Dueling: Deadly combat, honor, and misconceptions.

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Sharpie443

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I did a video discussing Dueling and the different black powder firearms used. Thought it might interest people here.

In case you were interested in the firearms i used in the video.
1.)French Heavy Dragoon- .54 caliber round ball with tow over & under ball wadding and 30 grains of FFF Goex.

2.) English(Style)target pistol-.32 caliber patched ball and Swiss pistol powder.(I only use Swiss in this gun.)

3.) 1851 colt pedersoli- .36 round ball, felt wad, and 22 grains of FFF Goex powder.

4.) Pennsylvania long rifle- .54 cal patched round ball with 60 grains of FF Goex powder.

I did make a slight mistake in that i used a short start with the rifle and that's not historical. I should have used a wood mallet or just my thumb. The flask is not a historical one but they did have similar ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExHSj3_dVPU
 
1. Dueling is not combat.

2. Obviously this is a gun forum, but I got into your video about eight minutes, and called no joy since you did not mention swords in any form at all. To understand dueling one must pay homage to blades well before guns.
 
1.)I'm pretty positive by definition it is combat. Combat is just armed conflict. It's a synonym for fighting.

2.)I did mention swords. In fact i talked about two different sword dueling traditions in america that survived into the pistol dueling age.
 
1. Dueling is not combat.

2. Obviously this is a gun forum, but I got into your video about eight minutes, and called no joy since you did not mention swords in any form at all. To understand dueling one must pay homage to blades well before guns.
+1

I agree.
 
Duelling is a form of combat, but the term is usually used for a type of highly stylized individual combat carried out under strict rules in regard to the weapons used, the commands to be given, and the actions of the participants. Further, it arose out of a time and social condition in which only certain "classes" could/would participate.

Of course, there have been "gunfights" as long as there have been guns, but very few of the "shoot 'em up" gunfights in what was or became the U.S. really met the requirements of the code duello.

In fact, none of the weapons Sharpie lists would ever have met the conditions required for a formal duel. (The Dragoon would have been too heavy, the Colt copy a revolver, the target pistol was rifled and had both front and rear sights, and the rifle would not have been acceptable.)

Jim
 
Actualy they did and I can site the actual duels they were used in. I covered all that in the video. The Dragoon was a stand in for a dueling pistol but it's not to heavy at all. It's a .54 smooth bore. A dedicated dueling pistol could be all the way up to 20 gauge (.62 cal) smooth bore. The duels I was talking about were all formal duels with secants and defined rules. However those rules and the weppones used varried widely and were never a legal code only sugestions. The actual rules of a duel and weppones were decided by the dulests or by secants if they were using Anerican dueling code post 1838.
 
Clayton Cramer has a book on the subject of dueling: Concealed Weapons Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Violence and Moral Reform. I read it many years ago and one thing about dueling is that only those with "honor" were allowed to duel. Lesser people had no "honor" per se to defend. Of course, that didn't prevent honorless people from killing each other. Darn them any how.
 
While the traditional image is of a "Manton case" with two gentlemen facing off with matching pistols under the Clonmel Code or similar, I am sure you can find set duels fought with various weapons.

Just to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, consider the two Frenchmen who had at each other with blunderbusses from balloons.
http://blog.britishnewspaperarchive...t-duel-fought-in-hot-air-balloons-paris-1808/

Abraham Lincoln selected broadswords when challenged in 1842, although the legend has it that he picked axes.

And I found the one about John Fox Porter who offered to fight a soon-to-be Confederate with Bowie knives in a darkened room. That one was transmogrified to a Jim Bowie adventure in the movies.
 
Jim Watson - I heard Lincoln was challenged and being challenged, selected swords because of his tall, lanky form. Before the duel, he reached up and hacked at the limbs of tree, amply demonstrating his reach over his opponent. The challenger came to terms without a duel being fought.
 
Some of the European dueling pistols were loaded with such light charges that they would make a SASS gamer laugh. The object being to actually strike your opponent but not hard enough to injure him.
In 1968 my wife and I escaped from my duty station in Bamberg, Germany and took a weekend trip to Switzerland. In our strolling around(we had no money for any other activity) we ran across a junk store that had a matched, cased, engraved and inlaid, pair of 30? caliber flintlock dueling pistols. They were priced at $300 which to me might have well have been $10000 as I couldn't have afforded either.
Two years later I made a special trip for the purpose of buying those guns. The junk shop was now an Antique store and the price had gone from $300 to $3000.
They may still be there.
 
You want a Hege-Manton.
Hege-Manton.png
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Or a cased set of percussion guns like these:
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That Hege-Manton is what I think of as a "dueling pistol." That is why they called a formal duel a "Manton Case" in the day.
Wonder why they put a stalking safety on a target or dueling pistol, though.
 
It's for safety in setting the trigger. I've got original flint duelers with the same setup. Not that I've seen anyone bother with it.

My dream is to own a cased set of originals. The problem being that those run $20K or more.
 
Under at least one Code, "hair" (set) triggers were considered unsporting. As were rifled barrels and overly prominent sights.
I have read of "secret hair triggers" without external adjusting screw and "invisible rifling" for the cheat.
 
All four of the original flint duelers I own have set triggers. Smooth bores were normal, particularly for the British guns. Percussion pistols were normally rifled, but the French were quite fond of fighting at 50 meters or so...far enough away so you could honorably miss.
 
No hair triggers? The antebellum Broderick-Terry duel in SF involved a pair of percussion pieces, both of which had hair triggers. Broderick didn't know and unwittingly discharged his piece. Terry took his time, put his ball into Broderick who was taken miles away to a house in Fort Mason (near Ghiradelli Square and overlooking Aquatic Park) where he passed away a few days later. It is said that that house is haunted.
 
I know it happened, but there was one published code of the day that disapproved.

How could Broderick not know it was a set trigger? Or was it just a very light single stage?
Terry may have been unethically taking aim, too.
 
It's been reported that the pistols used in the Hamilton-Burr duel had concealed set-triggers. Hamilton supplied the pistols and was aware of the gimmick, while Burr was unaware.
Apparently, Hamilton got a little too jumpy and accidentally fired his pistol before it was leveled at Burr.

http://www.aaronburrassociation.org/Smithsonian.htm
 
The main concern with rifling, sights, hair triggers, etc. was being prosecuted for murder afterwards. Dueling was usually illegal by the time pistols supplanted swords as the main weapon although often winked at. But if it was thought that the intent really was to kill by using the above improvements could sway the court into prosecuting

All sorts of weapons were used including the above. One Dr challengd another to two pills, one poisen the other safe, each would take one. France and Germany had different codes and rifling was more accepted there.
 
FWIW, a British rifled percussion dueling/target pistol is nearly a contradiction in terms. I've heard of a handful.

British duelers were smoothbore flintlocks.

The Continent was quite another story. You could get yourself killed in a duel up until 1914...and just about every percussion dueler I've ever seen was French, Belgian, or German. All rifled. Of course, the French liked using them at much longer ranges - 50 meters or so.
 
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