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Menifee, a note to Cilley then in his seat in the House, saying: "In declining to receive Colonel Webb's communication, you do not disclaim any exception to him personally as a gentleman. I have, therefore, to inquire whether you declined to receive his communication on the ground of any personal exception to him as a gentleman or a man of honor." Mr.
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.
A few weeks later, in the summer of 1821, being then seventeen years old, Hawthorne left Salem for Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, by the mail stage from Boston eastward, and before reaching his destination picked up by the way a Sophomore, Franklin Pierce, afterwards President of the United States, and two classmates of his own, Jonathan Cilley, who went to Congress and was the victim of the well-remembered political duel with Graves, and Alfred Mason; he made friends with these new companions, and Mason became his room-mate for two years.
He loved to subdue his foes; but no man could use a triumph more generously than he. Let us resume our narrative. In spite of the opposition of Judge Ruggles and his friends, combined with that of the Whigs, Mr. Cilley was re-elected to the legislature of 1833, and was equally successful in each of the succeeding years, until his election to Congress.
His salary was to be five hundred dollars, and he entered on his duties about the beginning of 1836. The change was welcomed by his friends, or such of them as were still near enough to him to know of his affairs; and from this time his college mates, Pierce, Cilley, and especially Bridge, interested themselves in his fortunes.
Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional appropriation.
During its course, after each fruitless exchange of shots, efforts were made to end the affair, but Graves refused to accept Cilley's statement, again repeated, that he had no reflection to cast upon Mr. Graves, and Cilley refused to abandon the position he had taken with regard to the editor. Never did a more foolish punctilio bring about so terrible a result.
Three others, Cilley, Benson and Sawtelle, were afterward members of the United States House of Representatives. Surely there must have been quite a fermentation of youthful intellect at Bowdoin between 1821 and 1825. Franklin Pierce was so deeply interested in military affairs that it was a pity he should not have had a West Point cadetship.
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.
Cilley in replying to an editorial in The New York Courier and Inquirer, criticised severely the conduct of its proprietor, James Watson Webb, a noted Whig editor of that day. At this, the latter, being deeply offended and failing to obtain a retraction by Cilley of the offensive words, challenged him to mortal combat.
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