Wouldn’t you rather duel with swords then pistols??
A vast amount of these duels seem to be about just showing up. Then if it comes to actually dueling, its about satisfying honor which could be done by shedding blood.
There’s just too much randomness in walking ten paces and THEN you can always turn on 9.5 or 9.75 and get the only advantage you need. Indeed, I’d think you to be a fool not to anticipate your opponent turning early.
Apparently the featured Lee duel in Hamilton actually had them begin facing each other and then they walked towards each other a few paces before firing. From what I’ve read the vast majority of duels did not involve two people who really wanted to kill the other and could live with it so…
…it certainly seems a sword-fight would remove a lot of randomness and mortality. AND since its more intimate it would seemingly promote more of a wish to adjucate the matter.
Hell you could even (if challenged) ask the duel to be done with blunted swords so you’re really fighting with concussion weapons (granted still capable of killing of course)…I wonder if anyone challenged ever said “Bare hands dude. I dont wanna be rude but I’m gonna laydown the beat-down”
Dueling with swords is far superior to dueling with pistols. Smoothbore muskets are many things, none of them a synonym for “accurate”. This fact is not lost on the participants. Even if bro code frowns upon intentionally inflicting a lethal shot, there is no guarantee the musket will oblige. That uncertainty only increases tensions and the alabaster paw that might normally comfort a distraught lady shakes like a newly-hatched tadpole, virtually ensuring the bullet will go anywhere apart from where the shootist intends. Add to that the odious smokes, nerve-shattering reports, and let’s face it: the very real probability of having to reload both pistols for another volley ad infinitum until blood is drawn. Even the best swordsmen get nervous under pressure. However, the jitters are readily hidden in, and indeed frequently relieved by, limbering up swordplay. Further, even a modestly skilled swordsman can score flesh with accuracy unmatched by even the coolest and most skilled musketeer. If a fellow should perish in a sword duel, it is surely the desire of his opponent which brings that outcome.
For those that aren’t familiar with the story, Lincoln got into a bit of a battle of words with a political rival named James Shields (this was about a decade before Lincoln became president). To be fair, Lincoln did say some pretty nasty things about Shields in a local newspaper. Shields demanded a retraction, and when Lincoln refused, Shields challenged him to a duel to the death.
Lincoln had no desire to duel with the man, and since he got to choose the weapons, he chose broadswords. On the day of the duel, Lincoln took his sword and casually reached up and lopped off some small branches of a tree that were far out of Shield’s reach. Shields was a relatively small guy, and realized that Lincoln’s significantly longer reach would put Shields at a severe disadvantage, probably fatally so. Cooler heads prevailed, and the seconds managed to negotiate a peaceful truce.
That’s why you had seconds - to make sure nobody tried something like this. Plus, the idea is to demonstrate that you are willing to defend your honor at risk of your life - cheating at a duel is a quick way to ruin your reputation.
I might pick pistols, for a couple of reasons. First, while I fenced a bit in high school (I even belonged to a club for several months) that was decades ago, and never with anything except a foil, which is not very much like a real duel. If my opponent was any great shakes with his sword, I’m dead.
Second, honor is satisfied when shots are exchanged, even if nobody is hit. And most people are lousy shots, especially under stress. Again, if my opponent is an experienced duelist, I’m dead meat, but there is at least a chance that we might both miss. Or, ideally, he fires first and misses, and then I generously fire into the air and we both go home and change our underwear so we don’t stink like urine the rest of the day, or perhaps less generously he fires first and misses, and then I aim very carefully because I am in no rush. Or if he hits me in some non-vital spot, and same thing.
I don’t know if a sword duel is more likely to be settled without actually fighting than a pistol duel would be. Both sides, especially inexperienced ones, are not likely to be eager to get killed or wounded, and it was considered Quite All Right if the combatants could be reconciled without bloodshed. They might be gentlemen, but they weren’t (always) stupid.
While there is definitely some truth to this, in the case of a duel, it’s not so accurate.
Militaries used smooth bore muskets because they needed to be able to reload. Black powder quickly fouls the barrel, and a soldier can’t exactly stop after half a dozen shots a clean his musket.
Smooth bore muskets firing round balls pretty much always shoot curve balls. The ball will randomly hit one side or another of the barrel on the way down, giving the ball a spin. Out of a full-size musket, the ball will go straight for about 50 to 75 yards or so, but after that, where it goes is anyone’s guess. You can increase the accuracy of the musket by using tight fitting balls, but tighter fitting balls also suffer more from fouling issues. Military muskets usually used undersized balls, since reloading speed and fouling issues were more important than accuracy.
You typically don’t fire a dozen or more shots at your opponent during a duel, so barrel fouling wasn’t so much of an issue. Dueling pistols therefore tended to use relatively long barrels (for a pistol) and tight fitting balls. They also tended to be very well-made pistols. They had good accuracy out to at least 25 yards or so, which was well beyond typical dueling range. Some dueling pistols even had rifled barrels. Even if they were smooth bores, in a dueling situation, they were more than accurate enough.
Of course, if you take your time and aim, the other guy might shoot you and kill you first, so shooting quickly (and fearing for your life) would of course introduce a certain amount of inaccuracy. But the pistols themselves were quite accurate.
Jeez, dueling is a weird concept. Essentially, it was once legal to murder somebody if both parties agreed ahead of time that one would murder the other.
Anyway, yeah, I suppose I’d rather take my chances with a swordfight than being shot at. But it’s kind of like asking whether I’d rather die in a fire or by drowning. The correct answer is “neither.”
The idea of dueling with firearms, I think, is that it takes away the factor of physical strength. Because if one guy is noticeably stronger and bigger than the other, then he would probably hack you much better with an axe/knife/sword/mace than you could in return. If you are the small or weaker guy, why would you agree to a duel on such disadvantaged terms?
By having both sides use pistols, it equalizes the odds. Sure, there’s still the issue of who has better aim, but it’s a much leveller playing field.
In the version of the show I saw (which, I guess, is the national touring company) Hamilton deliberately shot to miss. (History records Hamilton shot a tree branch above Burr’s head.) Burr may have decided that was too close to “waste” a shot, and fired directly at Hamilton, or he may have gone into the duel with the intention of killing Hamilton.
One of Stanley Kubrick’s lesser watched films is Barry Lyndon, which has several interesting dueling scenes. The final and most significant duel shows the danger of “deloping”, a word I’d never heard of previously.
In the first Horatio Hornblower novel (chronologically, not publishing date), Hornblower is challenged to a duel by another midshipman. Knowing that his opponent is much more skilled than him and will easily kill him with swords or pistols, Hornblower chooses one loaded and one unloaded pistol, to be assigned to the parties by random choice, thereby giving himself a 50% chance of winning the duel.
I recall reading that and thinking it was quite clever, but I wonder how well such a stunt would have actually played 200 years ago, and perhaps belongs entirely to the world of fiction. Would that stratagem be perceived as ‘cowardly’ in some fashion? If not, it just seems like we’d be hearing a lot more stories about ‘one loaded pistol’ type duels.
In the made for TV film adaptation, a key premise was that HH was uber-depressed and suicidal. I don’t recall if the short story on which it was based (Midshipman Hornblower, for those not familiar, was published as a novel, but each chapter was essentially a stand-alone short story) had a similar rationale, whereby HH was explicitly suicidal, or if he just hated Simpson for making his life hell (explicit or not, he certainly made it a him-or-me type scenario).
Anyway, maybe most would-be historical duelist weren’t so suicidal.
Oh, and also for those not familiar with the story, in addition to only one of the two pistols being loaded, the conditions of the duel were supposed to be that they’d fire into each other’s torso at point blank range, so close they couldn’t possibly miss. Whichever of them had the loaded pistol was sure to deliver a grievous, and most likely fatal for the time, blow.
