| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri. By Dick Steward. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. xii, 286 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8262-1284-0.)

Scholarship on dueling has long asked what the institution of choreographed murder reveals about honor and violence in the "Old" South. Now Dick Steward seeks to pose again that question in the narrower field of Missouri. To specificity of place—a state that Steward is at pains to depict as less southern than those of "the Deep South"—he adds change over time. Wealthy migrants from Virginia and elsewhere transplanted the duel to Missouri after it became a U.S. territory in 1803. Steward argues that their single combats attempted to represent the self-control in action celebrated by a 1776 codification of rules for dueling by Protestant Irish gentlemen. These guidelines promised a more peaceful society, in which gentlemen were careful about what they said. But in Missouri the duel quickly became a tool of political advancement for ambitious men such as Thomas Hart Benton or John Smith T. A man who survived a duel with a famous politician could count on rising in both social status and political rank. . . .

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