Shortly after 2 o’clock on a hot afternoon 125 years ago, two former Confederate colonels faced each other near Bishopville, 15 paces apart, loaded pistols in their hands.

Both wore dueling attire: snow-white vests, raven coats and light-colored pants.

To one side, a man — a kind of umpire named W.E. Johnson — called out: “Are you ready?”

South Carolina’s last fatal duel was about to begin.

One duelist was Ellerbe B.C. Cash of Chesterfield County, a bearded man more than 6 feet tall. Bushy eyebrows under a high forehead kept his eyes in shadow, giving him a fierce look. The wealthy owner of a large plantation, Cash had three daughters and a son.

The other duelist was William Shannon of Kershaw County. Tall and bearded also, with sensitive eyes, Shannon was known for his “Christian kindness,” as the Charleston News and Courier would later report. An amateur historian with a large private library, he had eight daughters and five sons.

Both were lawyers and former members of the S.C. House of Representatives. In their late 50s, each was a crack shot.

The morning of the duel, held halfway between their homes, Cash had practiced firing his single-shot pistol with blanks at his 25-year-old son, Boggan. He had hit Boggan a half-dozen times in the chest with paper wads.

Shannon, too, had fired his pistol that day but only once — to see that it worked.

After asking “Are you ready?” umpire Johnson lifted his pistol in the air and fired.

Bang!

That was the signal to begin. Cash had requested the gunshot because he was deaf in one ear. Shannon had agreed.

Johnson began counting out loud. Under the duel’s terms, he would reach three, then cry “Halt.” During that time, the duelists would have only one shot.

“One!” Johnson yelled.

Off to one side, Cash’s son, Boggan, watched through opera glasses. Two of Shannon’s sons, Charles and William, also stood nearby. In all, about 100 spectators were on hand.

Shannon fired first. His shot went low, hitting five feet in front of Cash. Sand flew up, stinging Cash’s face.

“Two!”

Cash later would say he thought the stinging sand was Shannon’s bullet. Thinking he had been wounded, he took aim and fired. His bullet tore a hole in the chest of Shannon’s raven coat. Onlookers saw a patch of white — his vest. Shannon dropped his pistol, turned and muttered, “Oh, God!” As he fell, friends rushed to his side.

An autopsy would find that a lead ball had pierced Shannon’s chest, broken a rib and penetrated his heart.

Unsure as to what was happening, Cash asked one of his aides whether the Shannon party was satisfied. By that, he meant should the duelists go another round?

“My God, what more could we ask?” Cash’s aide responded. “Do you not see Col. Shannon has been killed?”

Watching through his opera glasses, Boggan Cash “expressed great joy when Shannon fell,” the News and Courier reported.

In a news account two days later, the newspaper offered a judgment that came to be widely shared: The “whole community feels the shock. It was uncalled for.”

Ellerbe Cash didn’t gloat. But he showed no remorse.

The next year, when he published his story of the duel — then a hotly debated topic statewide — Cash displayed the gallantry that came easily to the winner of a duel. “The fight was fair and equal,” Cash wrote. “He fell at my feet, and I can honestly say, I do not believe a braver man ever bit the dust.”

‘HONOR ... MORE DEAR THAN LIFE’

By 1880, duels had been a fact of life for South Carolina’s blue-blood aristocrats for more than a century. They were thought as natural as white supremacy, cotton and magnolias in moonlight.

One S.C. governor, John Wilson, wrote an oft-cited book, “Code of Honor,” that became the bible of dueling.

Published in 1838, the 22-page booklet praised dueling as an outlet for “manly independence” that ennobled a gentleman’s character. It set out elaborate rules on how to challenge someone — with a polite note — and how to accept or decline a challenge — with a polite note.

The arms were to be “smooth bore” pistols, not more than 9 inches, with flint and steel.

Duels were believed by many to uphold the honor of Southern manhood in an era when, as one writer put it, “honor was more dear than life.” Editors, politicians, soldiers, lawyers, merchants and even preachers challenged each other. If a man refused to duel, he would be shunned by other men. The challenger could post notices declaring him a coward.

One S.C. governor, James Hamilton Jr., fought 14 duels, wounding — but never killing — his foes. From 1806 to 1839, 63 duels were fought in the Charleston area alone.

The slightest insult could trigger a duel. One duel was fought after one man called another an “ugly, gawky, Yankee looking fellow.” In the 1830s, a student at South Carolina College, now USC, killed a fellow student in a duel resulting from a dispute over a plate of fish.

In the 1850s, Camden’s Chapman Levy was a dueling guru, consulted on techniques and manners by people all over the state. Another Kershaw County man fashioned a life-size human silhouette, dubbed the “Iron Man,” that duelists used for target practice. Anyone participating in a duel was said to be “going to the Iron Man.”

Dueling, some now believe, symbolized a society in which male pigheadedness had run amok.

“You have to remember this was a male-ruled society where men dominated every aspect of public and social life,” said Belinda Gergel, former history chair at Columbia College. “They knew they could do whatever they wanted to do.”

The hair-trigger egos of the state’s dueling aristocrats help explain the “temper and personality of those who led the nation into a great mass duel, the American Civil War,” wrote the late Clemson historian Jack Williams.

‘I HAVE TO DEMAND OF YOU ... REDRESS’

Thousands of words have been written about the events leading to the Cash-Shannon duel.

Those events involve mistaken assumptions, goading by third parties and the untimely death of Cash’s wife, Allan, which left him obsessed with seeking revenge.

More than a dozen letters were exchanged between Cash, Shannon and their friends. The matter began with a lawsuit and played out over almost a year.

In late 1879, Shannon and a fellow lawyer, Capt. William DePass, sued a brother of Cash’s wife, a planter named Robert Ellerbe, winning a $2,000 judgment.

About the same time, another court awarded Cash’s wife a $10,000 judgment against Ellerbe.

DePass and Shannon could not get their $2,000 because of Mrs. Cash’s $10,000 judgment against Ellerbe. So they sued her.

In drawing up legal papers, DePass wrote in pencil on the papers’ margin that the $10,000 judgment for Mrs. Cash was a family trick to prevent the $2,000 from being paid.

Dropping by the sheriff’s office, Col. Cash saw the papers and allegation. He became enraged at the insinuation that his wife was part of an underhanded scheme. Later, someone removed the allegation. Thus, no one ever made a formal charge that Mrs. Cash had committed fraud.

On Nov. 24, 1879, following the “Code of Honor” dueling rules, Cash wrote Shannon a polite letter asking him why Shannon had accused Mrs. Cash of fraud.

On Nov. 25, Shannon wrote back, denying the charge. “I know I was never rude to a lady in all these long years.”

On Dec. 1, Cash wrote in reply. “I am truly happy to know there is no cause for any change of the friendly relations that have existed between us. ...”

But over the winter and spring, Cash became convinced Shannon or DePass had lied to him and, in fact, had maligned his wife.

In April, Cash’s wife died. He believed the allegation had hastened her death.

Meanwhile, Boggan Cash began publicly ridiculing Shannon, and Col. Cash challenged DePass to a duel. But law officers intervened, twice scuttling a Cash-DePass duel. Then Boggan Cash let it be known he might challenge Shannon’s sons to a duel.

Still, Shannon wouldn’t duel.

Finally, on June 15, 1880, Cash wrote Shannon to call him a hypocrite and coward.

On June 27, Shannon replied. “Sir: Your letter of the 15th was duly received. In reply to its insulting contents I have to demand of you that redress which is usual under such circumstances.”

In the language of their age, Shannon had challenged Cash to a duel. He did so, his family would later say, to spare his sons from dueling with Boggan Cash.

Eight days later, Shannon was dead. While he was the challenger, many believed the Cashes had goaded him into a duel.

“He who was sinned against lies dead, with a bullet through his noble, generous heart,” the News and Courier editorialized days after the duel.

That two respected, prominent family men could pull off a ritualized killing in public sparked widespread outrage. Anti-dueling activists had found a poster child — Shannon.

Within a year, the Legislature passed a stiff anti-dueling law. Later laws banned anyone who had ever fought a duel from holding public office.

It was the end of dueling in South Carolina.

Cash was put on trial twice for murder. The first time, the jury deadlocked. The second, the jury found him innocent.

Although his friends stuck by him, he became an object of scorn to many.

Then-U.S. Sen. Matthew Butler of South Carolina, in particular, was angry. He said lawyers should be able to practice their profession without being challenged to a duel.

‘TOO SOON. ... IT HAS ONLY BEEN 100 YEARS’

The guns that spoke so loudly that day 125 years ago have long been silent.

But questions linger: Did Shannon fire deliberately at the ground, hoping Cash would do the same? Should DePass have been the one to duel in Shannon’s stead?

Tragedy befell some of those at the dueling site. In 1884, a Chesterfield County posse hunted down Boggan Cash, who had killed a law officer, and riddled his body with bullets.

Col. Cash died in 1888.

These days, Cash’s pistol is on display in the small town of St. Matthews at the Calhoun County Historical Memory.

Shannon’s pistol is in possession of a Kershaw County resident who requested that its location not be made public.

Descendants of Cash and Shannon — there are hundreds, mostly Shannons — live with the memory of that fatal day.

“The entire Shannon family has a very personal feeling about Col. Shannon and what happened, and that feeling is not diminished in any way by the passage of 125 years,” said William Shannon Nelson II, 66, a retired Columbia lawyer and the great-great-grandson of Col. Shannon.

The family reveres the memory of the type of man that Shannon was — kind, popular, a writer and beloved father, Nelson said.

Twenty-five years ago, members of the Cash, Shannon and DePass families tried to put together a joint reunion, Nelson said.

But when several Shannon descendants — women in their 80s — were asked about it, “there was a long period of silence, and one of them said, ‘It’s entirely too soon to think about such a thing. It has only been 100 years,’’’ Nelson said.

Now, that generation has “passed on,” and Nelson would consider a meeting.

Johnny Roland, 59, the great-great-grandson of Col. Cash, also said the Cashes would be receptive.

“It’s a good idea,” said Roland, a Citadel graduate and full-time mailman who also raises freshwater shrimp, sells real estate and plays trumpet twice a month in a beach-music band. “I thought it was a good idea 25 years ago.”

When he was young, Roland said, he was good friends with a young woman who was a Shannon descendant. “She called me brother, and I called her sister,” he said. “It was far enough in the past we could do that.”

But not so far in the past that Roland has not heard stories of the Cash-Shannon duel.

“Col. Cash thought he was hit, and he returned fire,” Roland said. “I’ve heard that all my life.”

Sources for this story include: “The Cash-Shannon Duel,” by John Hammond Moore, unpublished manuscript at the University of South Caroliniana Library; “The Cash-Shannon Duel,” by Harris Mullen; “The Code of Honor in Ante-Bellum South Carolina,” S.C. Historical Quarterly, July 1953; News and Courier, July, 1880