Pistols and politics
Published June 13, 2015
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, June 12, 2015.
Politicians and pistols have a colorful history in North Carolina, which might be modernized if a measure is enacted to allow legislators and their staffs to carry concealed weapons on General Assembly property — even in the House and Senate chambers.
Proponents of House Bill 562 say security concerns are behind it. Perhaps lawmakers ought to be armed to protect themselves from terrorists, assassins and constituents, but politicians in times past more often used guns against each other. Keeping loaded firearms at the ready once again will create opportunities to settle political and personal disputes with gunfire. There are precedents in North Carolina, although none took place inside a legislative building.
• The state’s most prominent victim of a duel was Richard Dobbs Spaight, who was shot and mortally wounded by John Stanly in New Bern in 1802.
Spaight had been a delegate to the Continental Congress, a member of the Constitutional Convention, governor from 1792 to 1795 and a U.S. representative from 1798 until 1801, when he was replaced by Stanly.
Spaight’s death prompted the legislature to ban dueling, but that law was widely ignored.
• Montfort Stokes, a future U.S. senator and North Carolina governor, was wounded in a duel by legislator Jesse D. Pearson near Salisbury around 1810.
Said to be “sudden and quick in a quarrel,” Pearson accused Stokes of authoring an unsigned publication against him. For his part, according to William S. Powell’s Biographical Encyclopedia of North Carolina, Stokes was “an inveterate politician, but his love of gambling and his dangerous temper frequently got him into trouble.”
He survived his trouble with Pearson and in 1830 defeated Richard Dobbs Spaight Jr. to become governor.
• Samuel Price Carson was born in the Pleasant Garden area of Guilford County in 1798. After serving in the state Senate, he defeated Robert Brank Vance for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1824. Their political differences continued, however, and eventually led to a duel in 1827, when Carson shot and killed Vance.
Carson later moved west and in 1836 signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Carson County, Texas, is named for him, the duel having been forgotten or not held against him.
• Jesse Pearson’s brother, Joseph, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1809 to 1815, during which time he fought a duel with Virginia Congressman John George Jackson, shooting him in the hip.
“For many North Carolina gentlemen, honor was to be defended at all cost, for it had ‘personal credit’ and ‘clear economic value’ in the South, writes historian Joe Mobley,” according to the North Carolina History Project. “Antebellum editor Charles B. Dew considered ‘the modern practice of dueling’ to be a remnant of medieval knighthood and chivalry.”
Politicians today are no less honorable than their 19th century predecessors. Nor any less hot-tempered. So, when they quarrel and trade insults, they should have their guns close at hand.
