WINDSTONE HOMEOWNERS' ASSOCIATION

Tucked into a copse of oaks toward the east end of Pleasant Breeze, the Coleman Family Cemetery lies just past that street’s intersection with Windstone Parkway. Neighbors may not even be aware that those stone steps lead to a graveyard. The cemetery has only three readable markers. Two of the elaborate stones commemorate William Harris Coleman of Virginia (1778-1842) and his wife, Kentuckian Ann “Nancy” Hawes Coleman (1793-1853.) Footstone remnants stand at the front of each grave, their inscriptions now obliterated. The couple’s 1811 marriage would have been considered an auspicious union between two respected houses; both William’s and Nancy’s fathers had served as officers in George Washington’s Continental Army during the American Revolution.
As the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, William H. Coleman would have had opportunity to buy lands “reclaimed” from the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations after Mississippi’s admission to the Union. William Coleman registered a purchase of acreage in DeSoto County with the federal land office in Jackson MS, in 1820 – before forced removal from tribal lands began the “Trail of Tears” in 1830. The United States Land Management Office record does not indicate what he paid for the land, but notes it was a cash sale. And so the young Colemans of Virginia became Mississippians.
William and Nancy had 14 children. Their fifth child, and third son, was William Pitt Coleman (1819-1841) whose grave is on the west side of the family plot. Family life in the early 19th century, particularly in frontier lands such as North Mississippi, inevitably meant the loss of one or more children; William and Nancy Coleman knew their share of that sorrow. Two of their children were stillborn (perhaps the tiny stone markers honored those infants) and another lived only a year. But the death of young William must have struck their hearts particularly deeply. Available records for his cause of death list only “killed in a duel.”
Dueling had been common in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries; the English essayist Samuel Johnson regarded the custom “as ordinary and inevitable as war between nations.” Dueling was considered a courtly art, a “manifestation of manly spirit.” While European society began to scorn dueling by the mid-1700s, their American counterparts in the rough-and-tumble colonial world embraced the custom as the preferred way to settle matters of honor between gentlemen.
At the time of William Pitt Coleman’s death in 1841, dueling had been a criminal offense in Mississippi for more than 20 years; the territorial charter of 1817 had stipulated as much. Merely challenging another to a duel was punishable by a heavy fine and 12 months in jail. Duelers forfeited the right to run for office; should one of the parties die as a result of the duel, the death would be treated as legally equal to murder. When Mississippi legislators revised the state constitution in 1830 they reiterated these stipulations.
But the stringent penalties were no deterrent. Despite the legislation, dueling laws in Mississippi – and in the South as a whole -- were widely ignored and violations rarely prosecuted. Duels were said to be “as plenty as blackberries.” Mississippi gentlemen were known to cross state lines for dueling, or to schedule the arrangements on private islands away from the prying eyes of local law enforcement officers. When William Pitt Coleman gave the challenge to settle a grievance by way of duel (or perhaps answered the challenge of another young gentleman) he was
breaking one of the most-flouted laws in the United States.
Who was his opponent, and how did that young man fare in the gunfight? Duels in larger towns might attract the notice of a local newspaper, but no archived Mississippi newspaper records the Coleman duel. Record-keeping for births, deaths, and marriages in the early days of the United States was haphazard at best, and was generally considered the duty of churches rather than governments. Mississippi did not begin statewide record-keeping for deaths until 1879. County death records prior to that date are spotty, and no uniform process for government certification of deaths existed in DeSoto County at the time young William died.
William Sr. lived only a year after his son’s untimely death. Nancy was a widow for eleven years longer, eventually moving back with relatives in Kentucky; she died there in 1853. Some sources show the couple being buried on the lands of their Virginia and Kentucky ancestors, others list the Olive Branch cemetery in Windstone as their final resting place. Short of opening the graves, there is no definitive evidence. Still, the plot in Windstone is regarded by DeSoto County and by the State of Mississippi as a cemetery; William Pitt Coleman is without dispute buried there. During the phased development of Windstone, each iteration of the Planned Unit Development document (or “PUD”) pledges to respect the tree-shaded lot. It does not appear on DeSoto County tax rolls for the same reason. The Coleman Cemetery endures, a reminder of this early family of settlers who committed the earthly remains of a child to the red clay soil of our neighborhood.
Ancestry.com
Ross Drake, “Duel!” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2004.
James W. Silver, “Land Speculation Profits in the Chickasaw Cession,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 10 #1, February 1944, pp. 84-92.
Jack Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History, Texas A&M University Press, 1980.
Planned Unit Development affidavits filed with DeSoto County Board of Aldermen, 1997-2017
Special thanks to Ms. Nancy Danley of the DeSoto County Genealogy Society