The one (and perhaps only) thing Americans seem to agree on these days is that political rhetoric is too toxic. They long for everyone to cool down and behave like dignified statesmen from that long-ago time before Twitter inflamed passions. Ah, the good old days!
Except they weren’t so good.
In fact, angry words sometimes even led to death. This is the story of how one nasty exchange ended badly for everyone.
President Andrew Jackson despised banks. Probably because he was in debt up to his eyeballs, with bankers constantly hounding him for money. He had an all-consuming hatred of the Second Bank of the United States. A forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System, it was responsible for establishing sound currency and regulating credit, which means the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, was the Janet Yellen of his day.
Jackson and his fellow Democrats believed Biddle’s bank intentionally kept money in the hands of the rich and out of the hands of the working poor. They made destroying it their top priority. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and the National Republicans fought back equally hard, defending it. By 1830, public discourse had grown just as toxic as today.
During that year’s midterm elections, several blistering speeches came from Spencer Pettis, Missouri’s only congressman and an ardent Jacksonian Democrat. Just 28 and wildly popular, he had a bright political future. Pettis repeatedly damned the bank in general and banker Biddle in particular.
Which infuriated Thomas Biddle, an army major stationed in St. Louis. He wrote an angry letter to a local newspaper defending his big brother, Nicholas, and savaging Pettis as “a dish of skimmed milk” (which apparently sounded worse in 1830 than it does today). Pettis responded with a letter questioning Biddle’s manhood. It was personal now, and things only went downhill from there.
The men trash talked each other to anyone who would listen. Things reached a tipping point on July 9, 1831, when Maj. Biddle heard Pettis was lying sick in a St. Louis hotel room. He burst in and attacked the ailing congressman with a whip.
Biddle was arrested. When he appeared in court a few days later, Pettis pulled out a pistol and tried to shoot before being restrained by friends. Pettis then challenged Biddle to a duel.
The “affair of honor” was the talk of St. Louis. With dueling outlawed in Missouri and neighboring Illinois, they agreed to meet on a Mississippi River sandbar, a kind of no-man’s-land between the states where the authorities wouldn’t interfere. It was used so often for that purpose the locals called it Bloody Island.
While Biddle had the choice of terms, he had a major disadvantage: He was seriously near-sighted. So he chose pistols at 5 feet. Note: not five paces, 5 feet. With arms outstretched, the guns would almost touch. It would be suicide; there was no way either man could miss with them standing that close together.
Some historians believe Biddle picked the absurd distance to scare Pettis into rejecting it, thus making Biddle the “winner” without actually shooting. But Pettis didn’t take the bait. He accepted.
A large crowd was watching on the St. Louis riverfront late on Friday afternoon Aug. 26 as the men and their seconds slowly rowed to Bloody Island. They stood back-to-back, then walked one step, turned and fired directly at each other. Both fell to the ground in bleeding heaps. As they were carried away, each was heard saying he forgave the other.
Pettis died the next day, Biddle the day after that. Their funerals were among the largest and most elaborate held in St. Louis in the 19th century. And as soon as they were buried, they were mostly forgotten (although a Missouri County was named in Pettis’ honor 18 months later).
President Jackson eventually won his own duel with the bank when it went out of business. But the deaths of Pettis and Biddle had nothing to do with determining the outcome.
Which should serve as a cautionary tale for 2017. Let’s hope people of all political persuasions tone down the rhetoric … before it’s too late.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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