Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 3d ago
Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Hamilton detested the practice, and in a letter written beforehand, he told a friend he would aim his gun to miss, that he intended to miss on purpose.
This was a very risky strategy known as deloping, from a French word.
It was considered by some the height of honor, a way to preserve your own honor while in effect remaining above the fray.
And that's why many folks believe Hamilton did that misty morning on the New Jersey shore.
His shot sailed harmlessly over Burr's head.
Burr, though, shot into Hamilton's body.
His bullet struck above Hamilton's right hip, zigzagged through his major organs, and killed him.
Even though duels were officially illegal in both New York and New Jersey, New Jersey rarely prosecuted them.
It's one of the reasons they staged the duel in New Jersey.
So Burr walked away free.
But his killing of Hamilton caused such an uproar that duels thereafter pretty much vanished from the North.
Not so in the old South.
In fact, it was there in the first half of the nineteenth century that American dueling reached its apogee.
But then the South was always a much more violent area of the country.
In Florida's cotton districts during the eighteen thirties, modern analysis shows the murder rate was something like fifty times that of the Northeast.
One English traveler wrote that the South was, quote, barbarous as a jungle inhabited by wild beasts.
Another said, The darkest side of the southerner is his quarrelsomeness and recklessness of human life.
Why was this?
I mean, the possible answers are kind of all over the place.
Historians have suggested reasons as varied as slavery, or the heat, or the fact that many Southerners were descended from the notoriously quarrelsome Scots and Irish.
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