By Berry Craig
Special to NKyTribune
When pundits go on about “hard fought political campaigns” they mean verbal battling.
Congressman Chittenden Lyon, D-Eddyville, put up his dukes for real, at least once.
The First District’s man in Washington from 1827 to 1835, Lyon accepted a constituent’s challenge to “go out on fair ground, and fight him a fair old-fashioned Kentucky fist fight,” according to Lewis and Richard Collins’ old History of Kentucky.
The eldest son of Vermont and Kentucky Congressman Matthew Lyon, “he was the champion fighter of that whole region, in his day,” the father and son authors added. Chittenden “was a man of prodigious physical proportions, being 6½ feet high in his stockings, and weighing 350 pounds.”
Lyon’s antagonist, Andy Duncan, was “a man of like powerful frame and strength, and nearly as large, and his equal in personal prowess, for both were as game as Old Hickory himself.”
The history book doesn’t say which campaign featured the dustup with Duncan, who “bitterly opposed” Lyon.
In any event, “Lyon had braved too many storms, and steered too many flat and keel-boats over dangerous shoals, to” spurn “so fair a proposition.” After all, a precious vote was at stake.
“So, at it they went — Duncan quite confident he could give the colonel a good trouncing. No easy task it proved.”
The brawl “was long and bloody, and neither showed signs of relinquishing the field or even whispering, ‘hold, enough,’” the Collinses also claimed.
“At last, friends parted them, and called it a drawn battle. The contestants washed, took a drink together of Old Robertson whisky (of which they were both fond), shook hands, and made friends for the occasion, as they were personally. Duncan kept his part of the contract, and gave a hearty vote for his jolly competitor in the square stand-up fight.”
Matthew Lyon was a political warrior, too. In 1798, when he was a fiercely Jeffersonian congressman from the Green Mountain State, he spat in the face of a Federalist foe on the floor of Congress, triggering a tussle with his target. Ever after, he was “the Spitting Lyon.”
After he moved to Kentucky and helped found Eddyville, Bluegrass State voters sent Lyon back to Congress. He represented his new constituency from 1803-1811.
When a local lout disparaged Lyon over his great expectoration, a scuffle ensued in which Lyon bit his critic’s thumb off. It was self-defense. The scolder aimed to gouge the solon’s eyeball out.
In 1854, the state legislature created Lyon County, naming it for Chittenden. Eddyville is the county seat.
“The Spitting Lyon” and his cub are buried in the old city cemetery.
Berry Craig is the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. He is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and lives in Mayfield, where he was born and reared. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com