“Terry could not countenance this affront to his honor, and subsequently challenged Broderick to a duel. On the cold, misty morning of September 13, 1859, the two men squared off in a verdant ravine just over the San Francisco city line, near the south side of Lake Merced. Broderick fired first, and missed. Terry did not. The senator hung on for a few feverish days, and then died (but not before he claimed, on his deathbed, that he was murdered for opposing “slavery and a corrupt administration”). Fairly or not, the duel was widely seen thereafter as a proxy battle for the pro- and anti-slavery constituencies in California, and across the entire country.”
If, like me, you are dispirited by our national political climate, you may occasionally entertain the sense that you are witness to an era of unprecedented moral debasement. Creeping oligarchy, the re-emergence of an atavistic paleo-conservatism, the slow death-wheeze of the fourth estate, the rise of a relentlessly cheery techno-utopian Gatsby class—we’ve got a lot working against us. But if you think our era is defined by its high concentration of professional reprobates, or that the stakes for our republic are particularly high, you might find lukewarm comfort in the story of Judge David Smith Terry.
In the pantheon of salty, contemptuous bastards in American politics, not many can out-do Terry, a bowie-wielding, ardent-pro-slavery Texan with a volcanic temper, who rose to become Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court in the mid-nineteenth century. Like some shadow-character from Blood Meridian, Terry’s life mixed tragedy, vulgarity, absurdity, and spite in equal…
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