Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [48]
Before they were carried away from the dueling ground, each man forgave the other. That was also traditional—not only did it reassert their honor, but it also served as an additional hedge in case either man survived to be charged with murder. But the precaution turned out to be unnecessary. They barely lingered on for a few days; each died in horrible agony. Their friends all came by to console and praise them. Pettis was particularly concerned that his last-second crouch would be considered cowardly. He was comforted when everyone assured him that his honor was intact. Senator Benton said they were “the bravest of the brave.” Newspapers eulogized their willingness to put death before dishonor. Pettis’s funeral was later said to have drawn the largest crowd in St. Louis’s history.
Dueling wasn’t something that happened only between enemies. Anywhere in the valley, it was seen as perfectly appropriate between close friends. This is the way it played out in the life of the famous Mississippi attorney and politician Henry Stuart Foote. One of his lifelong friends was a fellow attorney, the celebrated prosecutor S. S. Prentiss. They were, Foote writes, friendly rivals in court and good companions in their off-hours for decades—except, of course, for those times when they tried to kill each other.
Their duels arose because of their professional competitiveness. Both men were lawyers of the classic school: that is, they were known as much for their showmanship as for their jurisprudence. The gallery of the courtroom in Vicksburg was always packed when they gave their closing arguments. With good reason: this was, after all, an age where public speakers of all sorts—preachers, attorneys, politicians, medicine men—were expected to offer as many rhetorical thrills as a Shakespearean actor. Foote and Prentiss always delivered.
One time it got out of hand. They found themselves on opposite sides in a murder trial. During the trial there was a moment where Foote thought Prentiss had impugned him unnecessarily. In his memoirs, Foote doesn’t spell out exactly what Prentiss said—evidently it was some needling personal witticism made during an exchange of objections. Foote did say that he felt the insult “had been sufficiently retaliated by me at the time.” But when he thought it over later, the feeling of sufficiency wore off. After the trial ended, he challenged Prentiss to a duel.
It was a mistake, he admitted in his memoirs: Prentiss was a much better shot than he was. They fought with pistols at dawn in a meadow outside of Vicksburg. Foote shot to kill, but he missed; Prentiss’s shot left Foote badly wounded in the shoulder. Foote as the aggrieved party declared that his honor was now satisfied. Even before they’d left the dueling ground to find a doctor, they had followed the code and made up their quarrel. They swore to each other that they were friends again for life.
A few weeks later, their reconciliation came undone. According to Foote, he had heard that Prentiss’s friends were passing around some kind of nasty gossip about the duel. He doesn’t say what the gossip was exactly—only that they “spoke disparagingly of my conduct on the occasion.” Foote was enraged, and wrote Prentiss a stiff note “demanding whether he had given his sanction to this act of injustice.” Prentiss immediately wrote back to say that he hadn’t. Probably this should have satisfied Foote, but he was so rankled by the perceived slight to his reputation that he published the two letters. Prentiss then publicly claimed to have been insulted by the whole exchange: “He placed such an interpretation upon my letter to him as gave him much offense,” Foote recalled. “He proposed reopening the fight, which