There are dozens of other names
once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock;
Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George
William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. "Gales
and Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and
lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and
the public printing went hand-in-hand.
For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent "affairs of
honor"--notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South
Carolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and
one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the
yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of
Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal
of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.
I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents
from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made.
They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire.
It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that
Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a
darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my
associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal,
Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr.
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