Nearly two years before the first shots were fired in the Civil War, simmering hostilities over slavery erupted on a "field of honor" in California, where a pro-slavery judge mortally wounded an anti-slavery senator in a duel.
The duel showed how political disagreements over slavery had become increasingly violent, culminating in 1861 when the war broke out.
On Sept. 13, 1859 -- 150 years ago today -- Sen. David Broderick, D-Calif., and Chief Justice David Terry of the California Supreme Court faced off at 10 paces near the San Francisco-San Mateo County line at Lake Merced. Broderick fired first, but his hair-trigger pistol went off prematurely and the bullet landed in the ground. Terry then fired a bullet into Broderick's chest; Broderick, 39, died a few days later from the wound.
"They have killed me because I was opposed to slavery and a corrupt administration," Broderick said from his deathbed.
The Senate's historian, Don Ritchie, said that as Northerners and Southerners settled in California, the tensions over slavery spilled over into the free state.
Terry was from Kentucky; Broderick was born in Washington, D.C., but his family later moved to New York City. He went to California for the gold rush and wound up making it rich in real estate.
Although the Republican Party had emerged as the national abolitionist political movement, the California Democratic Party had an anti-slavery wing, with Broderick as its chief. This enraged Terry, a pro-slavery Democrat. He leveled a personal attack on Broderick at a political convention, a few months before the duel, that eventually led to their fateful encounter.
Terry charged that the anti-slavery Democrats "have no distinction they are entitled to; they are the followers of one man, the personal chattels of a single individual, whom they are ashamed of. They belong, heart and soul, body and breeches, to David C. Broderick."
Terry mocked them for claiming the support of Sen. Stephen Douglas, an Illinois Democrat who tried to straddle a middle ground on slavery and went on to lose the presidential race to Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
"Perhaps they do sail under the flag of Douglas, but it is the banner of the black Douglass, whose name is Frederick, not Stephen," Terry said to cheers at the convention. Frederick Douglass was a former slave and abolitionist, and invoking his name was meant as a slur, historian Ritchie said.