Transplanted Texan Fights Duel With U.S. Senator
California Democrats allowed David Smith Terry, chief justice of the state supreme court, to address their convention on July 18, 1859 after he promised to behave himself.
Nothing was more important to the transplanted Texan than his good name, and he never backed down from a fight. While other 13 year old boys stayed home with their mothers, he risked his life for Lone Star independence. When Texans fought a second war with Mexico, the young lieutenant won the respect of fellow Rangers twice his age.
Bitten by the gold buy in 1849, David Terry joined the army of fortune hunters that invaded California. He soon realized, however, that prospecting was a losing proposition and returned to practicing law.
As a Know-Nothing candidate in 1855, Terry was elected to the highest court of the 31st state. In two short years, he was promoted to the post of chief justice.
With his term due to expire at the end of 1859 and the Know-Nothings no longer an influential force, Judge Terry tried to get back in the Democrats’ good graces. But his old allies held a grudge and refused to reward the defector with a reelection nomination.
Given the opportunity to address the state convention, Terry turned what was supposed to be a swan song into in a double-barreled blast at Sen. David C. Broderick, leader of the party’s anti-slavery faction. The Tammany Hall product was a Douglas Democrat, the Texan slyly conceded, but his hero was black abolitionist Frederick Douglas not presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas.
A few days later over breakfast with a good friend of his accuser, Broderick responded to the charge. Calling Judge Terry “a miserable wretch,” the senator snarled, “I have spoken of him as the only honest man on the bench in a corrupt supreme court, but now I find I was mistaken. He is just as bad as the others.”
Broderick had impugned his integrity, and Terry would not stand for it. Believing a jurist should not break the law by dueling, he waited until the fall elections to submit his resignation and to seek satisfaction as a private citizen.
Terry wanted to be fair, which meant allowing Broderick to retract his rash remark. But Broderick was not about to apologize, and preparations proceeded for the one-on-one combat.
Hoping to avert senseless bloodshed, a mutual acquaintance knocked on the senator’s door the night before the duel. A cocky crony refused entrance to the peacemaker explaining, “It’s no use. You are too late. The fight has got to come, and this is the best time for it. Broderick never had a better chance. He can hit the size of a ten-cent piece at this distance every time.”
The overconfidence in the senator’s camp went all the way to the top. “Don’t you fear,” Broderick assured a worried supporter. “I can shoot twice to Terry’s once.”
In sharp contrast to the devil-may-care attitude of his adversary, Judge Terry kept
to himself preferring to let his pistol do the talking. His reply to the “good luck” encouragement of a friend revealed grim determination mixed with compassion. “I will hit him, but I do not want to kill him.”
The combatants waited for an hour and a half on the morning of Sept. 13, 1859 for their seconds to work out the details. Terry lost the coin toss and had to face the rising sun.
Six San Francisco newspapers covered the confrontation, the most famous in California history. Their eyewitness accounts told the riveting story.
“Mr. Broderick lost all presence of mind and trembled,” reported the Eco del Pacific. “Meanwhile, his antagonist remained as immovable as a statue.” That was how the correspondent for The Phare saw it too. “Judge Terry was as cold as a marble statue. Not a muscle of his body moved. Broderick was less collected. His cheeks were flushed.”
The Alta described the fateful exchange. “Mr. Broderick partly raised his arm, when his pistol went off prematurely. Mr. Terry raised his weapon deliberately, covered the breast of his opponent and fired.”
Sen. Broderick collapsed with a mortal wound. He lingered at death’s door for three days before finally passing through.
Overnight the slain senator became the martyr of the northern cause. Suitable last words were put in his mouth: “They have killed me because I was opposed to a corrupt administration and the extension of slavery.”
Since saints do not lose their nerve and fire wildly into the ground, a diabolical plot had to be invented. Broderick was handed a pistol with an unusually sensitive trigger fiendishly designed to go off at the slightest touch. The senator’s two seconds, who examined the weapon, disputed the ridiculous claim in sworn testimony.
In spite of the inquest verdict and his murder trial acquittal, David Smith Terry still stands accused of killing Sen. David Broderick in something less than a fair fight. As recently as 1997, a cable-television documentary on dueling presented the hair-trigger fantasy as fact.
“Secession & Civil War” – newest “Best of This Week in Texas History” collection available for $10.95 plus $3.25 postage and handling from Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 or order on-line at twith.com.
We Are ALL Pelicans: The Harsh Consequences Of Environmental Pollution
Last night I dreamed that I was interviewing Oscar the Grouch. But when I woke up, I discovered that it was only a leg cramp that had caused the dream. Do you know how to cure leg cramps? Here’s how. Use an exercise that physical therapists call “The clam shell.”
Assuming that this evil cramp is in your right leg, then lie down on your left side, thrust your right hip as far to the left as you can go, bend your right leg half-way, and then move your right knee up to the ceiling and down to the bed or floor a few times — like a clam shell opening and closing. Voila. End of cramp.
It’s the sideways motion of your leg that does it. The muscles get confused. They think that they are only spozed to move back and forth, not sideways.
And clams got me to thinking about pelicans and all that oil-spill mess in the Gulf. If someone doesn’t contain that spill soon, our oceans could become hopelessly polluted — and if the oceans lose their ability to breath oxygen into the atmosphere and our oceans die, then you and me will probably die too.
When our oceans’ inability to process oxygen is combined with our disappearing forests’ inability to process oxygen plus our reduced oxygen levels caused by car exhaust, air travel and war machines, then any fool can tell that we humans will soon be in big trouble — not to mention that nobody seems to notice the huge amounts of totally dangerous nuclear waste we are accumulating, along with enough piles, mounds and masses of plastic Coke bottles generated daily to be seen from the moon if they were all in one place.
Am I the only one alive today that notices this stuff?
Anyway, after I woke up from the Oscar the Grouch dream, I got to thinking about pelicans. You know, the ones all covered with oil; the ones with the look in their eyes that says, “What happened? What hit me? Help!” And that “greasy-pelican” look could pretty much become ours soon too, in a shorter amount of time than we would like — covered with pollution, wondering what the freak had happened to us and slowly dying.
Not only that but there are approximately six billion people on the planet right now and each one of us has added at least one plastic bottle per (week, day, month, check one) to the landfill — or what used to be our farmland. Dig into the ground almost anywhere 20 years from now and you won’t hit oil. You’ll hit plastic. And rusted-out old cars. And toxic chemical sludge. And nuclear waste.
Unless something changes drastically in the very near future, in less time than we can imagine, we are all gonna be pelicans too.
PS: Actually, the human race does have one saving grace on the horizon — the end of oil. When we are out of oil in a few decades, at least there won’t be so much carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere any more. Who would have thought that being forced to go back to candlelight, horse-drawn buggies, caissons, cavalry and manual typewriters would be just the ticket to save the human race from extinction?
PPS: I was listening to progressive radio talk-show host Mike Malloy the other day and some right-winger commented that, “If only Ronald Reagan was alive today, he would have searched for an answer to the oil spill problem — and to all of our other problems too.” Dream on, wingnut. The only answers that Ronald Reagan ever searched for involved looking for newer and better and more corrupt ways to make him and his rich buddies even richer.
I’m not sure if I got Mike Malloy’s quote exactly right here or not — because I was too busy cleaning my apartment to take notes. Yes, after all these years I’ve finally found a house-cleaning system that works for me! Every weekday between 6 pm and 8 pm, I listen to Malloy’s radio talk-show on Green 960 AM and clean house. Then I get so angry at all the major Republican neo-con screw-ups he tells us about that I take my anger out on my apartment and actually manage to get stuff cleaned up and/or thrown out.
Next I’m going to take on gardening, another task that I hate, and garden from noon to 3 pm every day while listening to Randy Rhodes — taking my anger out on the weeds.
Currently every kind of right-winger you can imagine is busy telling me that if only America puts Republicans back in office, then they will clean up America’s mess. Not! Republicans and their various rich-dude allies are the very ones who made most of this freaking mess in the first place — as well as getting all us poor sweet victims of their nefarious plans to be all scrambling at each others’ throats while they, like the Beagle Boys, clean out the mint.
It’s like the old “Hair of the dog that bit you” theory I guess — that if we only drink more of the Republican neo-con Kool-Aid that got us drunk in the first place, our hangover from the last batch won’t hurt quite so badly? How naive do they think that we are?
If we really want to clean house in Washington, we should do it while listening to Mike Malloy!
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Ira Chernus nails it (again). We ALL need to be more patriotic: How do we tie progressive positions on the issues together in a story that is simple (because any successful political narrative must be simple, as Lakoff has taught us) and patriotic, a story that feels profoundly American? How do we fight for control of the symbolic meaning of the flag and the story that it represents?
Empathy is certainly a good place to start. In the now-mythic old rural America, which still sets the tone for successful patriotic narratives, people staunchly guarded their individual freedom; they knew how to take care of themselves (or so the story goes). But even the most rugged individuals recognized that they needed their neighbors’ help from time to time. So, they took care of their neighbors, too. They cared about building up their community. That’s hard-core patriotic language in this country.
Summer Time 2010
Ah, summer, the season of lovely, growing things. Summer’s about to kill me.
All around us, there has been rain, but oh no, not here. We often claim we live in some sort of meteorological black hole. Our weather only sometimes resembles the forecast and rarely matches that of our neighbors. An old high school acquaintance posted on Facebook recently that he was so happy there had been no days over 100 degrees — and here it was the middle of June in Central Texas. HELLO — Our thermometers at strategic spots on various decks and porches have registered as high as 109 — and certainly well over one hundred several afternoons. Like I said, we’re in our own zone. So I spend much time watering. I water the garden. I water the flowers. I water the dog.
Ah, the summer garden. I water. I weed. I pick. I wash. I pinch off bugs and worms. I shell black-eyed peas, cut the “spines” from the spinach leaves. I cook squash. And squash. And squash. Don’t get me wrong. I do love squash. It’s just sort of labor intensive, but not nearly so much as the peas and spinach, which I also find delicious. With all the peelings and scrapings and discarded parts, I’m often tempted to start that compost pile I’ve always threatened. But that would be yet another project demanding my attention, and extra time is something I truly don’t have in the bank.
Soon there will be potatoes to dig, wash, and prepare. And onions. And peppers and okra to pick. And tomatoes. And cucumbers. And cantaloupe. And whatever else I forgot. If I don’t go out to pick the asparagus each and every day and sometimes twice, it turns into little trees before I know it. Asparagus and okra are impatient vegetables. I think sometimes they can grow visibly larger in the time it takes for me to walk from one end of the garden to the other.
Although our plums are barely ripe, our kind, generous neighbors offered me enough of theirs to make two batches of jelly. This was a new experience for me, and one that deserves its own story. (Stay tuned). Soon we will have peaches to freeze and grapes for more jelly — and for wine. I can’t think about that yet. So much work. And hot work to boot!
So for all my trouble, I was stung by something in the garden that burned like fire and now itches uncontrollably. But we’re eating well. At least I am. When Zack is hungry, he’s apt to grab the first thing he sees — or want meat and tomatoes as quickly as possible. I warned him if he didn’t start helping eat some of this squash, a garden would not be on my agenda next year. Although Zack does a huge amount of work plowing, tilling, planting and mowing around the perimeters— it seems he always becomes consumed with some other major project just about the time the garden becomes a real chore. Then the weeding, watering, picking, cleaning and cooking all falls to me. And sometimes the eating — unless I put it in front of him and tell him, “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.”
The ducks and ducklings flew away when our tank dried up. I guess those babies learned to fly just in time – -and I hope they found another home close by. From what I could see, of their newly discovered navigational skills, they might not have made it very far.
A bird has been feeding her little ones — in one of my hanging baskets. She occupies herself, for hours a day, fussing at one of the cats. And he, in turn, spends an inordinate amount of time staring at her and the little “peepers” in the nest. It isn’t the first time a bird had chosen this particular piece of real estate for a home.
The dog seems to need more attention in this weather. He certainly has more baths. I’ve found a trick to keep him still while I shampoo and rinse him with the hose I will share this with you because I’m a true humanitarian. I discovered quite by accident last year that if he has one of those chewy stick things in his mouth, he’ll stand stock still for the entire ordeal until I release him to shake off and enjoy his treat. Other than the drooling, it’s a minor miracle. You’re welcome.
The humans around here need more showers in the summer time too. Spending most of our time outdoors and with the kinds of “job descriptions” there are here, we always seem to be hot, dirty or both. I’m grateful we don’t live in the desert. We might think it’s dry here, but I know for a fact it can be worse.
I also discovered that I can keep the dog still much more easily for his “pedicure” if I sing to him. If you ever heard my voice, you might think he’s betting I’ll stop sooner if he’s still and we get it over with quickly. I prefer to think he’s the only one who truly appreciates my dulcet tones.
Have a lovely, HOT week everyone. Remember the sun block and drink plenty of fluids!
Coaching Kids Starts With Jelly Donuts
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not very athletic. I made this realization in the third grade, when I was knocked unconscious 32 times playing dodge ball. After that first game, I remember waking up in the nurse’s office and being told of a special program for “gifted” athletes who were so special they got to wear a football helmet during recess. Of course, I eventually figured out there was no “special program,” and openly expressed my feelings of betrayal when I slammed my helmet on the desk of my high school counselor.
After which I was taken to the hospital with a broken finger.
I live with the memory of being an unathletic child on a daily basis. Particularly when I look in the mirror and see a man whose head still fits into a third-grade football helmet. For this reason, when my daughter asked me to coach her fourth-grade basketball team, I smiled, took her hand, and began faking a seizure. I panicked at the thought of providing guidance to a team of fourth-grade girls, any one of whom could take me to the hole. This includes my daughter, who has inherited a recessive “athletic” gene I call the “monkey factor” because, apparently, it leaps entire family trees.
Of course, none of this mattered to my daughter; she just wanted Dad to coach her team. Knowing this attitude would eventually change (possibly by the end of our first practice), I made the decision to put aside my own petty fears and be her team’s coach. In addition, I also put aside some petty cash for psychological treatment later.
To prepare myself as coach, I read books about fundamental basketball skills. I talked with other coaches. I installed a tiny basketball hoop over the trashcan in my office. Before long, I had gained confidence knowing that with hard work and determination, someone would be able to undo the damage I was doing.
For our first practice, we worked on free throws and lay-ups. I chose these areas because, as everyone knows, they are the most common — and easiest ways — of scoring a basket.
Unless you are me.
As it turns out, repeatedly sending a wad of paper through a six-inch hoop over your trashcan doesn’t mean you’ll be able to sink a regulation basketball from the free throw line. Particularly if your entire team and most of its parents are watching, in some cases using phone cameras to send live images to friends while laughing hysterically. Confident that I had taught my team an important lesson in determination, humility, and the value of having a “shared minutes” plan, we moved on to lay-ups. It was at this point I asked parents to please put their phone cameras away. In addition to the distraction it was causing, there were also safety issues to consider since many parents had now moved under the backboard to get a better angle.
When practice ended a week later (okay, but it felt like a week) we joined hands and reached an important understanding as a team:
The coach has no “game.”
Apparently, my players don’t see this as a problem. What matters to them most is if I can be trusted, as their coach, to coordinate the snack rotation. I assured them I could, and things have gone well ever since.
They bring “game,” I bring jelly donuts.
And my helmet.
Just in case there’s a loose ball.
(You can write to Ned Hickson at nhickson@thesiuslawnews.com, or at the Siuslaw News at P.O. Box 10, Florence, OR 97439.)
CENTRAL TEXAS POLITICS: Toll Roads Planned for MoPac (LOOP 1)
“Some Things Never Change
“Mismanagement, special interest pandering, corruption, hidden agendas, misuse of tax dollars and abuse of power continue to run rampant in Texas. It is politics as usual.
There are plans to build two adjacent “managed” lanes, a.k.a., toll lanes, that will tax Texans to drive on the new lanes. Here we have another stupid and costly idea to benefit the wealthy. We need fewer roadways, not more. We need legislators to use available tax dollars more wisely, NOT provide private roadways for the wealthy and to generate more revenue to spend foolishly on other special interest issues.
The plan is just pandering to the wealthy who can afford to drive on their own private roadway, while TxDOT continues to let the “free” (already paid for with taxes) MoPac roadway crumble into further ruin and additional overcrowding.
This simply is Texas politics as it has been for the past several decades. We are being told that the planned toll lanes MAY alleviate congestion in the near future. Toll costs will be “manipulated” to higher costs during hours of increased traffic. Will the tolls be removed after the new lanes have been paid for, say in 100 years? Currently there is no plan to eliminate the tolls and no idea when the lanes will have been paid for.
There are better ways to improve, maintain and repair MoPac and to widen it. It is time to stop diverting gas tax revenues to other special interests and to allow the gas tax to increase proportionately with cost of living adjustments. The gas tax has been frozen for more than 1 decade and legislators continue to divert the gas tax revenue to other interests instead of using the tax dollars to build and maintain our roadways, as was intended.
Too many priorities remain askew here in Central Texas. Soon, there will be many more toll roads built throughout Texas. It is how most things are done, here in Texas, in Washington D.C. and across the nation. Working for the entire community good is forgotten and pushed aside. It really is time to change this attitude and political process especially at our Texas level.
I believe one way to initiate appropriate change is to vote out most incumbents in the next several years of elections, from Gov. Rick Perry on down the line through the Senate and House and down to local government. Perhaps after a while of “voting-out” the special interest motivated, do-little elected and appointed “leaders” we may be able to get back on-track to working in the community’s best interests. I sincerely hope that Texans will get to the polls and do this.
Peter Stern, a former director of information services, university professor and public school administrator, is a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in Driftwood, Texas.
