Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence by Stuart W. Sanders (review)

Reviewed by: Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence by Stuart W. Sanders James Hill "Trae" Welborn (bio) Anatomy of a Duel: Secession, Civil War, and the Evolution of Kentucky Violence. By Stuart W. Sanders. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Pp. 266. Cloth, 60. 00; paper, 30. 00. ) In this aptly titled monograph, historian Stuart W. Sanders has indeed clinically dissected the May 8, 1862, duel between secessionist William T. Casto and Unionist Leonidas Metcalfe, two prominent Kentuckians on opposite sides of the sectional chasm that had already rent the nation, continued to divide their native state throughout the Civil War, and would inflect the contentious dynamics of cultural identity and historical memory in the Bluegrass State after the war. But such analytical precision does not in any way preclude narrative art, as Sanders conveys the biographical background, cultural context, and social and political milieu surrounding this affair of honor in accessible and enlivened prose. Like an accomplished oil painter, Sanders layers the details of the combatants and their communities, political parties, sectional loyalties, and cultural values in successive chapters that collectively exhibit the landscape of honor, violence, sectionalism, and nationalism—in history and memory—during the late ante-bellum, wartime, and postwar periods in Kentucky. In so doing, Sanders accomplishes his stated purpose to use the duel to show "that Civil War violence went beyond the battlefield. . . . It had its roots in the secession crisis and explains how political and military policies could lead to bloodshed, " and "that despite the carnage of the Civil War, Southern honor culture thrived in the Bluegrass State. " Sanders asserts that the duel and its broader context "also represents a pivot point in Kentucky history, highlighting a cultural change pertaining to interpersonal violence. After the Civil War, even though Southern honor culture remained intact,. . . the elite decided that they no longer needed to adhere to the antiquated conventions of the code duello, " instead embracing "impulsive, spontaneous violence that was fuel-injected by the commonwealth's brand of honor culture" (178–80). End Page 392 Sanders argues that the October 2, 1861, arrest of William Casto and several other "active secessionists" by Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe proved the initial spark that eventually ignited the Casto-Metcalfe duel. Sanders convincingly shows in the first six chapters that both the personal backgrounds and the trajectories of Casto and Metcalfe, as well as the intensifying animosity between secessionists and Unionists in Kentucky before and especially after the Civil War commenced, were essential fuel to that fire. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 chronicle the particulars of the affair of honor that culminated in the duel itself, which resulted in Casto's death by Metcalfe's precise aim with a rifle. Sanders shows this duel to be indicative of the "code duello" at work across the South during the era while also pointing out the singular imprints of Kentucky's masculine honor culture in this specific case. The final three chapters chart the course of Metcalfe's life and career through the end of the Civil War as a prominent officer in Union army operations in Kentucky, the experiences of which prompted his conversion from proslavery Unionist to conservative antislavery advocate who eventually accepted emancipation as a necessary means to preserve the American Union. But Sanders shows that this triumph of Union and associated emancipation did Metcalfe no favors in a postwar Kentucky that embraced Democratic Party resistance to Radical Republican Reconstruction and asserted its prosouthern, white supremacist credentials to render Metcalfe and other wartime Kentucky Unionists pariahs in their home state. All the while, interpersonal violence among political leaders and public figures, many of them connected to the Casto-Metcalfe duel, continued to pervade the state, much of it honor-bound but stripped of the regulatory rituals of the discarded "code duello, " the swan song of which Sanders locates in the 1866 Desha-Kimbrough duel. Sanders engages several prominent historiographical genres in his analysis, including especially foundational works on southern honor and violence by Ed Ayers, Dickson D. Bruce, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Kenneth Greenberg, and, more recently, John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette. 1 In his analysis of sectionalism, proslavery Unionism, and the evolution. . .