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It’s Time to Bring Back the Duel

I prefer autumn for a duel. A nip in the air and the thick butterscotch warmth of bourbon. A whiff of wood smoke. The rustle of our feet through the leaves as we walk those 20 paces. The explosion of colors — and of pistols, too, of course: deep crimson on that rustled bed of bright orange and amber.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just imagining. I’ve never been in a duel, of course. We don’t allow duels anymore. They’re barbaric, archaic. We can just shoot people on the spot now, over whatever slight or insult or dust-up has us riled. We don’t need rules, or a quiet meadow at dawn. The strip-mall parking lot outside a suburban Italian restaurant will do. That happened a few years ago where I live. There was a disagreement over two S.U.V.s parked too closely to each other. The men argued, then one went to his vehicle for a gun and shot and killed the other. Over a parking dispute. Over nothing. The judge at the sentencing lamented how a gun, ever so handy when things became heated, “controlled” the man’s “mental condition” and “emboldened him.”

A couple of hundred years ago, this quick escalation, from mundane to murderous, might have taken several days. After the challenge was made and accepted, the duel would have to be scheduled, and a suitably secluded plot of land identified, and the weapons chosen, and the seconds (dueling’s version of the bridegroom’s best man) signed on. Then the appointed day would come — and what if it rained? Oh, snap! Were there rainouts in dueling, like in baseball? Heck, they might have decided to wait until autumn.

Not to make sport of duels, mind. They could be lethal. Alexander Hamilton most famously died from one, shot by his longtime political rival, Aaron Burr, in a dispute partly over the former’s deeming the latter “a dangerous man.” More than he knew!

But dueling, though fraught, was seldom fatal — only about 7 percent of duels resulted in death, according to scholars.

Consider the early American politicians John Randolph and Henry Clay, who staged what the Kentucky secretary of state’s website calls “one of the most ludicrous exchanges in the annals of dueling.” After some early misses, Clay put a bullet through Randolph’s coat, then braced for his opponent’s return fire. Randolph shot harmlessly into the air. No one died, or was even wounded that day. “But you owe me a new coat,” said Randolph to Clay. Har.

History is strewed with duels that weren’t — called off for one reason or another, cooler heads or back-channel collusion or whatever. A young Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln avoided one rather craftily. When challenged by the aggrieved state auditor James Shields over personal insults, Lincoln chose swords as the weapon, in a nod to his height and reach advantage. They met on a Mississippi River sandbar called, a little too aptly, Bloody Island. In a flourish of preduel gamesmanship, the future American president swung his sword high and hacked off a tree branch. Shields saw the folly of bringing thin skin to a sword fight, and a truce was called. So the story goes.

You could also just apologize and avoid a duel. Or your second — cool head to your hot one — could talk you down. This was a crucial part of a second’s job, turns out — to see that the duel never came off. (So scratch that best-man comparison from earlier.)

Finally, if the duel could not be avoided, you could always “delope.” That is, the duelists would miss on purpose, a sort of let’s-not-and-say-we-did maneuver. With such subterfuge, it’s a wonder they didn’t do away with pistols altogether. Why not dirty looks at 20 paces instead!

So maybe they were onto something, back in the barbaric, archaic United States. Maybe the whole idea of a duel was to give would-be duelists time to cool it. To stand back for a bit, and make peace. Or anyway, live to loathe another way.

Imagine the applications today in this agitated America of ours — where guns, at some 400 million, outnumber the nation’s population. We have people taking potshots at one another on Interstates. We have shootings at schools, churches, grocery stores, food courts, hookah lounges, nightclubs and parks. We have shootings at Easter parties and after-prom parties and trail rides. Mix the easy availability of guns with our politics of incitement, division and (let’s just call it what it is) old-fashioned hate. The threats, the bullying. The fighting over every little thing — over books and bathrooms and whether facts are facts. Two people of opposing views can’t even talk calmly about the weather anymore — there’s climate change, you know. Unless it’s a hoax!

See? I’ve gone and worked myself into a state. It doesn’t take much, honestly. Bit of a hothead I am. One more combustible American. I have one of those hair-trigger tempers that’s just too quick for me sometimes. It reacts before there’s time to stop, think, reason. I don’t own a gun, but who’s to say I won’t get crosswise someday with someone who does? I’ll have been a co-conspirator, if a dead one.

So it seems to me we need, as a country, a little time to calm our collective bad selves, to temper our flaring tempers. You see what I’m proposing here, don’t you? We have to bring it back. Yes, dueling. Think of the lives we’ll save.


David Wesley Williams is an author whose novel “Come Again No More” will be published this year by JackLeg Press.

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