A public house—more of a shack, really—somewhere in the Georgia backwoods, the early 1790s. Two men are drinking when words are exchanged. Some trifle, perhaps a bet, maybe a challenge, even just the wrong kind of look—it isn’t clear and it doesn’t really matter. The two men spring to their feet, and come together nose to nose. A torrent of oaths pour from the men’s mouths, each man foretelling the other’s demise as a mist of spittle forms between them. The oaths become more and more bloodcurdling and then, suddenly, they stop. The men head outside. The rest of the drinkers, and the publican himself, follow. The two men strip to their waists as a small crowd forms around them. They begin to circle each other, fists raised, like in a typical boxing match. A few tentative blows are exchanged, and the men clinch up. But they don’t break; for these men have not agreed to a “fair fight”. Now the meaning of the fighters’ terrible half-comprehensible oaths “to tear and rend” each other becomes clear. Gripping each other by the hair, the fighters try to force their thumbs into their opponent’s eyes, while the bystanders place bets as to who will be the first to gouge whom. A visiting Englishman would record what happened next.

“For some time the two combatants avoided the thumb stroke with dexterity. At length they fell to the ground, and in an instant the uppermost sprung up with his antagonist’s eye in his hand!!! The savage crowd applauded, while, sick with horror, we galloped away from the infernal scene. The name of the sufferer was John Butler, a Carolinan, who, it seems, had been dared to the combat by a Georgian: and the first eye was for the honor of the state to which they respectively belonged.”

The shocked response of Charles William Janson, for that was the (real) Englishman’s name, was typical of visitors to the backwoods when treated to such spectacles. Whether they came from overseas or from East Coast islands of refinement like Harvard, these outsiders naturally believed the rural man to be something less than a full human, a savage in the state of nature. To an educated Englishman, such a display was all the evidence he needed of the baleful effects that could only follow when god-given authority—monarchy, of course—was thrown off. “Democracy”, as even a schoolboy knew, meant “rule by the mob” and here, indeed, were its bitterest fruits.

The locals, it would seem, were more than happy to play up to the savage stereotype. But violence for its own sake was not something the backwoodsman engaged in just to shock travellers from Europe and well-meaning missionaries looking to reform him. Nor was it something only the poor sharecropper or trapper engaged in either. For rich man and poor, ultraviolence was a way of life, with its own code, customs and mythology. Fighting bareknuckle and pulling out a man’s eye was an essential part of a masculine culture centred around hard living and, most of all, the defence of individual honour. What might seem to us, today, to be an unconscionable, animal method of fighting was in fact an art—a martial art, something we are wont to forget also existed here, in the West, as much as in the East.

*

We know that the vicious style of fighting that came to be known as “gouging” or “rough-and-tumble” was already widespread as early as the 1730s in America, a good fifty years before independence. In 1735, gouging was said to be “much in fashion” in parts of Chesapeake Bay, and eleven years later, four deaths prompted the governor of North Carolina to appeal to the colonial legislature to make such fights illegal. Soon after, it was made a felony to “cut out the Tongue or pull out the eyes of the King’s Liege People.” A few years later, slitting, biting and cutting off noses were also outlawed. Similar legislation followed in Virginia, to stop “gouging, plucking, or putting out an eye, biting or kicking or stomping upon” citizens. Anti-gouging legislation appears to have gone the furthest in South Carolina, where “premeditated mayhem”, meaning severing another man’s bodily parts, became a capital offence in 1786.

In the earliest years, gouging was generally referred to simply as “boxing”, despite its very obvious differences from the more restrained form of prize fighting that was beginning to be codified during that period. In 1743, an English bareknuckle boxer by the name of Jack Broughton introduced “Broughton’s Rules” at his amphitheatre in London, and these would remain the standard rules for prize fights until 1838. Although rough-and-tumble fights began in the manner of a standard boxing match, with the combatants squaring off on their feet, there the similarities ended. There was no defined space in which to fight, no rounds, and whereas a prize fight under Broughton’s Rules would be halted when one of the fighters fell, under backwoods “no-holds-barred” rules, it had only just begun. And “no holds barred” was not meant figuratively. Fighters really would use whatever techniques they could, whether that meant gouging, strangling or even castration, until their opponent had given up, was incapacitated—or died.

Unlike prize fights, gouging matches were more likely to be spontaneous than staged, the result of an insult or even a thoughtless gesture. Calling a man a “Scotsman” (implying he was low caste, i.e. of Scots-Irish birth), offering him a sip of whiskey without cleaning the mouth of the bottle “and ten thousand more [reasons] quite as trifling and ridiculous are thought and accepted as just Causes of immediate Quarrels”, wrote one unimpressed observer, in 1774.

As is clear from the nickname “gouging”, it was dismemberment, in particular, that became the raison d’être of this style of fighting, and so, quite naturally, various special techniques and body modifications developed towards that end. Some fighters were said to file their teeth to make biting more effective, but by far and away the most common modification was to grow, sharpen and harden the finger nails, to enable eyes to be removed in an instant. Since a successful eye gouge usually brought a fight to an end, eyeballs became a particularly treasured keepsake for victorious fighters.

An eye gouge did not always end a match, though. Another Englishman, Thomas Ashe, recorded a particularly brutal fight that took place after a horse-race. The fighters were a crafty Virginian and an enormous lumbering Kentuckian. Although the Virginian was able to gouge both of the Kentuckian’s eyes out, the fight continued and didn’t end until the Virginian had also bitten off his opponent’s nose and lips. “The poor wretch, whose eyes were started from their spheres, and whose lip refused its office, returned to the town, to hide his impotence, and get his countenance repaired.”

For ordinary folk, the savage violence they were prepared to unleash on one another was, in a very obvious sense, simply a reflection of the broader violence and hardship of daily life, especially on the frontier. Life in the backwoods usually meant poverty, certainly in monetary terms. Even when cotton production was booming, the vast majority of land in the south was owned by a tiny minority. Prosperity and trade simply passed the backwoodsman by. Instead, he lived a thoroughly premodern existence, combining small-scale agriculture for consumption with hunting and gathering in the forest, spending what little money he could scrape together on essentials and bartering for the rest. Add to this dangerous wild animals, rampaging Indians and outlaws, high infant mortality rates, agricultural and natural disasters, and what you have is a recipe for a life in which cruelty and violence, and one’s response to it—kill or be killed—becomes the defining feature. To revel in violence, whether through ghoulish folk-stories and legends or fighting and animal blood-sports was “to beat the wilderness at its own game”, as the historian Elliott Gorn puts it. This explains, too, the dark, sometimes absurd and incredible, humour that underlies a great many of the tales told by the gougers themselves, with ears being pulled off “by the roots”, windpipes “loosened” with a fighter’s bare hands and so forth.

An entire folklore or mythology of over-the-top violence developed, full of stories, legends and even place-names (“Fighting Creek”, “Gouge Eye”) to commemorate particularly notable encounters. As this folklore developed, so the combat took on a more ritualised nature, which included elaborate verbal duels—the media press conferences of the day—where combatants would take it in turns to brag of their skills. Sometimes, these boasts were powerful enough to prevent combat. Take this electrifying boast from champion gouger Mike Fink, from well over a century before Muhammed Ali made verbal blows as much a part of the modern boxer’s repertoire as physical ones.

“I’m a salt River roarer! I’m a ring tailed squealer! I’m a regular screamer from the old Massassip! Whoop! I’m the very infant that refused his milk before its eyes were open and called out for a bottle of old Rye! I love the women and I’m chockful o’ fight! I’m half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o’ me is crooked snags an’ red-hot snappin’ turtle… I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an’ out-fight, rough-an’-tumble, no holts barred, any man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an’ back ag’in to St Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk white mechanics, an’ see how tough I am to chaw! I ain’t had a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise. Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Wherever life was least rationalised, wherever the reach of the market economy and the law was weakest—there the rough-and-tumble life flourished most vigorously. That meant among hunters, trappers and herdsmen as much as croppers. But even men whose lives depended on the incipient markets and trading networks of the backwoods—early agents of prosperity and civilisation, not that you would have known it to look at them—were no less prone to such excesses.

One notable group was the pre-steam boatmen of the major rivers—the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio. The life of a pre-steam boatman who made the thousand-mile journey up and down the Mississippi to and from New Orleans was one of alternating periods of idleness and intense, often perilous but always strenuous, labour. Like herdsmen and hunters, boatsmen were isolated from women for long periods of time, and formed roaming brotherhoods of swaggering, drunken, gambling, fighting men. These men were immortalised in wonderful, sympathetic paintings by George Caleb Brown, and also by the “father of American literature”, Mark Twain, in a vivid description of his childhood home on the river in Hannibal, Missouri. Here’s how Twain described the boatmen:

“Rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailorlike stoicism; heavy drinkers, course frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery. Prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picaresquely magnanimous.”

I found it hard not to think here, with this talk of barbaric finery and everything else, of the ancient Germans as described by Cornelius Tacitus in the Germania. Tacitus tells us that, like the boatmen, the ancient Germans are either at war or settle down to idleness and languor—there is no in-between. “The warriors themselves become sluggish, and embody a strange contradiction in character, for they both love idleness and hate peace.” These vagabonds of the American backwoods also evoke the Chatti, a warlike German tribe who shun all comforts of domesticity for a grizzled, thrilling existence at the sharp end of life. The most distinguished of the Chatti, says, Tacitus, embody a “harsh virtue” that few could imitate—a phrase that certainly fits Twain’s nostalgic description of the almost mythical men who travelled the great river in his childhood. I’ll return to this comparison with the Germania again in just a moment.

While we might expect such a down-and-dirty fighting style to be found among the ordinary folk, it was also common much higher up the social ladder. According to one early commentator, skill at gouging was reckoned essential for a Virginia gentleman—as much as being able to dance, play the fiddle, fence or play cards. One famous upper-class gouging match involved Savannah politician Robert Watkins and State Senator James Jackson. Jackson had to bite off Watkins’ finger in order to save his own eye. As unexpected as the sight of two American politicians attempting to gouge each other’s eyes out might seem, the reality of life for most gentlemen, especially outside the more civilised enclaves of the eastern seaboard, was one of constant challenges, or perceived challenges, to their status, all of which necessitated brutal displays of prowess if face was to be saved. Although hierarchy was the ultimate value among the gentleman class, nobody’s status was so fixed that they could let a challenge go unanswered. Historian Elliot J. Gorn explains that “great planters and small shared an ethos that extolled courage bordering on foolhardiness and cherished magnificent, if irrational, displays of largess.” Gradually, however, a new code of gentility, which took many of its cues from the English aristocracy, would see rough-and-tumble fighting replaced by duelling among young gentlemen, and by the end of the eighteenth century, gouging had become almost entirely a popular art.

If we want, truly, to understand rough-and-tumble fighting, we must go beyond a simple environmental explanation—the harsh backwoods—and look to cultural factors. In particular, if we want to understand why gentleman and pauper alike fought in such a savage manner, we must contend with the notion of honour—something we understand very poorly, if at all, today. Many sociologists and historians have noted that honour is a concept totally at odds with our way of thinking about self and its relation to society. This is demonstrated nicely if we look at an example from modern jurisprudence. While there is legal recourse for slander and libel in modern jurisprudence, there is none for insult, by which is meant damage to a person’s reputation. As far as American or British law is concerned, there can be no material damage in the case of insult. This couldn’t be further from the attitude of the pre-modern European, who, as Norbert Elias, the great German sociologist, reminds us, was very quick to spill blood in order to settle personal disputes. Honour is essentially a social relation, a currency that derives its value from the acknowledgement of others. If others don’t acknowledge your honour, you have none—regardless of what you think about the matter. Dignity, by contrast, is much more suited to a “truly” democratic society like our own, where everybody is assumed to have an inherent value regardless of the opinions of their peers. “Dignity frees the evangelical to confront God alone, the capitalist to make contracts without customary encumbrances, and the reformer to uplift the lowly,” to quote historian Elliott Gorn again.

Honour is central to many traditional societies, where small-scale, face-to-face relationships are the only kind that matter or exist, as opposed to the largely anonymous and bureaucratic relationships that prevail in modern large-scale societies. Social standing is never completely fixed in such societies, because it must constantly be validated by one’s fellow men and women. Shaming is the proper name for the process by which a person’s honour is brought into question. Crucially, only action, not words, can restore a man’s status and validate his claim to honour in response to an act of shaming. It should be clearer, now, why the apparently trivial causes of rough-and-tumble fighting that were noted by observers, like calling a man a “Scotsman”, should receive the savage responses they did. Such an insult was not “mere words”, but a blade aimed at the heart of the target’s very being. Words really were violence.

The concern for honour, as a number of historians have pointed out, was the backwoodsman’s inheritance from the Old World, where his ancestors came from, and a shared concept of male valour that can be traced back to the earliest Indo-Europeans. Since I’ve already made a comparison with the descriptions of ancient German customs contained in the Germania, I’ll return to them again here. The importance of honour to the ancient Germans is richly attested by Tacitus, whether he is describing their sexual morality, tactics in battle or the way in which hospitality functioned. His description of their seemingly mad gambling habits is particularly striking and apropos.

“When sober, the Germans play dice in such a manner as you would marvel at. They play with such disregard of winning or losing that, when they have nothing left to bet with, for a final throw of the dice they will offer their own freedom and life itself. The loser goes into voluntary servitude. However much younger, or indeed stronger he may be, he allows himself to be bound and sold. There is a kind of perverse obstinacy in this. The Germans call it honour.”

This vividly brings to mind what has already been said about the “magnificent, if irrational, displays of largess” that were so essential to the status of the early American gentry. In both societies, backwoods America and ancient Germany, men were loyal to their kin and clan, guarded their women, and defended their personal reputations by bloodshed if necessary. All of which is to say that the hierarchical rural communities of ancient Germany were not so different from the hierarchical rural communities of pre-Revolutionary Georgia or North Carolina, despite the expanses of time and space that separated them.

It’s worth noting, however, that this ancient notion of honour did not pass unchanged from the Old World to the New. Honour-bound societies tend to be heavily stratified, and the particular hierarchy of backwoods society gave the ancient Indo-European concept its own American inflection. Because slave-owning was the basis of society, the slave-owners sat atop the hierarchy, with the slaves at the bottom, and everybody else in the middle. This had important consequences for the expression of honour. In basic terms, it meant that status determined who could challenge whose honour. To a gentleman, an insult from a backwoodsman or a slave was no threat at all—a simple thrashing was enough to right that wrong. Likewise to the free vis-à-vis the unfree man. In a certain respect, though, there was more at risk in a genuine challenge for the free man than the gentleman. Owing to his ambiguous structural position—caught between the slave’s absolute lack of honour and the gentleman’s monopoly on it—the free man had to fight just that little bit harder, just that little bit more ferociously to assert his status. After Independence, the formal democratic ideology of the United States told the free man that he was an equal citizen with every other free man, in stark contrast to the deep social and cultural norms of his people. To fight brutally and win, then, was an assertion of freedom, both from the slave’s abject state and from the mediocrity foisted upon all citizens of the newly created Republic.

Gouging continued well after the end of the Civil War (1861-65). Progress, however, would begin to  undermine the conditions that had allowed it to flourish, both materially and morally. Growing demand brought more of the backcountry into the wider economy and out of the subsistence pattern, and with economic integration came towns, schools, churches, steamboats and railroads—“civilisation” at last. These institutions stabilised life and fostered the more restrained ethos of other parts of the country that had had all or many such institutions long before the backwoods. Of course, the provocations and justifications for violence remained, but the response—“premeditated mayhem” as the Carolina legislature had it—came into question in a way that it had never done before.

Another important factor in the decline of this violent art was the arrival of new technology, including new forms of weaponry such as bowie knives and, especially, revolvers. The first modern revolver appeared in 1835, and cheaper editions soon followed. The stigma that surrounded the carrying of weapons gradually disappeared, and so it became far more common for disputes to be settled by knife or gun. However sanguinary gouging matches might have been, lethal force was never the norm.

The arrival of the revolver ushered in a golden era for the duel, a relatively new custom imported from Europe. As I’ve already noted, by the end of the eighteenth century, the native aristocracy was increasingly looking to their British counterparts for their social cues, and that meant circumscribed contests, with strict protocols, rather than the traditional “no-holds-barred” affairs. In time, these new customs also became the model for ordinary people looking to emulate their betters and lay claim to higher social status. So it was that the savage and direct fury of honour offended was replaced with something that looked, and felt, much more like murder in cold blood.