Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [114]
Even more extreme were the provisions if death occurred: the body of the victim was to be buried “without a coffin, with a stake drove through the body at or near the usual place of execution”; or it might be delivered to any “surgeon ... to be dissected and anatomized.” The killer was guilty of murder. If convicted and executed, his body, too, would either be dissected or buried coffinless, with a stake driven through it.
The statute has an archaic ring, but the point was to try to nullify the positive image of dueling as noble, honorable, and even aristocratic. In an interesting case in the mayor’s court of New York City, in 1818, a man named George F. Norton had challenged one William Willis to a duel. His letter of challenge began: “I Expect You will give mee the satisfaction of a gentleman For the insult you have put upon Mee.” The mayor told the jury that this “offence had hitherto been supposed to be confined to that class in society denominated gentlemen.” Norton’s case, he said, showed that “this fashionable crime was ... diffusing itself among the lower and, perhaps, the most useful classes in society.” Though Norton “has assumed the character and etiquette of a gentleman, there is scarcely a word in his letters spelled right. Even the monosyllable me he had spelt mee.” He exhorted the jury to nip this spread of dueling in the bud; Norton was convicted, sentenced to a month in jail, and ordered “to find security to keep the peace for one year from the expiration of his imprisonment.”12
Dueling flourished in the southern states. Andrew Jackson’s mother told him that law “affords no remedy that can satisfy the feelings of a true man.”13 In other words, a true man vindicated his honor outside the law. Dueling was illegal in the South as well as in the North—in Virginia as early as 1776, in Tennessee and North Carolina in 1802, in Georgia in 1809, in South Carolina in 1812. But these laws were totally ineffective.14 Although officeholders in a number of states (Alabama and Kentucky, for example) had to swear that they had never fought a duel, in or out of the state, legislatures simply exempted, by resolution, those who could not take the oath without telling a lie. Many prominent men in the southern and border states had duels on their records. In January 1809, Henry Clay and Humphrey Marshall were on opposite sides of a heated debate in the Kentucky legislature. Clay called Marshall a demagogue; Marshall called Clay a liar. The result was a duel, fought with pistols at ten paces. Three rounds were fired; each man was “cool, determined and brave,” and neither was seriously injured.15
Dueling had a specific place in the social structure of the South. In the South, only gentlemen fought duels, and one only fought a duel with a social equal. Dueling was thus one brick in a structure of stratification, an unwritten code, in which every member of society knew his or her place and stuck to it. It was part of the southern code of honor. This code “discouraged the growth of strong law enforcement agencies,” and “lessened the effectiveness of the state courts.”16 It was, in short, pre-legal, prerational, aristocratic. It was also tenacious. Dueling as an institution lasted in the South much longer than in the North; indeed, it persisted till the late nineteenth century. The end of the southern aristocracy and the rise of a new class, the white populists and smallholders, was perhaps the cause of its decline.
The code of honor, despite its aristocratic tang, was, at bottom, nothing more than