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Updated: June 2, 2025
Jones, "My friend is dead, sir!" Mr. Cilley, who left a wife and three young children, was a popular favorite, and his tragic end caused a great excitement all over the country. Mr. Wise was generally blamed for having instigated the encounter; certainly he did not endeavor to prevent it.
Aside from accepting the challenge, Cilley had pursued a dignified and proper course. Graves, to put it mildly, had played the fool. He was practically a disgraced man thereafter. The Congressional committee which investigated the matter censured him in the severest terms, and recommended his expulsion from Congress.
Graves then felt himself bound by the unwritten code of honor to espouse the cause of Mr. Webb, and challenged Mr. Cilley himself. This challenge was accepted, and the preliminaries were arranged between Mr. Henry A. Wise, as the second of Mr. Graves, and Mr. George W. Jones, as the second of Mr. Cilley. Rifles were selected as the weapons, and Mr.
He was five successive years the representative of Thomaston. In 1834, when Mr. Dunlap was nominated as the Democratic candidate for governor, Mr. Cilley gave his support to Governor Smith, in the belief that the substitution of a new candidate had been unfairly effected. He considered it a stratagem intended to promote the election of Judge Ruggles to the Senate of the United States.
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.
Cilley, although a man of courage, declined this, on the ground that members of Congress ought not to be called to account outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in debate. "Then," said Graves, "you will at least admit that my friend is a gentleman."
This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman, and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia.
He did not, however, prove to be as skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The duel between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it.
"Some time after this," that is after leaving college, would give the impression that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were not in Washington together till five or six years later probably seven years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce's friend O'Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Washington up to that time.
But the public sentiment that existed at the time must be taken into account before a too ready condemnation of one of the actors in this fearful tragedy. In announcing the death of Mr. Cilley to the Senate, Mr. Williams of Maine said: "In accepting the call, he did nothing more than he believed indispensable to avoid disgrace to himself, his family, and his constituents."
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