Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was the most prominent black American at the beginning of the twentieth century. He began and ran the Tuskegee Institute, an innovative industrial school for blacks, which is today Tuskegee University. He dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House—the first time a black man had met with a president in the White House since Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln. He was a champion of education and moral betterment for all blacks (not just an elite). Thousands of boys were named Booker in his honor.
Washington’s fame declined after his death, however. W.E.B. Du Bois, an intellectual with a Harvard PhD, seems to have taken over the mantle of black leadership, after Washington’s death in 1915—if not before. Du Bois was much younger; he died in 1963.
Today Washington is sometimes disparaged as an “Uncle Tom” because he did not politically resist the growing Jim Crow restrictions of the South.
As readers know, I have written quite a bit about war on these pages.[1] But, to my surprise, I have never written about direct personal combat—specifically, about dueling. This amazes me because I just learned that dueling was a widespread activity, a way of life even, in the antebellum South.
We all know about the fatal duel in 1804 between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which led to the death of Hamilton. But I have recently learned that Hamilton was involved with—that is, at least entered into discussions about—ten duels before that. Burr had dueled once previously. (And Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel.)
A recent scholarly paper perused two newspapers (the New York Times and the Richmond Daily Dispatch) for duels reported between 1861 and 1865. They found 130 duels (over just five years!). Of these 130 duels, they write, “71 involve prominent figures, which we define as politicians, military officers with rank of at least colonel (Army) or captain (Navy), and other well-known private citizens.”[2]
