Sprague, William B. A Sermon addressed to the Second Presbyterian Congregation in Albany, March 4, 1838 [Congressman Killed in a Duel]

Sprague, William B. A Sermon addressed to the Second Presbyterian Congregation in Albany, March 4, 1838, the Sabbath after intelligence was received that the Hon. Jonathan Cilley, Member of Congress from Maine, Had Been Murdered in a Duel with the Hon. William J. Graves, Member from Kentucky. Albany: Printed by Packard and Van Benthusen, 1838. 1st .

Blue printed wrapper, 9 x 5 1/2 inches, center crease, 15 pp., unreadable inscription on front. Very good. Pamphlet.  [306] 

The title on the wrapper is, "Doctor Sprague's Sermon, occasioned by the Late Tragical Deed at Washington."

A sermon on I Timothy 2:1-2, on the duty to pray for civil rulers.

Condemns dueling, "The story as it goes abroad is, that a man has fallen in a duel; but the truth as it is written in God's book is, that a man has been deliberately and wantonly murdered."

Congressman Cilley accused James Watson Webb, a newspaper editor, of graft and receiving funds for supporting the Whigs and their efforts to not re-charter the Second Bank of the United States.  Webb challenged Cilley to a duel, through his friend, Congressman William J. Graves, of Kentucky.  Cilley refused, and Graves was so insulted that he challenged Cilley to a duel.  Rifles at 90 paces; it took three shots before Cilley was mortally wounded in his femoral artery, and bled out on the field of contest.

William Buell Sprague (1795-1876), born in Andover, Connecticut; graduated at Yale in 1815, and afterwards studied at Princeton for two years.  He was ordained in the Congregational Church at West Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1819 and was pastor there for ten years.  In 1829 he accepted a call to the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany and served in that congregation as pastor for forty years. “He has been well and truly described as an ‘illustrious man; a cultivated, elegant, voluminous, useful and popular preacher; an indefatigable and successful pastor; an unselfish and devoted friend; loving, genial, pure, and noble; an Israelite, indeed, in whom there was no guile; one of the most childlike, unsophisticated, and charitable of men.’  While he never relaxed his pulpit and pastoral duties, his added literary labors were prodigious, and their fruits exceedingly great.” – M’Clintock & Strong.