This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces King Philip's War, begun by King Philip, a Wampanoag chief, after years of tension between English and Wampanoag cultures. The Indians launched raids on dozens of English towns, but they were ultimately defeated and hunted down.
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In 1838, former South Carolina Governor John Lyde Wilson published The Code of Honor; or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling. You are a respected lawyer and landed gentleman in Charleston, SC, in 1838, and determined to follow the Code in your life (and duels).
1. To your face, a store-clerk—rather than asking you when he might expect payment for an overdue bill—says that he doubts you have ever intended to pay it. What should your response be?
A. Take out a pistol and threaten to shoot him, unless he immediately apologizes.
B. Ignore the insult as unworthy of notice and take your business elsewhere.
C. Later that day, have your Second ask him for an explanation. If the response conveyed to you is not satisfactory, challenge the clerk to a duel.
D. Immediately beat the clerk with a cane or a horsewhip for his insolence, or have your servant do it.
The point of the duel was not to inflict harm on your opponent, but to preserve your honor. If your honor was threatened and you did not defend it, then you demonstrated that you had none. The clerk was below you in social station and so could not threaten your honor. Duels could only occur between social equals—and gentlemen—who could be expected to rise to a challenge. However, social inferiors could sometimes require discipline or punishment, with the cane or the whip, for their impertinence or rebelliousness.
2. During an evening at a tavern with your long-time acquaintances, the political discussion becomes heated and one of the party intimates strongly but vaguely that the local opposition party leadership (of which you are a member) clings to power because of its willingness to offer bribes. What should you do about it?
A. Nothing at the time and nothing in front of other people. Avoid mentioning it then, but send a respectful letter through a Second to the other person shortly thereafter, asking for an explanation of his actions or words.
B. Call the attention of other witnesses to the insult just after it happens. Leave the scene immediately and send a written challenge to a duel to the person who insulted you.
C. Confront the other person immediately, explaining that he has impugned your honor. Slap his face with a glove or your hand, and tell him that your Second will deliver a demand to him for a duel to settle the matter.
Advocates of the Code of Honor held that its formalities minimized spontaneous escalations of violence, allowing passions to abate and providing opportunities for mediation and reconciliation. Moreover, the Code cautioned against reacting immediately and in front of other people because such an uncontrolled reaction would insult the integrity of the group and would preclude any resolution of the dispute except through a duel. The careful procedures the participants were expected to follow were explicitly detailed. The person who felt insulted and the person whom he thought had insulted him were the "Principals." Each of them found "Seconds," who acted on their behalf at various points in the dispute. The aggrieved Principal was expected to write a polite note to the other Principal (delivered to him by the first Principal's Second), asking for a clarification of his words or actions. If the response did not satisfy the aggrieved Principal, he would write another note, issuing a challenge to a duel, which the Seconds would arrange.
3. You have been sent a note asking for an explanation of your words or actions, but you refuse to respond satisfactorily and repeatedly ignore the challenger's request for an explanation or his later challenge to a duel. What is likely to happen next?
A. You and your friends have a good chuckle over it all and get back to your work, knowing that dueling is unlawful.
B. You send the challenger's note to the local police requesting a judge to issue an injunction against the challenger to stay away from you.
C. The challenger posts a notice in a public place, naming you as a coward who is unwilling to defend his honor. As a consequence, your friends shun you, your business fails, and any political aspirations you may have had are now finished. Your family is shamed by their loss of honor.
The Code of Honor was seen as existing in a society in which the law might act to defend and protect many things, but did not act to defend your personal sense of honor, which could be taken from you if you did not think enough of it to defend it. Dueling was technically illegal in every state in which it was practiced (with the punishment ranging from execution to disbarment from public office), but the law was rarely enforced. Moving the defense of one's honor under the umbrella of the law—through such things as the establishment of libel laws and the use of civil suits—was probably one of the causes of eventually quelling the practice of dueling.
4. You have sent a note, asking for explanation for someone's words that have offended your honor. In a note of reply, the person explains that he was intoxicated when he said what you found offensive. Is that the end of the matter?
A. Yes. Gentlemen may not have been excused by the law from criminal actions that they perpetrated when drunk, but the point of honor with other gentlemen was satisfied when the offender stated that he had been intoxicated.
B. No. In order to satisfy your honor, the offender was obliged, not only to state in reply to you that he was intoxicated, but also to disavow explicitly the insulting words.
Wilson's Code says, "Intoxication is not a full excuse for insult, but it will greatly palliate. If it was a full excuse, it might be well counterfeited to wound feelings, or destroy character." If the initial insult was "You are a liar and no gentleman," the note must not only explain that he was intoxicated when he said that (or that he does not remember saying it because he was intoxicated), but also must state, "I believe the party insulted to be a man of the strictest veracity and a gentleman."
5. Someone strikes you, but then soon apologizes. Is that all that honor demands?
A. Yes. A heartfelt apology, publicly offered, is to be accepted in a spirit of Christian forgiveness. The honor of both parties is preserved.
B. No, that is not enough. Words alone cannot satisfy for a blow offered first.
Wilson's Code says, "As a blow is strictly prohibited under any circumstances among gentlemen, no verbal apology can be received for such an insult; the alternatives therefore are: the offender handing a cane to the injured party, to be used on his own back, at the same time begging pardon; firing on until one or both is disabled; or exchanging three shots, and then asking pardon without the proffer of the cane."
6. Apart from the Principals and their Seconds, who should be present on the ground during a duel?
A. The duelers' families.
B. Members of the local constabulary.
C. The duelers' ministers or priests.
D. Surgeons and their assistants.
E. The general public.
No one else in this list would have been welcome or even tolerated. Dueling was not a family feud, and having family members present would have been distracting, provocative, and cruel. Dueling was conceived as a private matter between gentlemen, so the general public was certainly not invited to witness it. It was also illegal, and so duels were generally conducted in secret, at a time and place such that police or sheriffs would not interfere. And the clergy did not countenance the practice, and so they would not appear on the dueling ground either.
7. If you are the Principal in a duel and you come onto the ground but then refuse to fight or to continue the fight when required—or you leave the site altogether—what should your Second do?
A. Step in and take your place in the duel to uphold your honor.
B. Try to determine from you the reasons for your actions, explain them to the other Principal and Second, and negotiate the best settlement possible.
C. Ask for mercy from the other Principal on your behalf.
D. Say to the other Second: "I have come upon the ground with a coward. I tender you my apology for an ignorance of his character." Then tell him and the other Principal that they may publicly post your name as a coward.
It was felt that if the strongest means to enforce the system were not in place, it would very quickly become nothing but a farce. During antebellum years, the weapons used were often smoothbore, muzzle-loaded, flintlock pistols, which fired a single bullet and had to be reloaded after each shot. The exchange of shots was sometimes lethal, but often not. Depending on the nature of the dispute and the disputants, honor might be "satisfied" on both sides after an exchange of fire in which neither one of the Principals was hit, or in which one or the other were merely wounded or grazed.
8. As Principal, you appear with your Second at the appointed time and place for the duel. The other Principal also appears with his Second and offers you an apology for his insult. Is your honor satisfied?
A. Yes. The whole point is the reconciliation of disputes.
B. No. At this point the dispute cannot be settled with a mere apology, for the other Principal has placed you in a trying situation far beyond the initial insult. The duel must proceed.
"No apology can be received, in any case, after the parties have actually taken their ground, without exchange of fires." In fact, this rule was sometimes breached, and reconciliation was achieved on the ground before shots were exchanged.
9.Is honor satisfied if one or both of the Principals "delopes"—that is, deliberately fires into the air or into the ground to avoid harming each other, or to show their magnanimity?
A. Yes. It is sufficient, and in many cases, laudable.
B. No. This is not admissible.
If the offence and the challenge were not serious in the first place, it should not have come to the point of a duel. If they were serious, the duel must be taken seriously, or in a way that might even suggest that you do not regard your opponent as worthy to shoot at. As a matter of historical fact, however, either one or both of the Principals did "delope" and afterwards counted the matter settled.
10. After an exchange of shots and neither one of the Principals is hit, can the duel be ended with honor served?
A. No, never. The Principals must reload and continue firing until one of them is hit.
B. Yes, always. The exchange of shots proves each Principal's willingness to defend his honor.
C. Yes, sometimes, depending on whether the Challenger feels that his honor has been satisfied.
If neither Principal is hit, the Second to the one who was challenged should approach the Challenger's Second and ask if he is satisfied. He may say yes, if the original insult or injury was not great, but he may say no if the insult was a serious one, in which case the duel must continue until one or the other of the Principals is hit.
Project Gutenberg provides the full text of John Lyde Wilson's The Code of Honor, or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling. The pamphlet runs to 14 printed pages, in eight chapters of bullet points—short enough for homework reading, or perhaps division and discussion in class.
Colonial Williamsburg's podcast has twice looked at early American dueling—in one podcast on The Code Duello and its application in Europe and the States, and in another on the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
PBS's website The Duel looks in detail at the duel between Hamilton and Burr and provides history on dueling and a teacher's guide for viewing the corresponding documentary, American Experience: The Duel. You can also watch the sections "A Father's Loss" and "The Duel" from the full PBS documentary American Experience: Alexander Hamilton online (scroll forward to 15:27 or right click on the chapters on the thumbnail bar at the bottom of the screen).
Or try the lesson plan and resource collection compiled by the Missouri State Archives' Missouri Digital Heritage: Crack of the Pistol: Dueling in 19th-century Missouri. The lesson plan invites students to read and interpret a variety of primary sources related to dueling in Missouri, including the original 1777 Irish Code Duello.
Thomas Jefferson described the system of growing tobacco that prevailed in Tidewater Virginia and Maryland as "a culture of infinite wretchedness." What do you know about tobacco and the tobacco farming of his time?
1. The first English colonists who landed in Jamestown learned about tobacco from the Native Americans in the area, who taught them to grow it. The colonists, in turn, sent some of their harvest back to England, introducing it as a novelty there.
A. True.
B. False.
2. If a tobacco plantation was a thousand acres, how much of it might typically be under tobacco cultivation at any one time?
A. 30 acres.
B. 100 acres.
C. 300 acres.
D. 600 acres.
3. How large an acreage of tobacco plants could each laborer tend?
A. A half an acre.
B. 1 acre.
C. 2-3 acres.
D. 10 acres.
4. A Tidewater tobacco plantation owner in 1725 might typically have what percentage of his total wealth in the value of his slaves (as opposed to his land, livestock, tools, buildings, and household possessions)?
A. 10 %
B. 30 %
C. 50 %
D. 75 %
5. By 1750, what percentage of the Chesapeake region's population were slaves?
A. 2 %
B. 7 %
C. 15 %
D. 35 %
6. In 1619, the first ship arrived in Jamestown carrying women who intended to marry some of the colonists and embark on new lives. The men had to pay the passage of their brides-to-be, and payment was assessed in tobacco, rather than in gold or silver. How much did each man pay for his chosen woman?
A. 10 pounds of tobacco and 2 hams.
B. 120 pounds of tobacco.
C. 500 pounds (one hogshead) of tobacco.
D. 1000 pounds (two hogsheads) of tobacco and three cheers for His Majesty.
[Question 1] Tobacco was well known in England before the colonization of Virginia. The Spanish had introduced tobacco to Europe after their earliest voyages to the Caribbean and South America. It had reached England by 1565, when Sir Walter Raleigh acquired the habit of pipe smoking and introduced the English to tobacco. At that time, Spain dominated the new tobacco trade. When the Jamestown colonists arrived in Virginia, there was already a robust British and European demand for tobacco.
The Jamestown colonists first attempted to cultivate the variety of tobacco that was native to Virginia, Nicotiana rustica. But this was harsher and therefore inferior to Nicotiana tabacum, the Caribbean variety that the Spanish had made popular in Europe. In 1612 Englishman John Rolfe brought to the Virginia colony seeds of the milder, "sweet-scented" variety from the West Indies. In the Virginia soil, the seed produced a highly pleasant tobacco whose smoking qualities exceeded that which was grown elsewhere.
[Question 2] 30 acres out of 1000 was not unusual. The growing of tobacco enforced a complicated and stringent regimen on the grower. Weather, geography, and soil conditions had to be just right in order to achieve a good crop. All of these factors were present in the Tidewater region, which had fertile, loamy soil that suited the tobacco plant. The region had a relatively temperate climate and, in most years, received an ideal amount of rainfall. The land was also largely flat and most of it was accessible to the many waterways and tributaries that flowed into the Chesapeake Bay, ensuring relatively easy transport of the crop to the ships that would take it to England. For these reasons, the colonists found it "easy" to grow tobacco. Only seven years after John Rolfe shipped the first crop of Virginia-grown tobacco to England, it had become the colony's main export.
The tobacco plant, however, is quite temperamental and demanding. Even within a single field, the plant would be influenced by the amount of sunlight, minerals, water, and wind. Not all of the field would yield the best tobacco, even in years where there was neither too little rain nor too much. Also, growing tobacco rapidly exhausted the soil's nutrients. Without the addition of fertilizer, three years of growing tobacco was all it took to deplete the soil. The easiest solution was to have available large areas of cheap land so that the grower could shift his fields onto virgin soil when his original plot could no longer sustain his crop. At least in the first decades of the colonial settlements in the area, large tracts of cheap land were precisely what the colonists had, so this, too, made it "easy" for them to cultivate tobacco.
The tobacco planter also needed to have some portion of his land in forest because a large amount of lumber went into making the large barrels or hogsheads in which the tobacco crop was shipped, as well as for constructing his drying barns, cold frames, and drying rods, and for fueling the carefully kept fires in the barns that cured the harvested leaves.
Finally, besides the other factors already mentioned that limited the suitable acreage, the larger the plantation was, the larger was the labor force that was needed, and so additional acres of the plantation also had to be devoted to growing the food that the laborers would eat.
[Question 3] About 2 acres of cleared land, with each acre producing about 5,000 plants. This would require bending over about 50,000 times per growing season. One peculiarity of growing tobacco was the extraordinary amount of labor that was required. Unlike other crops, tobacco requires steps in its cultivation that stretch throughout almost the entire year. And many of these steps require intensive, but delicate, and incessant attention by the grower—preparing the beds, sowing the seeds in cold frames, transplanting the seedlings to hilled rows (all this, it was said, was a process as elaborate as making a lace pillow-case), making almost daily passes through the field to carefully pinch off suckers, pinch back the tops, pick off tobacco hornworms by hand, and harvest the leaves as they matured. The leaves then had to be strung on poles and put in drying barns to cure, where ventilation had to be constantly adjusted and small drying fires constantly watched. Afterwards, the leaves had to be taken down, sorted by size and quality, allowed to become slightly moist to make them pliable again, and packed into hogsheads for shipping out.
[Question 4] 50% or a little more of his wealth was typically in the value of his slaves. By 1700, Virginians were importing huge numbers of slaves to work the tobacco fields (it had begun eighty years before), creating what was for some a lucrative "subsidiary" trade, apart from trade in tobacco itself. As large landholdings became rarer, the nature of tobacco cultivation encouraged the increasing numbers of white farmers who could now only rent land to invest in slaves rather than land: Because the soil would be depleted in just a few years, it made sense to the farmer to invest his capital in the labor he could move to the next plot of rented land that he occupied, rather than in the soon-to-be exhausted land itself.
[Question 5] In some areas slave populations grew from 7% (in 1690) to 35% of the region's population in 1750. It rose to about 40% by the eve of the Civil War.
[Question 6] The colonists couldn't do anything with tobacco (beyond what they smoked themselves) except sell it—they couldn't eat it or feed it to livestock or use it in construction. It was only good for converting into cash, which seemed like a very good thing when they could essentially grow "cash" in their back yards and use it to purchase other things they needed, or to pay taxes or fines. Because there was almost nothing else that the colonists could export to England that the mother country could not produce itself (and of better quality), tobacco was doubly useful to the colonists. Very early on, tobacco became fixed as the stable value of other goods, replacing gold or silver in a culture where they were scarce.
With the very rapid growth of tobacco cultivation in the colonies, however, in just a few years there was too much tobacco being grown and prices for tobacco began to drop. Disruptions in the market in Europe, such as caused by the Thirty Years' War, also contributed to a glut and, consequently, much lower prices. One such price fluctuation in 1660 drove many Tidewater tobacco growers close to bankruptcy. The colonists responded with attempts to limit tobacco production and to ensure the high quality of all the tobacco that was shipped with public warehouses, inspectors, and licensed agents.
Nevertheless, all these measures amplified the amount of control exercised over the tobacco trade. This was a colonial, "mercantile" system, whereby the colonists were required to sell their crop only to England. In return, the growers were "protected" in some ways, but only as long as they continued to supply the crop. Many growers, by the beginning of the 18th century, felt trapped by the system, and looked for ways out of it, such as trying to diversify their crops, or to free their slaves, or to develop trade in other goods, or to develop manufacturing. Yet they needed capital in order to do this, which they could only get by selling tobacco. The dilemma they faced in all this suggested to many of them that the colonies would be better off if they were independent from England.
Francis J. Bremer, author of the biography John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father, traces the life of John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
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Michael Ray narrates a basic introduction to indentured servitude and slavery in the North American colonies. The presentation looks at the transition from indentured servitude as the most common form of forced labor to the use of African slaves and the development of the slave trade. It includes excerpts from the oral history of a former slave.
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The story of sugar's transformation from luxury product to ubiquitous commodity in the modern Western diet offers a rich vantage on transatlantic and world history. It also prods students and scholars to deeper consideration of the myriad social, cultural, and economic processes within which even the most seemingly banal substances can be enmeshed. Seminar participants will explore these connections and processes, with special attention to the Caribbean. The link between sugar cultivation and the transatlantic slave trade—and the enduring, intertwined legacies of both—will be an important area of discussion and analysis.
The workshop investigates the interaction between Europeans and Native Americans in the struggle to control North America, both during the colonial era and the early years of American independence. Participants will study early French contact with the Iroquois Great League of Peace, warfare between France and Great Britain and the Iroquois caught in the middle, Patriot struggles against Loyalists and Indians during the American Revolution, and key battles fought at the Fort during the War of 1812, which resulted in the eventual dispossession of the Iroquois after that conflict.
The workshop investigates the interaction between Europeans and Native Americans in the struggle to control North America, both during the colonial era and the early years of American independence. Participants will study early French contact with the Iroquois Great League of Peace, warfare between France and Great Britain and the Iroquois caught in the middle, Patriot struggles against Loyalists and Indians during the American Revolution, and key battles fought at the Fort during the War of 1812, which resulted in the eventual dispossession of the Iroquois after that conflict.
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes Bostonian Samuel Adams's encouragement of Committees of Correspondence, which were letter-writing campaigns to monitor British activities in the colonies.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the European powers continued fight for control of American territory and trade routes during King George's War. American colonists and Native Americans were drawn into the fight and helped gain territory from the French.
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