come to
conduct business; this would not be a policy discussion. As the waiting senator knew, this encounter would
be utterly straightforward, even primal: the secretary of state was coming to
shoot him.
Though the participants on this occasion were unusually
exalted, a visit to the field of honor was hardly rare for American gentlemen, especially
from the 1770s to the Civil War. In Virginia, the first documented duel—that is, with a challenge
and seconds and a pre-arranged date and a choice of weapons—had occurred in 1619 in Jamestown; the last would be fought in Fincastle in 1883. After Vice President
Aaron Burr killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1804, a backlash of revulsion had made dueling increasingly unacceptable in the North. But in the 1820s it
was still considered a legitimate remedy for a gentleman’s grievance in the more martial, more honor-obsessed South. Not that every Southerner approved. In 1779 legislator
Thomas Jefferson, who detested blood sports and ridiculed dueling as grotesque and barbaric, had sought
to outlaw the practice, in a bill that would have made it a capital offense. The House of Delegates crushed
Jefferson’s effort, though seventeen years later Virginia did enact an utterly toothless anti-dueling measure.
In 1810 the legislature did make killing someone in a duel an act of murder, to be punished accordingly: no prosecutor ever attempted to enforce it, knowing that
no jury would ever vote to convict.
Virginians were hardly alone. Dueling was an
American import, not invention; in the 1820s it still thrived in much of the world. In 1808 the
quarrel between two Frenchmen over a woman was elevated (literally) into a spectacular
duel fought from two hot-air balloons, ending only when one man (and his
hapless second) were blasted out of the
sky. In 1843 another two Frenchmen fought a formal duel with billiard balls, one killing the other with a direct hit to the head by a red ball. As late as 1894, two British officers in India challenged each other by being confined in a room filled with poisonous snakes. And the United States was not the only nation with dueling celebrities. In 1809, British Defense Secretary Castlereagh shot Foreign Secretary Canning in the leg. Twenty-eight years later, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was killed by his brother-in-law, who had been having an
Henry Clay’s bullet went hurtling
affair with his wife.
In Virginia, as elsewhere, the field of honor was the resort
of a gentleman who had lost face because of the actions
or words of another. The aggrieved party could restore
his reputation by stalwartly facing his nemesis in a setting where death was possible and courage essential. Killing one’s opponent was neither necessary nor the norm; what mattered was the honorable display of manly fortitude. Indeed, if both contenders displayed this, the balance of honor would be restored and a civil relationship, even a friendship, might be possible.
But on this day, Secretary of State Henry Clay had no interest in a friendship with Senator John Randolph, a man who had tormented him for years. Ironically, the Virginia- born Kentuckian had much in common with the Virginian. Both were noted orators, gentleman planters, and successful politicians beloved by their constituents. But politically they were bitter antagonists. Clay was the leader of a coalition
that would come to be known as the Whigs, people who believed in national power and a national program—financed by taxes and tariffs—of roads, bridges and canals (“internal improvements”) that would spur development of an integrated, diversified modern economy. Such a program was anathema to Southern localists like Randolph, who could not see why Virginians should be taxed to finance a turnpike in Pennsylvania or a canal in Maryland, and who feared that a stronger national government would pose a lethal threat to slavery. Accordingly, Randolph had lost no opportunity to thwart Clay’s nationalist program at every turn.
But it was personal insult, not merely politics, that had brought these men to the field of honor. Randolph recently had delivered an incendiary speech on the floor of the House critical of Clay’s Latin American policy, during the course of which he questioned the integrity of the process by which

LYNCH’S FERRY
A