Part 14

The confession of State’s Rights would seem strong enough to soften the heart of an original Secessionist—a being as yet unheard of—and the respectful mention of the Nestor of the _Enquirer_ might have drawn the fire of the filial editor. How far these failed of their effect is obvious in the return shot:

“Although the language used by Mr. Pleasants may not be considered directly offensive, yet we are unwilling to allow him or others to make hypotheses in regard to our veracity. When we desire lectures on morals we hope to be allowed to choose our own preceptor. We certainly shall not apply to _him_!”

In Mr. Pleasants’ rejoinder he again reminds the young men that their father and himself had been of the same mind on the Slavery question for twenty years:

“The correspondent may have believed what he said, in ignorance of the facts, and may therefore be guiltless of premeditated injustice, but the editors who indorse his calumny by printing it without any explanation, either did know better, in which case their candor and liberality are compromised, or ought to have known better, in which case they themselves may say what responsibility they incur by printing an accusation utterly false in fact, and calculated to infuse the greatest possible prejudice against him respecting whom it is promulgated.”

The answer of the _Enquirer_ was a sneer throughout:

“We doubt whether he knows, himself, what principles he may be disposed to advocate. His most intimate friends are sometimes puzzled to understand his position.... If our correspondent ‘Macon’ wishes it, he will, of course, have the use of our columns, but if he will take our advice, he will let Mr. J. H. P. alone. To use an old proverb—‘Give the gentleman rope enough, and he will hang himself!’”

In a long letter to a personal friend, but published in the _News and Star_—what would be called now an “open letter”—Mr. Pleasants sums up the points of the controversy, and calmly assumes the animus of the attack to be personal enmity, a sort of vendetta feud, against which argument is powerless:

“Justice from the Richmond _Enquirer_ I have long ago ceased to expect. For more than twenty years I have lived under its ceaseless misrepresentations and malevolent misconstructions. I had hoped, when the former editor removed to Washington to receive the rich rewards of his devotion to party, to live upon better terms with his successors, and I have studied to cultivate better relations by respectful consideration and undeviating courtesy; but I have found that other passions besides the love of liberty are transmitted from sire to son.... Calmly reviewing this piece of impertinence, I should be of opinion that this assailant meditated fight, if I could think that a young brave would seek, as an antagonist upon whom to flesh his maiden sword, a man so much older than himself as I am, and with dependent children.”

In allusion to a former altercation with “Il Secretario,” a “foe illustrious for his virtues and talents, whom this aspirant after knighthood” declined to encounter—the senior combatant concludes:

“Battle, then, being clearly not his object, I must suppose that he meant no more than a little gasconade, and the recovery, at a cheap rate, of a forfeited reputation for courage.”

With the, to modern taste, odd blending of personality with editorial anonymity that characterized the professional duel throughout, “We, the junior editor,” retorts:

“This letter affords strong corroborative evidence of our opinion expressed in our article of the 27th ultimo, and from Mr. J. H. Pleasants’ communication, evidently understood by him to the extent we intended—namely, that facts within our knowledge proved him to be a COWARD.

“He appeals to the confines of age and dependent children. Let it be! We shall not disturb him.”

Ten years after the correspondence and the “affair” to which it was the prelude, an eminently respectable citizen of Richmond told my husband of a street-corner scene, date of February 21, 1846, the day on which the last contribution to the war of words above recorded, appeared in the _Enquirer_.

“One of the groups one saw on all sides, in heated discussion of the newspaper controversy and the probable outcome, was collected about Doctor ——, then, as now, pastor of the —— —— Church. He read out the last sentences of Ritchie’s ultimatum with strong excitement. Then he struck the paper with his finger, and said: ‘That settles the matter! Pleasants must fight! There is no way out of it!’

“One of the party ventured a remonstrance to the effect that ‘Pleasants was not a hot-headed boy to throw his life away. He might be made to see reason, and the matter be smoothed over,’ etc.

“The minister broke in warmly, with—

“‘Impossible, sir, impossible! No honorable man could sit down quietly under the insult! He must fight! There is no alternative!’

“Now,” continued the narrator, “I am not a church-member, and I had no overstrained scruples against duelling at that time. But it sent a queer shock through me when I heard a minister of the gospel of peace take that ground. I felt that I could never go to hear him preach again. And I never did! I heard he made a most feeling allusion to poor Pleasants in a sermon preached shortly after his death. That didn’t take the bad taste out of my mouth.”

How general was the sympathy with the incautiously expressed opinion of the divine can hardly be appreciated now that the duello is reckoned among the errors of a ruder age. The city was in a ferment for the three days separating the 21st of February and the 25th, on which the memorable encounter took place. If any friend essayed to reconcile the offending and offended parties, we have no note of it.

The nearest approach to arbitration recorded in the story of the trial is in the testimony of a man well-acquainted with both parties, who was asked by one of Mr. Ritchie’s seconds to “go upon the ground as a mutual friend.”

He testified on the stand: “I declined to do so. I asked him if the matter could be adjusted. I asked if Mr. Ritchie would not be willing to withdraw the epithet of ‘coward,’ in case Mr. Pleasants should come upon the field. His reply was that Mr. Ritchie conscientiously believed Mr. Pleasants to be a coward.”

The persuasions of other friends to whom he spoke, at an evening party(!), of the affair to come off on the morrow, overcame the scruples of the reluctant pacificator. He accompanied the surgeon (the most eminent in the city, and one of the Faculty of Richmond Medical College) to the ground next morning. The meeting was no secret, except—presumably—to the authorities who might have prevented it. Going up to Mr. Ritchie’s second, he made a final effort to avert the murder:

“I renewed the application I had made the evening before, telling him that Mr. Pleasants was on the field, and asking him if he would not withdraw the imputation of cowardice. He replied that he would keep his friend there fifteen minutes, and no longer.”

The morning was raw, and the wind from the river was searching. There had been rain during the night, and the ground was slippery with sleet. The principals were equipped with other arms than the duelling pistols.

“Mr. Pleasants put a revolver into the left pocket of his coat; then he took two duelling pistols, one in his right, and the other in his left hand.” At this point the witness interpolates: “I looked away about that time.” (As well he might!) “The next weapon I saw him arm himself with was his sword-cane under his left arm. He had a bowie-knife under his vest.”

Of Mr. Ritchie it was testified:

“He had four pistols and also a revolver. He had the larger pistols in his belt. I did not see his sword until after the rencontre. He had it drawn when I came up to him. I supposed it was a bowie-knife.”

After a brief parley as to the disadvantages of a position first selected, and the choice of a second, the word was given to advance and fire. The principals were two hundred yards apart when the word was given.

“Mr. Ritchie fired at the distance of twenty-five or thirty yards. Mr. Pleasants fired his first pistol within about fifteen or twenty feet of Mr. Ritchie.... At the third shot they were more rapid. Mr. Pleasants advanced. At the third fire Mr. Ritchie’s form became obscure; Mr. Pleasants still advancing, I saw him within six or seven feet of Mr. Ritchie. It was then that Mr. Pleasants fired his second pistol.”

Thus the eminent surgeon, who had refused to come to the field as the friend of both parties, but yielded when asked to serve in his professional capacity. He remarks, parenthetically, here:

“I am now giving my recollection of events transpiring in a short time and under great excitement.”

Perhaps, in spite of the great excitement, the training of his calling held his senses steady, for his story of the fight is graphic and succinct.

“I saw Mr. Pleasants level his second pistol; I heard the report; I saw Mr. Ritchie stagger back, and I remarked to Mr. D.” (the man who had been overpersuaded to witness the murder as a “mutual friend”), “‘Ritchie is a dead man!’ I so inferred, because he had staggered back. Then I heard several discharges without knowing who was firing. I saw Mr. Pleasants striking at Mr. Ritchie with some weapon—whether a cane or a pistol, I do not know. I also saw him make several thrusts with a sword-cane. He gave several blows and two or three thrusts. I do not know if the sword was sheathed. During this part of the affair I saw Mr. Ritchie with his sword in his hand. I did not see him draw it. I saw him in the attitude of one making a thrust, and did see him make one or two thrusts at Mr. Pleasants. I remarked to Mr. D., ‘Let us go up, or he’ll be stabbed!’ Two or three times the cry was made, ‘Stop, Pleasants! Stop, Ritchie!’ We went up. Mr. Pleasants was tottering; Mr. Ritchie was standing a few feet away, the point of his sword on the ground; he was perfectly quiet. Mr. Archer took Mr. Pleasants’ arm and laid him down. He was on the ground when I reached him. Before I got to him I saw Mr. Ritchie leaving the ground. He walked a short distance, and then ran.”

It transpired afterward that not one of Pleasants’s balls had struck Ritchie. The presumption was that the elder man was wounded by his opponent’s first fire, and fired wildly in consequence. He received six balls in various parts of his body. But one of his bullets was found, and that in the gable of a building out of the line of the firing. The ball was embedded in the wood, nine feet above the ground. Mad with pain and blinded by rage, the wounded man struck at the other’s face when they were near together—some said, with the useless pistol, others with his sword-cane or bowie-knife. When the fugitive reached the carriage in waiting at the foot of the hill, his face was covered with blood. His physician was in the carriage, and examined him at once. But for the cut lip he was absolutely uninjured.

The sun was just rising when John Hampden Pleasants was lifted into the carriage and borne back to the city. He knew himself to be mortally wounded from the moment he fell.

This was on Wednesday, February 25th. Before the short winter day neared its noon, the tale was known from one end of Richmond to the other, and the whole population heaved with excitement. Business was practically suspended while men talked over the terrible event; the sidewalks were blocked by gossiping idlers.

Our school was called to order at nine o’clock daily. On this morning, teachers and pupils were unfit for lessons. For Mr. Pleasants’ only daughter was one of us, and a general favorite. His niece was likewise a pupil, and the two had the same desk. Their vacant chairs made the tragedy a personal grief to each of us. When Mrs. Nottingham bade us get our Bibles ready for the morning service, not a girl there could read without a break in her trembling voice, and when the dear old lady made tender mention in her prayer of the “sorrowing,” and for “those drawing near unto death,” our sobs drowned the fervent tones.

I recall, as one of the minor incidents of the dreadful day, that when I went home in the afternoon, my grandmother insisted I should read the newspaper correspondence aloud to her. She was a captious tyrant at times, and, like many another deaf person, sensitive as to the extent of her infirmity. She “was not so very deaf, except in damp weather, or when she had a cold. If people would only speak distinctly, and not mumble, she would have no trouble in understanding what was said.” In this connection she often made flattering exception of myself as the “one girl she knew who could speak English.” In this capacity she summoned me to her side. She had the week’s papers on her lap. I must pick out the articles “that were responsible for this scandalous affair.”

Down I sat, close beside her “good ear,” and read, with precise articulation and right emphasis, the editorials from which I have made excerpts in this chapter.

In copying them to-day, the strait-laced New-Englander’s classification of the awful event is in my mind and ear. Every detail of the duel and the cold-blooded preparations therefor—the deadly weapons borne by, and girt about the principals; the sang-froid of seconds and attendant “friends”; the savagery of the combat; the tone of public sentiment that made the foul fight within sight of the steeples of the city practicable, although the leading men of the place were cognizant of each step that led to the scene on the river-bank before sunrise that gray morning—can we, in these later times we are wont to compare regretfully with those, sum up the details and the catastrophe in phrase more fit and true?

I resented it hotly, if silently, then. Even my father, who always spoke of duelling as a “remnant of Middle Age barbarism,” shared in the universal grief for his party leader laid low in the prime of his useful manhood, and would suffer no censure of the challenge that had made the fight inevitable.

“Pleasants is a brave man, and a proud. He could not endure to sit down quietly under the aspersion of cowardice.”

Another terrible day of suspense dragged its slow length along. Hourly bulletins from the chamber where the wounded man was making his last struggle with Fate, alternately cheered and depressed us. He was conscious and cheerful; he had exonerated his opponent from blame in the matter of the duel:

“I thought I had run him through. It was providential that I did not. Ritchie is a brave man. I shall not recover. You will be candid with me, Doctor? It is all right.”

These were some of the sentences caught up by young and old, and repeated with tearful pride in the dying hero. That was what they called him; and when on Friday morning the flag on the capitol hung at half-mast, the mourners who went about the streets were his fellow-townsmen, who had no word of condemnation for him and the rash act that ended his career.

On Saturday morning it began to snow. By Sunday afternoon the streets were eighteen inches deep on the level, with the heaviest snow-fall of the season. Mrs. Pleasants, the widow of a governor of Virginia, and the mother of the slain editor, was a member of the Grace Street Presbyterian Church, of which Reverend Doctor Stiles was then pastor. The funeral services were held there on Sunday, at 3 o’clock P.M. By two the sidewalks were blocked by a crowd of silent spectators, and, half an hour later, every seat in the church, except those reserved for the family and immediate friends of the deceased, was filled. After these had taken their places, there was not standing-room in aisles or galleries. The sermon was an eloquent tribute to the private virtues and the public services of the deceased. One memorable extract is inscribed upon the monument erected by admirers and friends over his grave in Shockoe Hill Cemetery:

With a Genius above talent, a Courage above Heroism

None ever forgot the scene who saw the long line of funeral carriages winding, like a black stream, through streets where the snow came up to the axles, under the low-hanging sky that stooped heavily and gloomed into leaden gray by the time the cortége reached the cemetery. And all the afternoon the brooding air throbbed with the tolling bells.

We said and believed that Richmond had never known so sad a day since she went into mourning for the threescore victims of the burning of the theatre in 1811.

The trial of Thomas Ritchie for murder in the first, and of the seconds as “principals in the second degree,” followed the duel with swiftness amazing to the reader of criminal cases in our age. On March 31, 1846, four of the ablest lawyers in Virginia appeared in court to defend the prisoner.

The old brochure which records the proceedings is curious and deeply interesting reading; in nothing more remarkable than in the defence of what was admitted to be “an unhappy custom” and directly opposed to the laws of the country.

“_The letter of the law is made to yield to the spirit of the times_” is an italicized sentence in the principal speech of the defence. The same speaker dwelt long and earnestly upon precedents that palliated, excused, and warranted the time-honored (although “unhappy”) practice.

Not less than fifteen instances of the supremacy of the higher law of the “spirit of the times” were drawn from English history.

“In not one of which had there been any prosecution.

“And now, gentlemen of the jury, does any one suppose that duelling can be suppressed, or capitally punished, when the first men in the kingdom—such men as Pitt and Fox, and Castlereagh and Canning and Grattan, and Nelson and Wellington, lend the high sanction of their names, and feel themselves justified and compelled to peril their lives upon a point of honor? And I would ask my friend, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, if such men as these constitute the ‘swordsmen of England,’ and were alone worthy of the times of Tamerlane and Bajazet?...

“Was Andrew Jackson regarded as a ‘swordsman’ and duellist because he fought, not one, but three duels, and once shed the blood of a fellow-man in single combat? He was twice elected to the first office in the world, and died a Christian.... How many of Henry Clay’s numerous friends in Virginia, and, especially, the religious portion of them (including ministers of the Gospel), refused to vote for him as President of the United States because he had fought two duels?...

“The coroner’s inquest held on the body of General Hamilton brought in a verdict of wilful murder against Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States.

“Colonel Burr afterward took his seat in the Senate of the United States as Vice-President; his second, afterward, became a judge; and the second of General Hamilton—a most amiable and accomplished man—I served with in Congress, some years ago....

“I call upon you, then, gentlemen, by every motive that can bind you to a discharge of your duty, to do justice to my unfortunate young friend. Bind up the wounds of his broken-hearted parents; carry joy and peace and consolation to his numerous family and friends; wash out the stain that has been attempted upon his character and reputation, and restore him to his country—as, in truth, he is—pure and unspotted.”

The address of the Commonwealth’s Attorney is comparatively brief and emphatically half-hearted. We are entirely prepared for the announcement in smaller type at the foot of the last page:

“The argument on both sides” (!) “having been concluded, the jury took the case, and, without leaving the box, returned a verdict of ‘Not guilty!’

“The verdict was received by the large auditory with loud manifestations of applause. Order was promptly commanded by the officers of the court.

“Mr. Ritchie then left the court-house, accompanied by the greater portion of the spectators, who seemed eager to shake hands with him and to congratulate him upon his honorable acquittal.”

XVIII

THE MENACE OF SLAVE INSURRECTION

“RICHMOND, _June 8th, 1847._

“DEAR EFFIE,—It is past ten o’clock, and a rainy night. Just such a one as would make a comfortable bed and a sound snooze no mean objects of desire.

“George Moody, alias ‘The Irresistible,’ arrived this afternoon, and will leave in the morning, and I cannot let so good an opportunity of writing to you escape. I must scribble a brief epistle.

“The drive down from Powhatan was delightful. I found Mr. Belt extremely pleasant, full of anecdote, a great talker, yet, withal—as Mr. Miller had told me—a good listener. A very necessary qualification, by-the-way, for any one with whom I may chance to be in company.

“The first thing I heard when I reached home was tidings of that worst of bugbears to a Southern woman—an impending insurrection. A double guard was on duty at the capitol, and a detachment of military from the armory paraded the streets all night. I was, I confess, somewhat alarmed, and not a little startled, but gradually my fears wore away, and I slept as soundly that night as if no such thing were in agitation.

“‘Puss Sheppard was in to supper, and her parting salutation to us at going was: ‘Farewell! If I am alive in the morning I will come and see if you are!’

“The whole matter ended, like Mr. C.’s sermon—‘just where it began—_viz._, in nothing.’

“Richmond is rather dull at present. The Texas excitement has subsided almost entirely, and those who gave credence to the report of the insurrection are desirous to keep as still as possible.

“_Morning._—I can write no more. I am sure your good-nature will acquit me of blame so far as matter, chirography, and quality go, when I tell you that I have written this partly by the light of a lamp which finally went out, self-extinguished for want of oil, and partly this morning, when I am suffering with a sick-headache. I feel more like going to bed than writing, but ‘The Unexceptionable’ is about to take his departure, and waits for this. Write soon and much. I will try to treat you better next time.”

There is much reading between the lines to be done for the right comprehension of that letter. My _genre_ pictures of days that are no more would be incomplete were I to fail to touch upon the “worst of bugbears” I feigned to pass over lightly.

In the debate upon the abolition of slavery in my native State, lost by one vote in the Legislature of 1831-32, while Nat Turner’s insurrection was fresh in the public mind, John Randolph declared, “Whenever the fire-alarm rings in Richmond every mother clasps her baby closer to her breast.”

I cannot recollect when the whisper of the possibility of “Insurrection” (we needed not to specify of what kind) did not send a sick chill to my heart. The menace I here dismiss with a sentence or two was the most serious that had loomed upon my horizon. I could not trust myself to dwell upon it within the two days that had elapsed since my return from a vacation month in Powhatan. How keenly every circumstance attending it was bitten into my mind is proved by the distinctness of the etching preserved by a memory that has let many things of greater moment escape its hold.

My host, Mr. D., had come in to dinner the day before that set for my stage-journey back to town, with the pleasing intelligence that Mr. Lloyd Belt, a former citizen of Powhatan, but for twenty years a resident of Richmond, was “going down”—Richmond was always “down,” as London is “up” from every part of England—the next day, and would be glad to take me in his carriage. As I wrote to Effie, the drive was delightful. My courtly escort took as much pains to entertain me as if I had been a belle and a beauty, instead of an unformed school-girl. It was a way they had—those gentlemen of the Old School—of recognizing the woman in every baby-girl, and doing it honor.