Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 4d 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
Next to an old West gunfight, the Southern duel was typically a much more formal thing.
There were roles to play, designated dueling grounds, and even written rules.
This was especially true for upper class Southerners, and in cities like Charleston and New Orleans, which remained centers of dueling culture long after it vanished up north.
The dueling craze peaked between 1834 and 1844.
Many cities actually had unofficial dueling grounds.
Outside Washington, you had the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds in Maryland.
Outside St.
Louis, there was a sandbar in the Mississippi River they called Bloody Island because of all the duels there.
A future U.S.
Senator, Thomas Hart Bitten, killed a man there in a duel in 1817.
In New Orleans, the oak trees at Esplanade Avenue, where City Park is today, used to be the busiest dueling ground in the country.
During the eighteen thirties, according to one local paper,
One Sunday in 1839, there were ten separate duels, though I'll say in a very New Orleans twist, most of these duels were done with swords, not guns, so they were far less deadly.
Generally these affairs ended once a participant became bloody, became cut.
Those oaks still stand by the way, and it's just beyond cool to walk beneath their limbs, and I've done it, imagining these guys lining up for sword fights on a Sunday afternoon.
As the years wore on, pushback to all this did rise, clergymen got a little louder and got a few more laws passed here and there.
For a long time, dueling was seen as a sort of release valve to maintain public order, to give angry and aggrieved people an alternative to lawless murder.
This was a notion pushed by a lot of prominent Southerners, in fact, congressmen and governors and such.
A pamphlet written in eighteen thirty eight outlined the rules for the formal duel.
It was written by the Governor of South Carolina of all people, who based it on an Irish code from seventeen seventy-seven known as the Code Duello.
Showing 161–180 of 583 · page 9 of 30
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