Lizzie Nutt's Sad Experience...The Great Dukes Trial at Uniontown, PA

Philadelphia: Barclay & Co., C. 1883. Wraps. Early or first edition. 8vo, 9.5 x 6 inches, in recent plain green wraps, with original sea-blue printed cover bound in, rear wrap missing. 64 (1) pp, 7 woodcut plates. Contents good to very good, spottiness and wear to front wrap and to title page, last page with some edgewear, but mainly the contents are very good. The episode is usually remembered in Uniontown as the “Dukes–Nutt” affair (and in some retellings as the “Great Dukes trial”). In December 1882, Uniontown lawyer and newly elected state legislator Nicholas L. Dukes tried to end his engagement to Elizabeth “Lizzie” Nutt by writing her father, Civil War veteran Captain Adam Clark Nutt, accusing Lizzie of “questionable moral behavior;" after heated correspondence, Captain Nutt went (with a companion) to confront Dukes at Dukes’ rooms in the Jennings House on Christmas Eve 1882, carrying a cane and a loaded .38 Colt, and during a physical altercation Dukes shot and killed him, then immediately surrendered to the sheriff. Dukes was tried beginning March 10, 1883 and was acquitted on self-defense grounds—framed as the right to defend one’s “castle”—a verdict that provoked furious public backlash, threats toward jurors, and calls for lynching under the era’s “honor code.” Six months later, Captain Nutt’s son James Nutt shot Dukes to death on a Uniontown street; because local passions made a jury difficult, venue was shifted, and James Nutt’s January 1884 Pittsburgh trial leaned heavily on an “irresistible impulse” insanity theory and ended in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, followed quickly by his release and return to Uniontown as a celebrated avenger. Good. Item #h44586

Price: $175.00