Essay On Dueling

Imagine two gentlemen facing off in a Southern forest. Suddenly a shot crackles through the air, and a man falls dead to the ground. Later, the killer is not charged with murder or put before a judge or jury. Dueling is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as, “a fight between two people that includes the use of weapons (such as guns or swords) that usually happens while other people watch.” Some people consider dueling an art form, but most people now consider dueling a barbaric method of settling petty disputes. Either way, the history of dueling, the reasons for dueling, and the laws surrounding duels have impacted people in many ways. Even though all aspects of dueling are compelling, it is important to know how dueling originated and the
Many duels were driven by unpaid debts. At the time, banks and private lenders did not have a good way of predicting the likelihood of someone paying off their loans (Kingston). When a person defaulted on a loan, the lender could tell the creditor that he had no honor and issue a challenge to a duel. Keeping honor was especially important to people such as plantation owners who were often cash-strapped, and could not afford to lose their lines of credit. If creditors lost or refused a duel, they could lose all of their property and financial lives (Kingston). Dueling was an important part of people's financial lives, and it was important to keeping healthy relations in a financial market. The motivations for dueling were varied and and the laws of the day reflected
Dueling was illegal for most of its history in America. George Washington openly opposed dueling and forbade it among his officers. Ironically, the punishment for disobeying this order was death. Dueling was technically illegal in most states, but no court really cared. If a municipality did enforce the law, the duelists would just go over into the next state or a secluded part of a forest and commence the duel there. It is unclear whether the decline of dueling occurred because of passing laws or because of the decline in acceptance of dueling as a just form of trial. What is certain though is that rates of dueling sharply declined at the start of the 1800s and would never recover in