The Least Known, and Most Important Duel in American Political History

Everybody in America, it seems, has seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical, which ends with the famous duel in which Hamilton was killed by his political rival Aaron Burr. It was a tragic end for somebody who did so much for the young Republic, but it was not an uncommon end to an early American political career.

Two other Founding Fathers met their ends in much the same way that Hamilton did. Only a year after signing the Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnett was killed in a duel with fellow Georgia politician Lachlan McIntosh. Constitutional Convention delegate and North Carolina governor Richard Dobbs Spaight died in a duel with John Stanly, his opponent in a fiercely contested Congressional race.

Dueling was part of American political culture well into the nineteenth century. President Andrew Jackson and U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton both killed other men in duels. And while he was Secretary of State, Henry Clay, the “Great Compromiser” from Kentucky, tried his best to kill Virginia Senator John Randolph in a duel after Randolph accused him, on the Senate floor, of “crucifying the Constitution and cheating at cards”

In all, dozens of American politicians between the American Revolution and the Civil War died, or killed, in duels that sprang out of heated…