7/30/2023 0 Comments Early 1800s photo gun![]() Ward was arrested and charged with murder. ![]() The Ward boys fled the building students rushed to Butler’s aid, carrying him to his house, where a doctor attended him. Matthews confronted the teacher, calling him a “damned scoundrel” and a “coward.” Matthews and William Butler scuffled, and in the course of the altercation, Ward pulled out his pistol and shot his opponent. Butler had no inkling that his actions had incensed the elder Ward brother, and he greeted all three brothers cordially. The next day the boy’s older brother, Matthews Ward, purchased two small pistols and returned to the school with William and another brother, Bob. The punishment did not go over well in the Ward household. This was a severe form of punishment, but not unusual in the mid-19th century, an age when corporal punishment in schools was the norm in many places. His teacher called him a liar and administered a whipping. Butler, a stern teacher, confronted the young Ward about eating in the classroom. One of those was William Ward, the son of a prominent cotton merchant. William Butler was a 28-year-old teacher, a Yankee immigrant to Kentucky who had helped found the Louisville School, an institution that attracted students from some of the best families in town. The deadly encounter between the two men was triggered by a trivial matter: eating a bunch of chestnuts during class. At a time when there wasn’t yet a national media, this case prompted a legal conversation that might be worth resurrecting today. Ward was a news sensation, prompting national outrage over the slave South’s libertarian gun rights vision and its deadly consequences. ![]() The 1853 murder of William Butler by Matthews F. ![]() was more than 150 years ago, in Louisville, Kentucky. Though little remembered now, the first high-profile school shooting in the U.S. But there’s actually precedent, deep in American history, for school shootings to shift the gun debate. Will it change policy? Skeptics doubt it, having watched time and again how previous shootings vanish from the headlines with no change to our national debate over guns. This weekend, thousands of people are expected to gather in cities and towns across America for the “March for Our Lives,” a national response to the horrifying school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Saul Cornell is a professor of American History at Fordham University, He is the author of A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America. ![]()
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