Photo by Nathanael Gassett

September 2011. In Proof of Honor.

Duels were once a part of life in the volatile, violent and hot-tempered South, where personal honor was often the only possession a man owned. Northerners, even today, seem shocked by the emphasis Southerners place on honor, and though duels seem long a thing of the past, they often haunt the mind in a Southerner’s repertoire of vindication.

Growing up in Woodville, Mississippi in the 1960s, pre-everything and before the media had really touched the South (or our accents!), my grandmother insisted that I be a “Southern Gentleman,” as if there was something innately different between gentlemen of the Southern kind and all others. My grandmother knew exactly what that was, though. I was to be the well-mannered protector of ladies, basically, well, Don Quixote—at age four. And for the look, my grandmother, running short on children’s toppers, made a top hat for me out of white construction paper! She then gave me every gentleman’s main tool, a cane; or in this case, a broom handle with a toy head on top.

With this little suit, I cut quite the figure of a Southern Gentlemen, and I still have the Polaroids to prove it. All I needed was the duel to prove my honor. I’m a bit ashamed to say, but I found an old broken “dueling” pistol. My family, being typical Southerners, was always well armed. It seems my grandmother’s great grandfather, Captain Prestwood Smith, was killed in a duel in Woodville in 1828; but a Southern Gentlemen he was. I’ve been hooked ever since.

My ancestors were handsome people, stylishly dressed. Their drinking was of bacchanalian legend, and it seems they were willing to gamble on, well, anything. They were hard, fast-living, beautiful and well-armed. They carried their honor on one shoulder and virtue on the other, and woe be to anyone who didn’t tread carefully in their midst. Southerners are known for their quick tempers followed by magnanimous forgiveness. Dueling is as much a part of our South as sweet tea.

And later this month on the grounds of historic Jefferson College near Natchez, the duel and the protection of Southern honor will come alive again as the Natchez Historical Society stages a true-to-life duel featuring re-enactors Finley Hootsell and Clark Burkett, and a crowd of spectators, who will be in both period costume and period attitude. They will re-create a duel that occurred in 1810 not far from that very place between Captain Andrew Holmes and a Private Rose. It seems Captain Holmes, who was the prosecutor in a case involving Rose, said something that offended Mr. Rose. After much effort to avert death, Mr. Rose finally got his day with Captain Holmes, his day to vindicate his name on the field of honor.

To see how it all turns out, you’ll have to be there at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, September 27, on the grounds of old historic Jefferson College on Highway 61, just north of Natchez. Bring your honor, but leave your temper behind! natchezhistoricalsociety.org for more details.

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