A number of British newspapers in 1825 printed a story about a duel that took place in St Kitts, between John James Amory and George Forbes. It appears that the dispute was over how they both tried to win the affections of an unnamed lady from Nevis. According to the period accounts, the men had been good friends, and when, in late 1824, they realized their mutual interest in the lady, they agreed that neither would take any further actions with her without informing the other first. Unfortunately, when Amory told Forbes that he intended to go to Nevis to “declare himself”, Forbes decided to beat him to the punch and go there first. Forbes wrote immediately to his friend:
“I pledged myself to take no step in the attainment of the object we both have in view, without apprising you so far of the same, as to give you a fair advantage in the pursuit. I have every reason to apprehend, from circumstances that have recently come to my knowledge, that there is a doubt entertained of the sincerity of my attentions, in a quarter, where I am most anxious it should be otherwise considered. ‘Tis, consequently, as act of justice to my own feelings, and due to the lady to remove any unfavorable impression of this nature without delay.”
With this weak excuse for betraying their agreement, Forbes ended his letter professing his “sincere friendship”.
When Amory later passed Forbes on the street in St Kitts, he ignored him and said afterwards that he had “cut” his acquaintance. In an angry exchange of letters, Amory fired off another:
“Sir- By the tenor of your letter addressed to me on Saturday last, I discover that you have committed a breach of promise, in consequence of which I can no longer be upon terms with an individual who as acted so unlike a gentleman.”
This declaration apparently led to the duel on January 3, 1825, in which Amory fatally shot Forbes. A trial was held in February, and – shocking to current norms – the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The verdict was explained this way:
“Several gentlemen of the highest respectability gave evidence as to the honorable manner in which Mr. Amory had acted throughout the unfortunate business, the conciliating disposition he evinced, and the fair and honorable conduct observed towards the deceased…”
It’s hard to imagine a society in which a rivalry between two suitors justified murder, to everyone’s satisfaction.
And who were these two men? George Forbes, referred to as Esquire in the newspapers, is a bit hard to pin down. There were several men named George Forbes during the 1700s and early 1800s who were connected with St Kitts and Nevis, but the timing doesn’t seem to work out to identify the duelist properly.
John James Amory is easier to trace, perhaps because he lived a longer life. He was the son of Benjamin Amory, and both men’s names appear in the Slave Register lists for St Kitts during the early 1800s. At the time of the abolition of slavery in 1834, John James owned two sugar estates in St Kitts, West Farm and Clay Hill. Both properties held large numbers of enslaved workers (about 100 each) who were field laborers, house servants, and performed jobs like distilling and boiling – tasks that were required to manufacture cane sugar, molasses, and rum. The work was brutal, and several of the registries for Amory’s estates recorded that about 10% of the enslaved people had died over each interval between the accounting years. One detail that will require further research is that in the 1834 book, fifteen enslaved people were listed as removed from West Farm, with the reason given as “Condemned by Court of Vice Admiralty”. This generally referred to cases of enslaved people that were somehow involved in illegal slave trading (the transportation of people from Africa to the British West Indies was abolished in 1807).
As far as Amory’s fatal obsession with the lady from Nevis, he seems to have gotten over it. In 1830 he married Frances Gore in Gloucestershire, England and they both returned to St Kitts and their land holdings. The Amory family are connected only by marriage to my husband’s family. His 2nd great-grandaunt, Jessie Cornelia Manchester, married a William Charles Mortimer Amory in 1883. Jessie lived a sadly short life, dying at the age of 32, with the cause of death recorded as only “fever”.
Sources
- The Star newspaper (London), Thursday 17 February 1825
- Ancestry.com. Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
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