Alexander Keith McClung

Alexander Keith McClung (June 14, 1811 – March 23, 1855) was an attorney from Vicksburg, Mississippi, U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Mississippi, a lieutenant colonel of the Mississippi Rifles during the Mexican-American War, and briefly chargé d'affaires to Bolivia in President Zachary Taylor's administration. He is best known today for his participation in a series of antebellum duels, or gunfights. He became a folkloric figure of the 19th-century United States, a dead shot with mental health problems known as "the Black Knight of the South," with claims made to the effect that he killed 18 people, or participated in 14 duels and had killed 10 men, or killed seven brothers in one family. (The historical record suggests four duels with two killings, but A New History of Mississippi states that by the end of his term as U.S. marshal he "had probably killed 10 men.")

Born the seventh child of a Kentucky judge and legislator, and the "most brilliant" daughter of the Marshall political family, McClung moved to Mississippi in 1832, where he built a lonely, storied, troubled life; he considered himself "Death's Ramrod." Amongst his contemporaries, he was considered a courageous soldier, a passionate Whig (devoted to Henry Clay, and opposed to Andrew Jackson), an excellent writer, an excellent shot, sensitive, melancholic, Byronic, erratic, alcoholic, and eventually, insane. He died by self-inflicted gunshot in a Mississippi boarding house in 1855, leaving a Romantic poem as a suicide note.