A half dozen readers responded to a rather puzzling picture that appeared in August, 1975, in our article on the Hamilton-Burr duel. Among them was Robert Thaden of Golden, Colorado, a man who knows his shooting irons:
The illustration on page 50 shows a pair of pistols. The one on the right is a full-stocked flintlock pistol; the one on the left is a half-stocked cap-and-ball (percussion-lock) pistol.

The point is that it is, I think, impossible that both of these pistols were used in the Hamilton-Burr affair. The one on the right, perhaps. The one on the left, I think not. In the first place, pistol duels ordinarily were fought with very well made, very plain and unornamented full-stocked pistols, either flint or percussion, depending on the date of the duel. In the second place, the Code Duello would not sanction the use of pistols of mixed types. In the third place, the participants would not have accepted the use of pistols of mixed types, because the fellow choosing the flintlock would be at a considerable disadvantage, not only because of the relative unreliability of ignition of the flintlock in comparison with the percussion lock, but also because of the slower “lock time” of the flintlock. In the fourth place, memory seems to tell me that percussion locks were not developed until a few years after 1804, the year of the Hamilton-Burr duel.

The above comments, if correct, prompt questions. …

We addressed these questions to Mrs. Annchen T. Swanson, the public-relations officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, in whose collections the pistols reside. Mrs. Swanson, who said that Mr. Thaden was “absolutely correct in his observation,” gave us the following authoritative explanation:
During the Civil War, Richard Church, the grandson of the original owner of the pistols, Alexander Hamilton’s brother-in-law John B. Church, organized a volunteer company. Having no other arms at hand, he changed the lock on one of the pistols from the old flintlock to the then more modern percussion cap. The frizzen of the original lock can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. Both pistols have a hair trigger without the set trigger behind it. This was unusual in 1796, when the pistols were purchased.

Those hair triggers have been the source of quite a fuss recently. Last spring Virginius Dabney, the former editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch , who is now chairman of the United States Bicentennial Society (a commercial organization), published an article in New York magazine with the dramatic title “The Mystery of the Hamilton-Burr Duel.” His story was related in the tone that one might adopt for an article raising doubts about the guilt of John Wilkes Booth in the Lincoln assassination. Dabney spoke portentously of “questions” that “should be answered” lest “uncertainty … surround America’s most historic confrontation on ‘the field of honor.’”

It