"To Duel or Not to Duel:"
Constitution-Making in Antebellum Kentucky and Ohio

Elizabeth R. Osborn
Indiana University

This paper will use the law as a means to explore the relationship between gender, culture and law-making in antebellum Kentucky.  It is a part of a larger project that will look for similarities and differences in the culture and law of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.   These states share not only geographic, but constitutional space as well.  Indiana borrowed sections from both Kentucky and Ohio's constitutions when it wrote its own in 1816.  Within an eighteen-month period in 1849-51 all three states held second conventions.  In the recorded debates and personal papers, convention delegates explicitly articulated fears about how potential sections of the new constitution challenged societal constructions of masculinity and femininity.  How perceptions regarding gender surfaced during the debates and proceedings surrounding the issue of dueling in  the Kentucky and Ohio conventions is the focus of this paper.