Today in History—February 20: The Eleventh Duel Commandment? No Dueling

On this day in 1839 Congress banned the ritual that Lin-Manuel Miranda made famous in the hit musical Hamilton.

They outlawed dueling in Washington, D.C., with a law so thorough it basically banned vibes. No challenging someone to a duel. No accepting a challenge to a duel. No delivering a message about a challenge to a duel. You get the point. The punishment for breaking the statute—a felony—was up to 10 years of hard labor.

For the first time, Congress had made its honor culture a crime.

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This was necessary because Congress in the 1830s was…well armed. Most gentlemen carried pistols, alongside a deeply combustible sense of honor. They brought both into congressional sessions. Members of rival political parties viewed each other as mortal enemies (a dynamic that hasn’t exactly vanished). The sergeant at arms routinely had to disarm the aggrieved.

The tipping point had come in 1838. Kentucky Rep. William Graves slapped Maine Congressman Jonathan Cilley in the face with an empty glove—a formal insult—for refusing to duel Graves’s friend, the editor of the New York Courier & Enquirer. Graves was so offended by Cilley’s refusal to be properly offended that he dropped the first challenge and issued his own. Cilley took the bait.

As the Hamilton song explains: “Most disputes die, and no one shoots.” Not this one.

The men met in Bladensburg, Maryland, in February 1838. (“Everything is legal in New Jersey.” Maryland is close enough.) With rifles at 80 paces, they fired and missed. Their seconds (negotiators) tried to make peace (“if they apologize, no need for further action”) but failed. The men re-paced, shot again, and missed again. Their seconds tried and failed—again. Then, because no one in this story was throwing away their shot (or learning anything), these two men, described by a witness as “without animosity” for each other, re-paced. The third time was not the charm for Cilley, who was shot by Graves and died.

Fed up members of Congress immediately introduced a bill in the Senate to ban dueling, but it stalled. It took until the following year for Congress to pass the law. Even then, it didn’t end dueling—it just pushed it out of the District and over the state line.

But a fundamental shift had been made. Personal honor no longer outranked order on the Congress floor. Nearly gone were the days of vice presidents shooting former treasury secretaries and being allowed to finish out their terms.

It was just a few decades too late for Alexander Hamilton. (“The world was wide enough.”)

Famous Birthdays

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1902: Ansel Adams—American photographer

1988: Rihanna—Barbadian singer