Page 44 →Dueling Onstage in Charleston

In 1800, while in his early twenties, John Blake White left his Charleston home to study painting in London under Benjamin West, the American-born court painter to King George III and then-president of the Royal Academy of Arts. At one point, White toured Eton College, near Windsor Castle, with some friends, and reported in his journal that from his walk he derived “particular delight”: “We felt ourselves treading on classic ground. Here the walls in every direction were scored with names and initials and dates, the simple record of thousands now reposing in the silent tomb, many of whom left no other traces behind them…. And so we sought in every direction for some idle traces of those who had since distinguished themselves in life’s theatre.”¹ On his return, in 1804, to the United States, White would go about distinguishing himself in his country’s theatre, embarking on a career as a playwright and becoming, as Charles Watson described him in The History of Southern Drama, “the first dramatist in the South to write a substantial body of work.”²

Indeed, White would likely be remembered as South Carolina’s most prominent antebellum dramatist had he not also established himself as one of its foremost historical painters. Hanging still in the halls of the US Capitol are four of his paintings describing moments significant to South Carolina’s role in the Revolutionary War. The most famous is General Marion in his Swamp Encampment Inviting a British Officer to Dinner (1836), which depicts General Francis Marion negotiating an exchange of prisoners during the 1781 occupation of Charleston.³ The painting is generally considered a faithful rendering not only of “the Swamp Fox,” but also of his slave-turned-soldier, Oscar Marion, who kneels beside the general, baking potatoes.⁴

Both Marion men were friends of White and his family. During the Revolutionary War, White’s mother, Elizabeth Borquin, served as a spy for Marion’s cause, and his father, Blake Leay White, fought at Fort Moultrie. White pere can, in fact, be seen manning a gun in White’s The Battle of Fort Moultrie (1826), which also hangs in the Capitol, as do Sergeants Jasper and Newton Rescuing American Prisoners from the British (n.d.) and Mrs. Motte Page 45 →Inviting General Marion and Colonel Lee to Burn Her Residence (n.d.). The former recounts the rescue, in 1779, by two of Marion’s scouts of several American prisoners being conveyed to Savannah for trial and likely execution. The moment described by the painting—the grateful wife of one of the prisoners kneeling before his rescuers—was engraved on Confederate bank notes in 1861. The latter, based on an incident in 1781, depicts Rebecca Jacob Motte, a wealthy widow, handing arrows to General Marion and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee to be set aflame and fired at her roof to smoke out the British soldiers inside. Before that could happen, the soldiers vacated and surrendered, and Mrs. Motte is said to have served dinner to officers of both armies.⁵

Until Sherman’s troops burned it down in 1865, the senate chamber of the Old Carolina State House displayed three of White’s other paintings. The Unfurling of the United States Flag at Mexico (n.d.) depicts Joel Poinsett, a South Carolina native serving as American ambassador, attempting to quell Mexican political discord with promises of American protectionism.⁶ The Battle of Eutaw Springs (1804) describes the last major engagement of the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, fought six days before White’s birth at Whitehall Plantation. The Battle of New Orleans (1816) celebrates Andrew Jackson’s dubious victory in the War of 1812 and would provide, three years later, the subject matter for White’s fourth play, The Triumph of Liberty, or Louisiana Preserved (1819). That play was not produced, likely because Jackson was by then being vilified in the pages of the Charleston Courier for inciting the first Seminole War and for executing two Britons, both mentioned by name in the play.⁷ White also painted portraits of such prominent South Carolina statesmen as John C. Calhoun, Charles C. Pinckney, and Henry Middleton. In 1821, he became director of the South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1845, he was made an honorary member of the National Academy of Design.

One of the lessons West imparted as White’s mentor was the moral and historical authority residing in art. This was a lesson White would not immediately apply to his career as a playwright. His first two plays are derived from continental romantic/revenge models and bear the standard attributes of verse drama—exotic locales, elaborate sets, stock characters, and orotund poesy. Both were produced by the Charleston Theatre, the first permanent theatre in Charleston, built in 1794 at the corner of Broad and New Streets.⁸

The first, Foscari, or The Venetian Exile, premiered in January 1806 and was reprised for one performance in January 1809. It told the story of a young Italian nobleman who, falsely accused of murder and rejected by his beloved Almeria, dies of a broken heart. The second, The Mysteries of the Castle, or, Page 46 →The Victim of Revenge, included several gothic elements, including secret passages, hidden chambers, a ghost, and a spectacular explosion. It premiered in December 1806 and was remounted in February 1807.

In his later plays, White would turn his attention to matters more domestic and high-minded. His last, The Forgers, although unproduced, is considered the first American temperance drama.⁹ It takes its title from the crime committed by its young, alcoholic protagonist, Mourdant, whose dissipations incite him to jealous rage and attempted murder. At play’s end, he ingests poison, believing it to be liquor, and dies while suffering the first delirium tremens portrayed on the American stage. The play prefigures such later, more widely known plays as Fifteen Years in a Drunkard’s Life (1841) by Douglass Jerrold, The Drunkard (1841) by W. H. Smith, and Ten Nights in a Barroom (1858), adapted by William Pratt from the novel by Timothy Shay Arthur.¹⁰

By the time the Southern Literary Journal published The Forgers in 1837, White was a prominent public figure who had served one term in the South Carolina general assembly, practiced law, run a paper mill, and worked at the Charleston Custom House. He had also become involved in the Reform Movement, likely inspired by his good friend Thomas S. Grimke, a Charleston lawyer and activist, after whom White named one of his sons. Grimke was involved in various causes and presided over a local chapter of the American Temperance Society, which had formed in 1826. It is likely that White was in attendance when Grimke delivered an address “On The Patriot Character [of] the Temperance Reformation” at the First Presbyterian Church, about two blocks from White’s home.¹¹ White himself would later deliver an address to the Young Men’s Temperance Society, arguing for the criminalization of intoxication. He also advocated against capital punishment and delivered, in 1834, an essay to that effect before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Charleston, of which he was a member.¹²

White’s first dramatic foray into social reform came in 1812, with his third play, Modern Honor, an earnest rebuke of the culture of dueling. Dueling had migrated across the Atlantic to the American colonies and was widely practiced from as early as 1621, when the first recorded duel was fought, albeit with swords, in the Massachusetts Colony by Edward Doty and Edward Lester, both of whom arrived on the Mayflower as servants for the same family.¹³ From 1800 to 1860, the US Navy lost more than half as many officers to dueling as it did in battle, including naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur, who was killed by fellow naval officer James Barron for impugning the latter’s courage.¹⁴ In the decade before White produced Modern Honor, Page 47 →Andrew Jackson had fought in at least two duels, suffering in one a bullet wound to the chest, and, of course, Aaron Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton. Whereas the New England states generally tended to dismiss dueling as barbaric, in the southern states, it gained in popularity. Ross Drake observed in The Smithsonian that, “to the touchiest among [Southern aristocrats], virtually any annoyance could be construed as grounds for a meeting at gunpoint, and though laws against dueling were passed in several Southern states, the statutes were ineffective. Arrests were infrequent; judges and juries were loath to convict.”¹⁵

J. Grahame Long, in Dueling in Charleston, contends that “South Carolinians—Charlestonians especially—participated in more duels than any other group of people in the nation, possibly the entire North American continent.”¹⁶ Given that, it seems safe to assume that although White sets his play in “any part of the civilized world (5),” the milieu his play describes is markedly Charlestonian.¹⁷ That White names one of his characters Caroline suggests to Watson “the women of Carolina whose husbands have died in duels.”¹⁸

Modern Honor premiered at the Charleston Theatre and ran for the then-standard three nights, the last two to disappointing houses, which Watson attributes to the then-popular enthusiasm for dueling.¹⁹ Indeed, during the post-colonial period, dueling had become so prevalent in the South that, according to Long, area newspapers “regularly announced the outcomes of concluding duels, not unlike modern-day sports pages,” a claim he substantiates with a contemporary report:

[August 1808] It is reported and we fear too much truth, that a duel was fought on Tuesday Last [August 9] on the Georgia side of the river between James Lesley, an attorney, and Dr. Bochell…. Mr. Lesley was shot through the body and died in a few hours. [August 2, 1853] Duel this morning about 5 o’clock [at] the back of the race course. Mr. J.D. Legare and Mr. Dunovant met to settle their disputes when the former was instantly killed. [May 25, 1839] Duel fought at the lower end of Broad Street between Fell and Herriot, the former shot in the foot to keep him from running and the latter in the mouth to keep him from jawing.²⁰

Jack K. Williams observes that visitors from abroad recorded their amazement at the frequency of dueling, one reporting that he had met eleven men who “had killed a man each” and another, a German baron, writing that dueling was so common that a tourist “should be careful of what he says and Page 48 →what society he keeps.”²¹ Other indicators of dueling’s prevalence include an item placed in the Charleston Courier on April 4, 1827, advertising “the Art of Self Defence [sic], Scientifically Taught” by one D. Mendoza, Jr.²²

Modern Honor is, of course, sufficiently obscure that any discussion of it ought to be leavened with summation. It begins, as did most plays of that era, with a prologue written “by a friend” of the playwright and “Spoken by Mr. Green” (3)—specifically J. William Green, an actor familiar to audiences at the Charleston Theatre, having already distinguished himself on that stage as Macbeth, Richard III, Iago, and a raft of other roles.²³ In couplets, the prologue celebrates the origins of honor from “the first day of chivalry” when it “breathed its fascinations o’er the mind” and “softened, polished and improved mankind.” Taking a darker turn (“But lo!”), it then warns of “false honor” as “the savage foe of life!/Her god is Moloch, her Religion, strife” and concludes by praising the author’s intent “to drive this monster from the light of day” (3–4).

Thus girded, we begin the play proper, discovering in the nursery of their apartment Charles and Caroline Devalmore, the play’s deuteragonists, hovering tenderly over their sleeping babe while nearby their toddler plays with his toys. At once, then, in its very first breath, the play aligns itself with the postcolonial dramatic tradition of placing the American family at stake. In, for instance, Royal Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), the very first American drama, the Van Rough family, sensible and honest, stood in for an America defending itself from corrosive continental influences represented by the dandified Billy Dimple.²⁴ In, for further instance, William Ioor’s Independence (1805), the first South Carolinian drama, the Woodville family, sturdy and agronomical, stood in for southern small farmers losing their land to greedy cosmopolitan interests represented by lascivious Lord Fanfare.²⁵

Modern Honor begins then with a recognizable trope: the American family in portrait, at home and rhapsodizing in blank verse about its own bliss and sanctity, with Devalmore asking at one point:

What wealth, what grandeur, my dear Caroline,

With that pure, heaven-born pleasure can compare,

Which grows with the souls of those who love!

Who, save a husband can appreciate

Delight, with which the bosom overflows,

When from the busy, bustling cares of life,

He turns to home’s enchanting scenes, beholds

Page 49 →A tender wife and smiling babes, anxious

To meet him: sees her smile, and hears them prattle[?] (7)

Because the play describes itself as a tragedy, we may correctly apprehend at this point that this family will over the course of the forthcoming five acts be torn asunder.

They are quickly joined by Devalmore’s comely sister Maria, rosy-hued with “pellucid tinctures,” who anxiously awaits the return from abroad of her beau, Henry Woodville, beloved by the family as “ever true,” a “faithful constant friend” and possessing “what the world cannot corrupt,/An honest heart” (9, 10).²⁶ We may here apprehend, again correctly, that this couple’s happiness is doomed.

When a letter arrives announcing that Woodville’s return has been delayed, Maria is left alone and visited forthwith by “wild perplexing thoughts,” wondering “Why writhes my soul with agonizing woe!/Why am I terrified by fears [?]” (12). Enter, of course and therefore, the play’s antagonist, Colonel Forsythe.²⁷ Having apparently never recovered from his unrequited love for Maria, he observes in her current vulnerability an opportunity to declare that “by my soul/I vow that, you the only woman are,/Whom on this earth, with rapture I adore” (13). Maria deflects his overture graciously, then less so his suggestion that her Henry is purposefully loitering “in foreign climes, nor cares,/While in soft dalliance with the guilty fair,/Who nightly join his round of idle mirth” (13). When she chastises him for such slander, Forsythe threatens to impugn her honor:

Be guarded in your speech—remember well,

That you a woman are, whose boasted virtue

Hangs by most slender threads: the slightest breath

Might tarnish, e’en your fairest fame.

· · · · · · · · ·

The roses which in yonder garden blow,

Are safer than a woman’s reputation. (14)

Through the rest of the play, and using such wiles, Forsythe pursues her doggedly until, at the end, a duel settles all the affairs, and badly.

The second act finds Forsythe at home with his man Flaurence, who apparently functions as Forsythe’s arms dealer, as he enters with two new pistols he praises as “true as fate itself:/Destruction seems to perch upon their sights” (17). He is referring, no doubt, to pistols designed solely for Page 50 →the purpose of dueling, those typically being ornately decorated .52-caliber smoothbore flintlocks that came in their own custom cases, such as those made in Charleston by the J. M. Happoldt family, who, for three decades, were the leading gun manufacturers in the region.²⁸ Here, Flaurence seems to fetishize his pistol, sighing,

For years, the pistol was my matin song,

My noontide sport, my evening’s recreation.

Nor did I hold my life or honor safe,

’Till it was pastime, to bisect with ease,

My ball, against a razor’s edge. (17)

The two men settle quickly into extolling the efficacy of firearms as instruments of both protection and courtship. Flaurence proposes, oblivious to his own irony, that carrying a pistol is the only way for a “man of honor” to protect himself “in these rude days” when so many carry firearms (17). Forsythe concurs that, “The pistol has more civilized the world,/Than all the pratings of your grizzly sages” and dismisses as “boys and cowards” those who would resort to law (17). True gentlemen, he argues as he grips his pistol, would not waste “the tedious lapse of years” pursing legal redress that “in a moment, should be grasped at—thus” (18). Bachelors both, they conclude that the summum bonum of their code is the affection of women, who “legislate/On all nice points of Honor,” for it is “Better to die than wear the badge of coward,/Fastened upon you by a woman’s scorn” (19). Thus aroused, they conspire to penetrate Maria’s chamber that very evening, when Forsythe claims to have an assignation arranged but, as part of his baroque plot to win her, offers to send Flaurence through her window in his stead.

Before their conversation, we have met Shadwell and Moore, essentially White’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Forsythe dispatches to assassinate his rival, Henry Woodville, but no sooner has Flaurence left than a bloodied Woodville staggers into Forsythe’s chambers, having just fended off his assailants. Forsythe, having secretly just sought to kill him, now bids Woodville “thrice welcome” and tends to his wounds, but intimates, sensing that Woodville is in a froth, that his Maria has been “false as hell” (24, 26) and offers, that very night, to prove it.

Thus, in the third act, the play reenacts, in miniature, both Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Forsythe, as Iago, leads his hapless Moor, Woodville, to Maria’s garden, where they spy her on her balcony, anxiously awaiting the return of her beloved, lamenting,

Page 51 →Ah would that thou wert come,

Dearest of my soul, to sooth the troubles

Of my aching heart!

· · · · · · · · · · ·

’Tis now eleven, and too late, I fear,

To hope for his arrival—whence that noise?

It was the owl, the watch-bird of the night,

Which flitted by seek yon distant grove.

No noise I hear, but all my soul is up,

In anxious expectation of his coming. (28)

The action that follows is dazzling: Flaurence, as arranged, arrives with a ladder and attempts to climb into her boudoir; Woodville, “in great agitation,” subdues and chases him off (30). Devalmore, whose house this is, discovers Woodville engorged with jealous rage. Honor is impugned, threats are made, and fisticuffs ensue until finally a duel is arranged for the morrow between two honorable men who have no quarrel with each other.

That duel occurs in the next act, but offstage; the spectacle of men shooting at one other must await the play’s climax. Act Four instead traffics solely in pathos. Early on, Devalmore bids a poignant adieu to his sleeping bride and children and then, full of foreboding, steals out into the night to face Woodville. He is reposited forthwith, shot dead, on a bier, followed quickly by a now-horrified Woodville hoping to reanimate his old friend with remorse. Failing that (“Moment of horror, too much for the damned!” [44]), Woodville quickly calculates how he has been deceived and closes the act by vowing revenge upon his deceiver:

Miserable wretch! What have I not done?

A tender husband killed, a father butchered,

Slaughtered a kind brother, murdered a friend—

But still the bloody scene shall not close here:

Fearful revenge shall first be satisfied:

So look to it Forsythe. Thou bloody monster!

Be this accursed act on thee, and thine—

Thy life or mine shall surely pay the forfeit—

Revenge is sweet, when duty points the way! (45)

Duty pointing the way, we move then to the final act, which presents, in striking fashion, the act of dueling itself. The first to arrive at the secret Page 52 →location—duels, being nominally illegally in Charleston, were conducted at undisclosed venues—are the two assassins, Moore and Shadwell. Before they hie to another part of the forest to lay again in ambush for Woodville, White allows one of them a show of remorse. Moore complains that

… I do not like this work of murdering men.

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

… from the first, I liked not this employment.

In honest truth, I cannot reconcile it

With my conscience. I passed a wretched night,

Last night. (47)

It is for this very moment these two exist in the play. They will fail, as they did before, to murder Woodville, so their importance to the plot is negligible. But here, they feel for a moment the first pangs of conscience. Moore in fact resolves to “have no hand in it—/No scruples would I have to take his purse,/But, at the thought of shedding human blood,/I tremble every joint” (47). At the end of the play, he—but not Shadwell—will be arrested, the implication being that he has turned himself in.

Their conversation prefigures nicely the one that follows immediately between Woodville and his second, Hanmer. As a second—i.e., an assistant at a duel—Hanmer’s responsibilities would have included enforcing established protocols and ending the affair in event of an injury. Those responsibilities had been codified across centuries and continents in, for instance, the Italian Flos Deullatorum (ca. 1410), the Irish Code Duello (1777), The British Code of Duel (1824), and Joseph Hamilton’s The Royal Code (1829). In 1838, roughly a quarter-century after the play, but certainly while dueling was still in fashion, former South Carolina Governor John Lyde Wilson drew from such primers in publishing his own how-to manual, The Code of Honor, or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling, which included eight chapters—for instance, the “Person Insulted,” “The Party Receiving a Note Before Challenge,” and the “Principals and Seconds on the Ground”—instructing all parties as to the proper procedures for inciting, conducting, and concluding a duel.²⁹

Primarily, a second’s responsibility was to mediate or suggest alternatives to combat. In his Code, Wilson instructs seconds to “use every effort to soothe and tranquilize your principal; do not see things in the same aggravated light in which he views them. Extenuate the conduct of his adversary whenever you see clearly an opportunity to do so, without doing violence Page 53 →to your friend’s irritated mind. Endeavor to persuade him there must have been some misunderstanding in the matter.”³⁰ Much of Act Five is a Platonic dialogue. It, in fact, reimagines much of The Crito.³¹ Hanmer attempts to soothe and tranquilize Woodville, entreating him to “Ponder yet upon this fatal measure./Permit the anger of your mind to cool” (48), and presenting appeals to religion, reason, friendship and obligation to family, none of which countervails Woodville’s insistence on defending his honor:

HANMER. How can this act, one step advance your cause?

In what your honor profit anything?

Should you this monster slay, the task is still

T’expose his horrid crimes: what should prevent

Th’ exposure while he lives? But should you fall,

You leave your loved Maria, honor, fame,

All in the power of that very man,

Whom neither love nor fear could influence.

O vile, O mad infatuation this,

It cannot stand the test of sober truth!

WOODVILLE. Should I from this guilty field retire,

Who’ll vindicate my honor with the world?

HANMER. What is the world to you, in competition

With your soul? (50)

Hanmer, besides being the most interesting character in the play, here serves also as White’s raisonneur; he was played by J. William Green, the same actor who delivered the play’s prologue, and so embodied in this character the gravitas of its message as well as the reputation of the actor.³² To, however, no avail: Woodville quickly rebuts him, his response echoing, at first glance, Shakespeare’s Brutus, who “love[s] the name of honor, more than I fear death,” and Hector, who “Holds honor far more precious-dear than life.”³³

WOODVILLE. Ah nothing! Yet—yet everything!

How shall I meet the friends whom once I knew?

How brook the killing smiles of pity? How

Bear up against th’ unfeeling laugh of scorn?

How stand that sharp reproaches of Maria?

How ’scape from orphan’s cries and widow’s curses?

How pass through life, with coward on my brow?

Page 54 →Ah me! No door, no hiding place is left,

Saving the silent mansions of the grave!

You argue, Hanmer, to the heedless winds:

Trust me, I’ve made my fixed determination.

Prepare the pistols. (50–51)

However sympathetic Woodville’s motives may appear, they are hardly noble. In the pointless shootout about to unfold, White asks us to distinguish between the clashes of legendary forces determining the course of history and the grievances of pettifoggers hoping to avoid embarrassment. This is the distinction White, through Hanmer, draws between honor and modern honor, just before the duel itself,

Honor, mystic name! To lengths how boundless

Wilt thou conduct thy votaries! ’Tis strange,

That, through the fear of temporary ill,

Which merely a day, an hour can endure,

They should the hazard run of endless ruin! (51)

This “hazard” was one with which White was and would remain personally acquainted. In 1796, his friend Alexander Placide, manager of the Charleston Theater and one of the town’s leading theatre figures, challenged one Louis Douvillier, a ballet dancer, to a sword fight in St. Michael’s Alley over the affections of a woman.³⁴ Neither was harmed, but the woman chose Douvillier.³⁵ Six months after the premiere of Modern Honor, White attended the funeral of one William Bay in Charleston who had died in a duel over political differences. Obviously moved, White wrote in his journal, “There was an immense concourse of people at the funeral, there were many eyes overflowing with tears. His venerable parents followed his remains to the grave, witnessed [their son] consigned to the bosom of the earth, heard the earth closing forever upon him, and the feelings of the father burst forth in loud, articulate sobs.”³⁶

In 1817, five years after the play, White’s friend Dennis O’Driscoll would also perish in a duel. His assailant, John Edwards, was arrested and tried in what would amount to a test case for antidueling laws in South Carolina. But charges against Edwards were dismissed when witnesses refused to testify, partly not to self-incriminate but also in deference to the gentlemanly code of honor.³⁷ That code, according to Clement Eaton, had its roots in the south’s chivalric military heritage and in southerners’ hyper-sensitivity about their Page 55 →honor: “To accuse a gentleman of an untruth, insult him, or attack his honor was to provoke a duel…. Many a high-minded man recognized the evil of dueling and yet accepted a challenge of a duel in order to escape the odium of being regarded a coward and thus lose his influence in society.”³⁸ The premium placed on honor was common among not only the aristocracy, but social climbers as well. Honor, as Watson writes, “became more inexorable than any civil or moral law. Any man wanting to be regarded as a gentleman conformed, or he suffered contempt from the high and low.”³⁹ Public figures—Henry Clay, Alexander Stephens, John Randolph, Sam Houston—all admitted to or bragged about having dueled, and all benefited socially or politically for it, a fact not lost on planters, members of the military, or even two students at South Carolina College who, in 1833, joined in the practice over a dining hall dispute. One was killed and the other, maimed.⁴⁰

It was an affront to honor that apparently spelled the doom of Dennis O’Driscoll, who, several days before he died, wrote the following in his will:

I do pray God of his infinite mercy and goodness to pardon all my sins: and forgive me for the Conduct I am about to pursue, to which I have been forced and every possible endeavor on my part to avoid it; and please Almighty God that I shd [sic] fall a victim to defense of my character & my Honor; I will devise all my estate or property of which I am now possessed, or may be entitled to, to my most dear and affectionate Wife Harriett C. O’Driscoll, & I pray God to grant her firmness to withstand her misfortune.⁴¹

O’Driscoll’s death appears to have been a heavy blow to White. Among the deaths he recorded in his family Bible, indeed immediately after an item about the passing of his own wife, Eliza, appears the following:

Died at Savannah, Geo. On the 17th August, 1817 my valued friend Dennis O’Driscoll, Esq. Attorney-at-Law, only son of Doct. Mathew O’Driscoll, of Charleston, aged 23 years, & 6 months. He fell in a duel with Mr. John D. Edwards, of Charleston, on Sunday morning, the 16 August, at Sunrise. Both fell at the first fire, Edwards severely wounded in the loins, and O’Driscoll mortally, in the abdomen (the ball at entered just below the naval [sic] and passed through his body). He possessed his reason to the last moment, was perfectly aware of his approaching dissolution, and dictated a letter to his father…. He expired the next morning, about 3 o’clock…. He was a man of extensive reading and varied information, Page 56 →and so commanded the respect of all who were acquainted with him, and the love and admiration of a great number of friends.⁴²

Two years later, in 1819, White would marry O’Driscoll’s sister, Ann Rachel, and with her have eight children.

But to return to the duel: Hanmer fails to discourage Woodville from this folly, and the two are met in the forest by Forsythe and Flaurence. The protocol is reviewed—the combatants are separated by ten paces, then, one at a time, beginning with the aggrieved, aim and fire—and the duel begins. Woodville, at Hanmer’s command, fires first—and misses, as was typical. Forsythe then levels his pistol at Woodville and, at Flaurence’s command, fires—whereupon a “piercing shriek is heard from without. Woodville drops his pistol and staggers” (55). He collapses into Hanmer’s arms, entreats him to make right all his wrongs by proving “a friend unto my loved Maria,/And a father to Devalmore’s children” (56), and so expires.

The shriek, of course, has come from Maria, who arrives too late and “throws herself on the corpse” (57). An officer arrives and sends his men off in pursuit of Forsythe and Flaurence, though no justice is administered during the action of the play. Indeed, the only characters who escape neither aggrieved nor arrested, nor deceased are those who act the most dishonorably. Fittingly, then, the officer, the play’s ostensible minister of law, asks its central questions:

When will this modern Moloch be appeased—

When glutted with the blood of human victims?

When will the light of reason dawn on man,

And shew this custom its deformity? (57)

Such questions went unanswered during White’s lifetime. He died on August 24, 1859, and reposes now in his own silent tomb in his family’s plot at St. Philips Church in Charleston, near Ann Rachel and his first wife, Elizabeth Alston, who died in 1817. There is no record of later productions of his plays, though a bronze bust, the gift of his son, Dr. O. A. White, still stands in Charleston’s City Hall. White was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2018.

Dueling was finally outlawed in South Carolina in 1880, owing primarily to an infamous duel near Bishopville. There, on July 5, after two years of open bickering and in front of hundreds of spectators, Colonels Ellerbe B. C. Cash and William M. Shannon took aim at one another, the former killing Page 57 →the latter, a father of fourteen whose neighbors were so appalled that they threatened Cash with lynching. Thereafter, the editor of Charleston’s News and Courier, Francis W. Dawson, himself a veteran duelist, began so fervent an editorial campaign against the practice that it was taken up in newspapers across the state. Under public pressure, the state’s general assembly outlawed dueling and added an amendment to the general statues stipulating that anyone convicted of mortally wounding another in a duel would be subject to the death penalty.⁴³

Jon Tuttle is professor of English, director of University Honors, and the Nellie Cooke Sparrow Writer-in-Residence at Francis Marion University and is a recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities. His most recent book, South Carolina Onstage, published by Academica Press, is now available.