THE DUELIST

John M. Daniel, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, sat alone in his office as he waited for the poet to arrive. Earlier, they had discussed the possibility of the writer contributing to the newspaper. But they were much alike, these two—brilliant, brooding, temperamental—and the negotiation had turned sour. It worsened when Daniel made disparaging remarks about the writer’s mounting debt and budding romance. The poet, infuriated, had dashed off a note challenging the editor to a duel.

Daniel became the editor of the Richmond Examiner at age 22. Soon he owned it.

Daniel knew from the stories circulating in July 1848 that the poet had been frequenting local taverns, imbibing freely, and entertaining his barroom admirers with his latest rhymes. True to form, when Edgar Allan Poe appeared at Daniel’s door, he was drunk.

Daniel packed a lot into his brief, turbulent life. He served variously as a U.S. diplomat, journalist, and Confederate staff officer. He is best known, however, as the rabidly proslavery, secessionist, and anti–Jefferson Davis editor of the wartime , the South’s most important newspaper. “No one man in all the Southern Confederacy,” an early biographer of Daniel wrote,