In the musical the first step to having a Duel is to go across the river to Jersey, as it’s legal there (“everything is legal in Jersey”)
Another interesting part is that a doctor attends, and turns his back during the duel itself, in order to provide plausible deniability.
The show is in lots of ways built around those three duels, which makes sense given that the elephant in the room of any story about Hamilton and Burr is their ultimate duel.
The first duel, in December of 1778, is between Laurens and Charles Lee, who was challenged by Laurens for running down General Washington's leadership after being relieved of command for his failure at Monmouth. What makes this an inescapable part of the show, IMO, is that Hamilton was Laurens' second and Burr was Lee's. (Charles Lee took a bullet in the duel, but it wasn't apparently serious -- he lived until 1782, and probably died of tuberculosis.)
The second, famously, was between Hamilton's son and George Eacker, in 1801. (Eacker, too, died of TB, in 1804.)
Obviously, the final one was between Hamilton and Burr, in the summer of 1804.
Came here just for the Hamilton reference tbh.
It was declining in the North (where it occurred), not so much in the South and elsewhere. The last notable political duel in the United States might be the Broderick-Terry duel in San Francisco in 1859.
Andrew Jackson fought in at least two, killing a man in 1806, and was later president.
Apparently, Mark Twain only narrowly escaped dueling with a rival newspaper editor (!) in 1864.
Given the accounts of folks taking bullets to the torso and surviving, it's hard to avoid concluding that dueling perhaps only continued because of the relative inefficacy (lower energy & accuracy) of firearms of the era. Jackson took a bullet to the CHEST and survived, as noted.