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. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville," its real character is hit off to the life.
When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.