By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Grant graduated in 1843, aged twenty-one, and was posted as a lieutenant to the Fourth Infantry. He was drilling his company one day when his company commander, a captain, walked by accompanied by other officers and asked, “Where are the rest of your men, Lieutenant?” “Absent, by your leave, Sir,” replied Grant. “That is not true,” snapped the captain. At this Grant turned to his sergeant, telling him to take over command, and dismissed the company. He then took out his sword and placed its tip against the breast of his senior officer. “Unless you apologize for this insult,” he said in level tones, “I will run you through.” The captain apologized, and Grant, fortunately, was not court-martialed for his insolence.8

  Ulysses was not done with the sword. On Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, he famously made his way to Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, where as general in chief of the armies of the United States he accepted the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, commander of the army of Northern Virginia and, in effect, all the Confederate forces.

  Lee was wearing his full dress uniform, replete with his ceremonial saber, his “Maryland sword.” Grant, in the careful words of Lee’s chief biographer, “a man of middle height, slightly stooped and heavily bearded, came in alone. He was dressed for the field, with boots and breeches mud-bespattered.”9 He was not wearing any form of sword—a symbolic gesture, as generations of historians have agreed, to show that as the victorious commander he had no need of one.

  The truth is more prosaic. Not only did Lee not offer Grant his sword, as has also been alleged, but the only talk of sword came when Grant apologized to Lee for not wearing his saber, “saying,” Lee later recorded, that “it had gone off in his baggage, and he had not been able to get it in time.”10

  Maybe it was a symbolic meeting all the same—just accidentally so.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1873, WHEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS FOURTEEN, he visited Europe for the second time. He stayed with the family of Herr Minckwitz, a German politician. “The two sons were fascinating students from the University of Leipsic [sic],” he later wrote in his Autobiography, “both of them belonging to duelling corps, and much scarred in consequence. One, a famous swordsman, was called Der Roth Herzog (The Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed Herr Nasehorn (Sir Rhinoceros) because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again.”11 Before long Roosevelt was himself a student and while at Harvard was challenged to “a real French duel by a real Frenchman.” He took such a vehement delight in furthering arrangements for the fight that his opponent, worn down, apologized and invited him to dinner.12

  Roosevelt’s interest in swordplay is possibly the least surprising in any of the fencing presidents. One of 821 students at Harvard, he boxed daily, wrestled, and competed in several track events, despite being a wiry 135 pounds. He was keen on a variety of outdoor pursuits, including hiking, mountaineering, and fishing, while also enjoying jujitsu, tennis, and big-game shooting. And he loved fencing, not as a passing interest but as a recreation he carried into the White House. Roosevelt was six weeks shy of his forty-third birthday when he succeeded McKinley, thus making him the youngest man ever to occupy the presidency. A story in The New York Times from April 26, 1903, when he was forty-four, records that he had arranged to take fencing lessons from a teacher in Baltimore, a Professor Giovanni Pavese. “I find Mr. Roosevelt one of the keenest sportsmen I have ever met,” Pavese is quoted as saying. “He has the quick eye and aggressive movement that will make him a good fencer. His physical development will adapt him to the exercise, which he will find strenuous enough to please him. I believe I will find him a pupil as apt as he is distinguished.” President Roosevelt was usually given lessons once a week, a room in the White House having been specially fitted up as a salle d’armes for the purpose. “During the interim between lessons,” wrote a contemporary reporter, “the President devotes as much time as he can spare from his official and social duties to the arduous practice which is necessary if one would become a skillful swordsman.”13

  Professor Pavese’s commission was not unique: in the 1890s the president of France, Félix Faure, regularly took lessons from a master at the Elysée Palace.† But Roosevelt’s interest in swordplay ranged widely. In Theodore Rex Edmund Morris describes how every evening in the residence the president would compel his friend Brigadier General Leonard Wood (onetime military governor of Cuba) to don padded helmet and chest protector, and armed with singlesticks the two men would “beat each other like carpets” in the upper rooms of the executive mansion.14 Roosevelt joked, “We look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” In one session his right arm was so severely whacked about that he had to greet his evening guests left-handed.

  THIS LEAVES ONE AMERICAN FENCING PRESIDENT UNACCOUNTED for, and he perhaps the least likely: Harry Truman. With his squeaky voice and delicate frame, Truman was the antithesis of a sportsman. His schoolmates called him “Four-eyes” on account of his spectacles, and he recorded disarmingly, “Without my glasses I was as blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.” Fencing proved the exception.

  At high school Truman found himself drawn to the girl who was the class’s foremost athlete, Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, a fine tennis player, the best third-base player in the school, a tireless ice-skater and all-round track star—and, of course, the girl he would later marry: Bess. According to their daughter’s biography, Bess “was the best female fencer in town, and she was probably better than most of the boys … and she was pretty besides.”15 St. Louis, a bustling, cosmopolitan city known as “The Gateway to the West,” had a long tradition of French influence, so it was not surprising to find fencing a respected sport. Anyway, the two teenagers used to meet after school at Truman’s cousins’, the Nolands’, and go over their homework together. That, at least, was the pretext for meeting; in fact, they spent their time fencing.

  In 1965, Mary Ethel Noland, Truman’s first cousin, recorded:

  [Harry] had two foils, or rapiers, or whatever you call them; and so we would sometimes practice fencing, which we knew absolutely nothing about, but it was fun to try, and we had the porch and we had room here to play and have fun, generally, which we did, with a little Latin intermingled, maybe. Though I’m afraid Caesar had a very slim chance with all that was going on.16

  One can picture the bespectacled boy and his Miss Wonderful, laughing and playing around with their foils and textbooks.

  FOR ANY RECENT PRESIDENT, FENCING MIGHT SEEM A THROWBACK to a much earlier age, but swordplay has actually had a long, if sometimes disreputable, tradition in the New World. The first recorded duel fought in North America took place at the newly settled Plimoth Plantation on June 18, 1621, between two servants of a landowner, using swords and daggers. They were literally bound to keep the peace: their punishment was to have their hands and feet tied together for twenty-four hours, without food or drink. Their suffering was such that they were freed after an hour—an act of mercy when one considers that another New England miscreant, in 1644, was beheaded with a sword, the last such execution recorded in North America. In 1719 Massachusetts passed a law depriving duelists of political rights and rendering them ineligible for any public office for twenty years; should a duelist fall or otherwise be killed, his body was to be “appropriated to anatomical demonstration.” America was outdoing Europe.

  The first reference to fencing as such in North America that I have been able to find is in a manuscript in the British Museum, dated 1675. In a short account of life in New England, a note reads, “One Dancing schoole was set up, but put down. A Fenceing schoole is allowed.”17 Thereafter a reference can be found to one John Rievers, a Dutchman, teaching fencing and dancing to colonists in 1754 in New York, on the corner of Whitehall and Stone Streets, on the encouragement of British officers garrisoned there.

  The sport took root in several colonies, most notably in Virginia, where plantation owners carried on the traditions of their (usually rather notional) En
glish forebears. This also meant dueling—a practice introduced by the French and Germans immigrants as much as by the British—which functioned as a means of gaining social status and demonstrating bravery. The code duello also reinforced the honor system and, in a society dependent on slavery, emphasized ritualized authority. Slaves and the lower orders should show deference; one’s peers should show courtesy—a gentleman would not duel with someone outside his class but would take up a cane or horsewhip, to show his contempt for his victim.

  Writing in 1831 on the American duel, de Tocqueville noted the differences between the European and the New World models. “In Europe,” he observed, “one hardly ever fights except in order to be able to say that one has done so; the offence is generally a sort of moral stain which one wants to wash away, and which most often is washed away at little expense. In America one only fights to kill; one fights because one sees no hope of getting one’s adversary condemned to death. There are very few duels, but they almost always end fatally.”18 Tocqueville could be credulous: even in America, both duelists usually survived.

  Americans used pistols for choice, but also shotguns, rifles, carbines, and bowie knives, with deadly results. Outside the aristocracy, most Americans had neither time for nor access to fencing instruction, whereas using a pistol was easy; all one needed was iron nerve. Wherever the French had settled marked an exception. The Francophone population of Louisiana certainly honored its heritage, with sword duels still being fought in New Orleans up through the early twentieth century. The practice first invaded New Orleans at the end of the eighteenth century, after the arrival there of immigrants from San Domingo and, later, officers and soldiers from Bonaparte’s army. As late as 1883, when dueling of all kinds had almost been eradicated elsewhere, a rapier duel between a soda-water seller and a catfish dealer lasted eighty-three minutes before either combatant drew blood.

  That same year, the editor of the Charleston News and Courier was created Knight of the Order of Saint George by the pope in recognition of his persistent opposition to dueling. Journalists (and politicians) were by then the main duelists throughout the United States, as they were in Europe. About this time a mode of fighting became known as “the American duel,” part suicide pact, part Russian roulette. An intermediary would offer the two principals the ends of a handkerchief, one of which would be tied in a knot: the person who drew the knot would be expected to shoot himself voluntarily. Some Americans protested against the name—rightly so, as the hybrid was practiced mainly in Germany. The appellation was the result of xenophobic Germans voicing their abhorrence of “Americanization.”

  New Orleans had a number of masters at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803—generally foreigners—and a special site where people went to learn to fence. “The whole stretch of Exchange Alley,” wrote Lyle Saxon, “was filled with fencing masters, and in the afternoon or evening those passing by in the street could hear the rasping of the swords, and the cries of the spectators who watched these contests with approving and critical eyes.”19 The city boasted several rich families, whose young men were sent abroad to be educated—usually to Paris, where they did as they pleased, gambled, fought, and made love. There had been swordplay in New Orleans since its founding, but by the 1830s the rich young Creoles of the city, back from their travels, had adopted a high style of studied dandyism, and “the word ‘honor’ hung in the air like the refrain of a popular song.”20

  Dueling quickly became a lifestyle. From 1834 on there was even a regular venue, known as “The Dueling Oaks,” which saw ten to twelve such encounters a week. A cafe nearby specialized in serving coffee to contestants before a duel. Many fencing masters plied their trade in New Orleans, forming a cadre of their own. They would be pointed out as they walked by, often even more elaborately attired than their pupils. One master, a lawyer from Bordeaux, having made a fortune teaching fencing to young officers during the Mexican War, gained notoriety early in his career in Louisiana by fighting seven duels in a week. Another, the splendidly named Bastile (Basile?) Croquère, a mulatto, is described as parading the city in a suit of green broadcloth, with spotless linen and a wide black ruff. He was famous for his collection of cameos and would wear breast pin, bracelet, and cameo rings. His skills were so phenomenal that the highest Creole gentry flocked to him for lessons, despite the prevailing prejudice against “men of color.” Another well-known duelist was José (or Pepe) Lulla, a wealthy Spaniard, who was famed with both sword and pistol. With the latter he was said to be able to shoot coin from between a man’s fingers or an egg from a man’s head. (He once shot an egg off the head of his own son.) He fought twenty duels, but died from natural causes in 1888, at the age of seventy-three.

  At first, fatalities and even serious wounds were rare, and “a scratch usually sufficed to bring the combat to an end.”21 Then encounters became more deadly, and as dueling spread to neighboring states, the South became known as “a seedbed of national violence,” producing a stream of young men with “obsessions about reputation and vengeance and deadly weapons with them.”22 Public opinion was united against the practice, condemning it as a foreign importation, “a remnant of Gothic barbarism.”23 Yet the code of honor actually grew in the South and the southern-influenced frontier states after 1810. Mark Twain blamed this on the disastrous effect of Walter Scott and the rise of romantic literature, citing such novels as The Antiquary and Ivanhoe and such romantic notions—this from a duelist in The Bride of Lammermoor—as “If one of us falls, all accounts are settled; if not, men are never so ready for peace as after war.”‡

  A café adjoining “The Dueling Oaks,” as the ground was known, served coffee to anxious participants. One unstoppable bretteur fought seven duels in a single week—making his reputation. (illustration credit 11.1)

  Surprisingly, attempts to control dueling in America, and the population’s response, were the inverse of those in Europe. While European rulers made every effort to suppress the custom—even dragging the mortally wounded from the dueling ground to a place of execution—only to find that dueling flourished, in America the practice was generally regarded with disapproval but the laws up to 1850 made it neither criminal nor contemptible. Not until 1838 did Congress outlaw challenges in the District of Columbia, and even then a senator from Delaware maintained that, though he thought dueling immoral, “it was not of that class of crimes which should subject offenders to the cells of a penitentiary and make them the associates of felons.” Similarly, a senator from Missouri declared that “from what I have seen, fighting is like marrying: the more barriers that are erected against it, the surer are the interested parties to come together.”25

  The first recorded fatal duel took place in Massachusetts on July 3, 1728, when after a quarrel over cards two young Bostonians, Woodbridge and Phillips, took their differences, and their swords, out onto King Street—State Street today—and Woodbridge was found dead on the Common the following morning. Phillips was not charged, but the practice nonetheless remained rare. Views hardened almost exactly a century later, after the legendary encounter of August 1827, when Colonel James Bowie used his infamous knife in what was reported as “the bloodiest affair of the kind on American record.”

  Bowie’s attack was the culmination of a running feud between two groups in the Red River parish of Rapides, in Louisiana. The principals were Dr. Maddox, Major Wright, Colonel Robert Alexander Crain, and the Blanchards on the one side, and the Wellses, Curreys, and Bowies on the other. When a challenge passed between Dr. Maddox and Samuel Wells, a duel was arranged to take place opposite Natchez, Mississippi. The site was a large sandbar, a favorite place for men to settle their differences by dueling, and on the appointed day about forty spectators, divided equally among friends of the two sides, gathered at opposite ends of the sandbar to watch. Bowie was carrying a large knife made from a blacksmith’s rasp, a file used for horses’ hooves. Bowie’s brother had advised him it was “strong, and of admirable temper. It is more trustworthy in the h
ands of a strong man than a pistol, for it will not snap.” And so it proved.

  What ensued was terrifying. After an initial exchange of shots, Crain and Bowie closed in. Crain neatly avoided Bowie’s knife and clubbed him over the head with his pistol. Bowie fell, momentarily stunned. Crain then stepped back, allowing his friend Major Wright, a noted duelist, to advance and thrust his swordstick into the stricken man. The blade struck Bowie’s breastbone and went around the rib, but did not kill him. At the same moment Bowie seized Wright, pulling the slighter man on top of him. “Now, Major, you die,” said Bowie coolly, plunging his knife into Wright’s heart. Meanwhile the savagery had spread to the forty onlookers and ended only when at least six had been killed and fifteen wounded. This, recorded a contemporary historian, was “the grand fight which gave origin to the bowie-knife, the fearful fame of which is spread over all countries.”26

  Bowie’s weapon, with a blade typically eight to twelve inches long, was not a sword, but it had its effect on swordplay. The bowie knife (and its first cousin, the “Arkansas toothpick”) became a favored weapon of the Southern aristocracy, one especially suited to killing.27 When, in 1849, Kentucky attempted to outlaw dueling, one opponent of the bill observed, “I ask gentlemen which has produced most misery and mourning in Kentucky, the duel or the bowie knife? Which, I ask, has shed most blood, the fair and open combat or the knife of the assassin?”28 People’s fear of the bowie knife made them more tolerant of formal duels.