Lincoln’s Duel

Throughout his early career, Abraham Lincoln worked not only as a lawyer and politician but also unofficially as a freelance journalist advocating for the Whig Party. For years, he contributed pseudon­ymous, sharp-elbowed columns to the Sangamo Journal, the Whig-affiliated organ for which he became an official “agent” while still living in New Salem, Illinois. That alliance broadened when Lincoln relocated to Springfield. Occasionally, Lincoln’s contributions proved combative enough to set off political fireworks.

One example that got dangerously out of hand ensnared Irish-born Illinois Democrat James Shields and Journal editor Simeon Francis, along with an unexpected participant: Lincoln’s former fiancée, Mary Todd. At the time, their on-again, off-again courtship was on again. Previously engaged to wed, the couple had broken off their relationship on January 1, 1841 — Lincoln might even have left Mary at the altar. Now, after a year of painful separation, they had reconciled.

In more ways than one, the local Whig paper brought them back together. When the couple resumed their friendship in 1842, Mary’s sister, still smarting from the aborted wedding she had been set to host, refused to welcome Lincoln back to her home. So Journal editor Francis and his wife made their Springfield parlor available for the rekindled courtship. It was here that Abraham and Mary, who shared a love for reading, likely devised a scheme to compose a series of satires aimed principally at Shields, who served as the Illinois state auditor. These became known as the “Rebecca” letters,  and all of them appeared in the Sangamo Journal.

Shields made for a mouthwatering target. Born in 1806 in County Tyrone, Ireland, he had immigrated to Canada at the age of 20, later settling in Kaskaskia, Illinois, where, like Lincoln, he studied law, fought in an Indian war, and won a seat in the state assembly. There the similarities ended. As a Democrat, Shields opposed all the pet Whig initiatives dear to Lincoln. In society, Shields perceived himself as a ladies’ man — “a great beau,” in the words of a contemporary — though he stood but 5 feet 9 inches and probably spoke with a brogue. Lincoln, by now a master of irreverent stories and foreign accents, no doubt enjoyed telling jokes at Shields’s expense — and behind his back — replete with mimicry. That Mary herself was partly of Irish stock did not seem to inhibit her own eagerness to join in the mockery.

In a more serious vein, the state auditor had recently angered Whigs by ordering state banknotes devalued, a blow to those who expected to redeem the paper at face value to pay their debts. Lincoln’s response arrived in the latest installment of the Journal’s pseudonymous satires, like earlier ones crafted as a letter from the fictional pioneer widow “Rebecca,” and lambasted Shields not only as a deceiver in affairs of politics but as a buffoon in affairs of the heart. “Shields is a fool as well as a liar,” went the August 27, 1842, “letter,” a ludicrous farce that bore hallmarks of Lincoln’s style. “With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.”

The farce went on to portray a malodorous Shields bursting into a fancy soiree and attempting to procure women with the type of worthless currency he had recently downgraded. One of these “gals” reports:

If I was deaf and blind I could tell him by the smell. … I seed him when I was down in Springfield last winter. … He was paying his money to this one and that one and tother one, and sufferin great loss because it wasn’t silver instead of State paper. … [He] spoke audibly and distinctly, “Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer, but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.” 

The sarcasm proved too much for the “hot-blooded and impulsive” Shields. His anger only intensified when this latest Rebecca letter was followed into the Journal by an inflammatory unsigned poem, probably the work of Mary and a female friend, asserting, with no shortage of anti-Irish contempt, that old Rebecca herself had fallen hard for the “soft-blarnied” Shields:

Ye jews-harps awake! The A[uditor]’s won—

Rebecca, the widow, has gained Erin’s son.

The pride of the north from the emerald isle

Has been woo’d and won by a woman’s sweet smile.

His temper up, Shields called for the true author of the libels to identify himself, and Lincoln stepped forward to take sole responsibility. As Mary later boasted, her future husband “felt, he could do, no less, than be my champion.”  Lincoln’s chivalry might have impressed the object of his affection, but it did not placate the target of his derision.

On September 17, Shields demanded that Lincoln apologize and issue “a full, positive and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions used by you” in the “articles … meant to degrade me” with “slander, vituperation, and personal abuse.”  Lincoln replied in irksome legalese, noting that “without stopping to enquire whether I really am the author, or to point out what is offensive … you demand an unqualified retraction.” The arch response concluded, “Now, sir, there is in this so much assumption of facts, and so much of menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer that note any farther than I have.”  The exchange was hardly private; the entire correspondence appeared in the Sangamo Journal.

Unsatisfied, Shields challenged his adversary to a duel. Perhaps aware that his foe had once fought a duel to the death back in Ireland, an anxious Lincoln now made a feeble attempt to modify his position through an intermediary: “I had no intention of injuring your personal or private character or standing as a man or a gentleman.” He had authored the Rebecca article purely “for political effect.”  Shields was neither convinced nor mollified. Lincoln was trapped.

Duels had become illegal in Illinois, so three days later, on September 22, the antagonists and their seconds headed to “Bloody Island,” a towhead in the Mississippi River outside their home state’s jurisdiction. Here, the principals actually came close to facing off in mortal combat. Lincoln saved the day — and perhaps his hide —by exercising a challenged party’s right to choose weapons. To exploit his seven-­inch height advantage, he had proposed “Cavalry broad swords of the largest size,” hoping “his long arms would enable him to keep clear of his antagonist.”  Some recalled that Lincoln even directed a few theatrical practice swings at the island’s trees, effortlessly shearing off low-hanging branches as Shields looked on apprehensively. At the last minute, a truce was arranged. Whether Lincoln apologized is not known. But he later admitted that a fight would have been a “degradation.”

The episode might at least have dissuaded him from further forays into published satire — especially of the ethnic variety. On the positive side, it bound Abraham and Mary closer together than ever. A few weeks after the incident, the coauthors of the Rebecca letter married. To Lincoln’s embarrassment, however, his close encounter with an Irishman remained a hot topic in Springfield. Three weeks later, he told a friend, “You have heard of my duel with Shields, and I have now to inform you that the dueling business still rages in this city” — indeed, the duel-happy Shields had already challenged Lincoln’s friend William Butler to yet another fight to the death. As Lincoln later mused: “If all the good things I have ever done are remembered as long as my scrape with Shields, it is plain I shall not soon be forgotten.”

Years later, Mary rather ungratefully recalled that her husband “thought, he had some right, to assume to be my champion, even on frivolous occasions.” She claimed that both of them were “always so ashamed” of the “foolish and uncalled for rencontre” with Shields that “Mr L & myself mutually agreed, never to refer to it & except in an occasional light manner, between us.” Otherwise, “it was never mentioned” again.

Except twice. During the Civil War, a Union general called on the Lincolns at the White House and, as Mary remembered, “said, playfully, to my husband ‘Mr. President, is it true, as I have heard that you, once went out, to fight a duel & all for the sake, of the lady by your side.’ Mr. Lincoln, with a flushed face, replied, ‘I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention the circumstance again.’” On another occasion, one of the actual “participants of the affair” supposedly turned up in Washington and encouraged the president to “rehearse the particulars.” A “sore” Lincoln complained, “That man is trying to revive his memory of a matter that I am trying to forget.”

One good reason to “forget” was that, by then, Shields was no longer the figure Abraham and Mary had tweaked two decades earlier. The Irish Democrat had gone on to serve as a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War, then as a U.S. senator from both Illinois and Minnesota. During the Civil War, he would see further action as a brigadier general, albeit without much distinction. No wonder Mary recalled of the close call on Bloody Island 20 years earlier: “This affair, always annoyed my husband’s peaceful nerves.”

Perhaps the Shields “affair” also showed the future president that there were better ways for an ambitious politician to assail rivals than through stereotyping. Not that Lincoln or the Whig politicians and press ever lost their zeal for savaging Democrats. Nor did they ever exempt Democrats of Irish descent from their future assaults. If he retained any zeal to goad the sons of Erin after the Shields episode, however, Lincoln for the most part — but not always — kept such feelings out of the press. Storytelling, however, he could never resist. Nor would his rivalry with Shields end without a few more spats.

Coincidentally, 20 years to the day after his close call on Bloody Island, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, ensuring that his name would indeed be remembered for something other than his near-affray with the state auditor. Thirty-one years after that, the state of Illinois presented a larger-than-life bronze likeness of James Shields to the U.S. Capitol to adorn Statuary Hall.

Harold Holzer, one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, has authored, coauthored, and edited 42 books, including Emancipating Lincoln, Lincoln at Cooper Union, and three books for young readers: Father Abraham: Lincoln and His Sons, The President Is Shot!, and Abraham Lincoln, the Writer.

From Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration by Harold Holzer, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ©2024 by Harold Holzer.

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