hallenge.

Thirty months before, his son, a bright lad of eighteen, fresh from
Columbia College, had been shot dead in a duel which he had brought
upon himself by resenting a public criticism of his father. He had
fallen on that very spot where his father stood. I think that {248}
the tragedy must have been in the great statesman's mind that summer
morning.

The word was given. The two pistols were discharged. The
Vice-president, taking deliberate aim, fired first. The ex-Secretary
of the Treasury, who had previously stated to his second that he did
not intend to fire at his adversary, discharged his pistol in the air.
He had been hit by the bullet of his enemy, and did not know that as he
fell, by a convulsive movement, he had pulled the trigger of the weapon
in his hand.

That was the end--for he died the next day after lingering agonies--of
Alexander Hamilton, the greatest intellect and one of the greatest
personalities associated with the beginning of this Government. It was
also the end of his successful antagonist, Aaron Burr, for thereafter
he was a marked man, an avoided, a hated man. When abroad in 1808, he
gave Jeremy Bentham an account of the duel, and said that he "was sure
of being able to kill him." "And so," replied Bentham, "I thought it
little better than a murder." "Posterity," the historian adds, "will
not be likely to disturb the judgment of the British philosopher."

II. Andrew Jackson as a Duellist

Comparatively speaking, the next great duel on my list attracted little
more than local attention at the time. Years after, when one of them
who took part in it had risen to national fame, and was a candidate for
the Presidency, it was revived and made much of. On Friday, the 30th
of May, 1806, Charles Dickinson, a young man of brilliant abilities,
born in Maryland and residing in Tennessee, met Andrew Jackson, of the
{249} latter state, near the banks of a small stream called the Red
River, in a sequestered woodland glade in Logan County, Ky., a day's
ride from Nashville.

Unwittingly, and with entire innocence on the part of both parties,
Andrew Jackson had placed his wife in an equivocal position by marrying
her before a divorce had separated her from her husband[1]. Absolutely
no blame, except, perhaps, a censure for carelessness, attaches to
Jackson or his wife, and their whole life together was an example of
conjugal affection. However, his enemies--and he had many--found it