(LE) Lincoln and "Stand Your Ground"

An excellent blog post for the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik discusses the roots of "stand your ground" laws in nineteenth century America, with particular mention of Lincoln. An excerpt:

"In France and England, though, duelling was meant to reinstate an aristocratic code of honor against the encroachment of the middle class. (This is dramatized in the strange and wonderful Ridley Scott film “The Duellists.”) But in the ideal European duel it was likely that both parties would survive. In America, around the same time, the code of honor took a very different form. American duels were dangerous, usually fought to the death, and they left in their wake that special American thing the feud. Instead of dissolving personal quarrels in a solvent of honor, the American way of duelling intensified them. In 1808, for instance, two men fought a duel in Maryland—with rifles, and at thirty steps. During the Jackson Administration, when General Armistead Thomson Mason challenged Colonel John Mason McCarty, McCarty, it’s said, “would only consent to meet him on such terms as would result in the certain destruction of one, or both.” (McCarty had suggested that they fight with pistols at point-blank range on top of a keg of gunpowder.) In Europe, the honor of the duellist was a concept that ennobled and abstracted violence. In America, it was a concept that empowered and invigorated it."

In the full article at  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/07/abraham-lincoln-and-the-birth-of-stand-your-ground.html Gopnik discusses Lincoln's famous rejection of vigilante violence in the Lyceum speech. This helps to put the otherwise somewhat exaggerated-sounding paean to "cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason" into perspective: Lincoln is contrasting an Enlightenment vision of legality and civility to the barbarism of codes emphasizing blood vengeance and honor-or-death.