History We Never Learned In School #1

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

How many duels did Andrew Jackson fight?

He fought 103 duels, most of them defending his wife’s honor.

Thousands of similar duels occurred in the U.S. (the first recorded one occurring in 1621 between two servants).

That’s not counting thousands of flat-out gunfights and acts of violence.

Wild Bill Hickok lost his pocket watch to David Tutt, and got it back in a duel over the latter’s dead body.

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Nowadays the globe-spanning Internet protects people from such violence.

Flamebaiting and flaming are common because 21st Century cyberbullies are protected by anonymity and distance.

Flame wars leave no corpses.

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Vincent Nolte (Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres: Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant, 1854) wrote …

“Young Baring (the banker) was traveling through the western part of Virginia, which was at that time peopled by the roughest class of Americans, and the vehicle he used was a very handsome and newly-varnished traveling carriage. In accordance with the favorite custom of these wild fellows, who usually carried a pen-knife or a nail in their pockets, one of the idlers, who stood and leaned about the door of the tavern, where he had alighted for refreshment, amused himself by scratching with a nail all sorts of ridiculous figures on the varnish of the carriage doors. Baring, who came out of the inn, and caught our friend engaged in this agreeable and polite occupation, the instant he saw what was going on, very sharply expressed his disapprobation. The loiterer responded, ‘Look here, sir, don’t be saucy; we make no ceremony. T’other day we had a European fellow here, like yourself, who was mighty saucy, so I pulled out my pistol and shot him dead, right on the spot. There he lies!’ Baring rejoined, in the coolest manner imaginable, by asking, ‘And did you scalp him too?’ The American was so struck with this, and felt this reproach upon his savage rudeness so keenly, that, after gazing at Baring suddenly and earnestly for a moment in silence, he exclaimed, ‘By God! sir, you must be a clever fellow! let’s shake hands!'”

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By the way, it was Barings Bank that financed the U.S. during the War of 1812.

N.M. Rothschild & Sons didn’t get their poop in group for another decade or so.

What about Haym Salomon being the representative of foreign Jewry?

Nope. He died in poverty in 1785 because the U.S. government refused to honor their war debts.

Congress has a long history of being as tight as a camel’s anus in a sandstorm.
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