Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [46]
At the next trial the venue was changed. Johnson’s family paid for an investigation in Winn’s home state of Florida, where they found that there he had been legally classified as a mulatto—which meant that Johnson’s son and his apprentice could indeed testify against him. But the judge in the new venue would not allow this evidence to come in. The witnesses were barred from testifying. The trial then proceeded to a verdict. Winn was found not guilty of murder. After two years in jail, he was a free man.
In the diary, the highest term of praise Johnson had for any man, black or white, was that he was a “gentleman.” He never defined what he meant, but then he didn’t need to. Everybody in the river valley knew what a gentleman was, even if they couldn’t have explained how he got that way. It was breeding, it was dress, it was manners—but more than any of that, it was honor. A gentleman was concerned about his honor just as an ordinary man was obsessed with his rights. This provided people with a handy rule of thumb. Where an ordinary man might commit manslaughter, a gentleman would fight a duel.
The duel was the defining trademark of the aristocrat in the lower valley and throughout the South. Every gentleman was expected to know the Code Duello, as it was called—an elaborately ritualized etiquette of single combat adopted from the old European aristocracy that laid out what was and wasn’t a dueling offense, how challenges were to be offered and accepted, how the duel was supposed to be conducted, and when to shoot to kill. The core of the code was its uncompromising rigor. Gentlemen were expected to fight duels over any affront to their personal honor, no matter how slight or absurd it might seem to an outsider. A misunderstood word, a political dispute that turned personal, an invitation to a dance that went awry—these were all legitimate occasions for a duel.
The code, if followed scrupulously, would have led any gentleman to fight duels on almost a daily basis. In fact, full-blown duels with real bloodshed seem to have been relatively rare. Going by Johnson’s diary—and this was the sort of thing he was sure to note down—Natchez saw on average only one formal dueling challenge a year, and almost all of these were settled without violence. When a duel was carried out to the point of actual combat, it became the subject of universal fascination.
One of the most famous duels fought in the river valley took place in St. Louis in 1831. The participants were both prominent Missouri gentlemen. Major Thomas Biddle was a distinguished veteran of the War of 1812, a quartermaster at the local army garrison, and a member of one of St. Louis’s most aristocratic families. The Honorable Spencer Pettis was a well-regarded local politician who had been Missouri’s secretary of state and was currently Missouri’s only representative in the United States Congress. The cause of their dispute was both personal and political. It centered on the Bank of the United States—an institution that seems during the few decades of its existence to have been the occasion for near-constant quarreling all over the country. In this case, Pettis was running for reelection and made the corruption and incompetence of the bank into a major campaign issue. Thomas Biddle’s brother Nicholas happened to be the president of the bank. Thomas regarded all attacks on the bank as attacks on Nicholas and therefore as affronts to the family honor. After Pettis attacked the bank in a speech, Thomas Biddle published a rebuttal in one of St. Louis’s newspapers, in the course of which he referred to Pettis as “a dish of skimmed milk.” Pettis replied with a letter impugning Thomas Biddle’s manhood. Biddle then escalated by breaking into Pettis’s room at the St. Louis Hotel early one morning while Pettis was still asleep and beating him with a rawhide whip. (Pettis later claimed to have been