23/09/2022
In 1842, at age 33, Abraham Lincoln sent two letters to the local Springfield newspaper, criticizing a political opponent. Calling the man, among other things, a fool and a liar, he signed the letters “Rebecca.” Lincoln was courting young Mary Todd at the time, and she was aware of Lincoln’s letters. Thinking such a thing to be great fun, Mary began sending her own “Rebecca” letters to the paper, poking fun at the man mercilessly and ridiculing him for being unmarried. In due course the man felt things had gone too far and he stormed into the newspaper office demanding to know if Abraham Lincoln was the author of the letters. When told that the letters had indeed come from Lincoln, the man challenged Lincoln to a duel.
The man Lincoln had been prodding was not a man to be trifled with. James Shields was a fiery-tempered Irishman, who was serving as the Illinois state auditor. He would go on to serve as a general in the Mexican American War (where he was twice wounded) and is the only man in American history to have been elected to the U.S. Senate from three different states. His challenge put Lincoln in a bind. He couldn’t admit to writing the letters Mary Todd had sent, but to pass the blame to a young woman would make him appear to be a coward. So, he reluctantly accepted Shields’ challenge.
As the challenged party, Lincoln got to choose the weapons and set the rules for the duel. Duels were normally fought with pistols, but Lincoln knew that he would likely be killed if he fought Shields with pistols. So instead, he chose broadswords as the weapons, and he set rules that assured he would win the fight. Under Lincoln’s rules, he and Shields were to stand on opposite sides of a board, ten feet from each other. If either man stepped closer than that, the penalty was death. Being seven inches taller than Shields, Lincoln’s rules assured that he would be able to reach Shields with his sword, but that Shields would be unable to touch Lincoln. While Lincoln’s conditions were unsporting, he was within his rights to set them.
Shields saw of course that Lincoln had set conditions designed to make it impossible for Lincoln to lose the fight. But Shields was no coward and on the morning of the duel he arrived ready to go forward, whatever the consequences.
As was the norm in such affairs, the men the combatants had chosen as “seconds” tried to negotiate an honorable resolution before the duel began. Exactly why Shields relented is unclear. By some accounts, while the seconds were negotiating Lincoln reached up and lopped off a large branch of a tree in a single swipe, convincing Shields that he ought to compromise. By other accounts, Lincoln’s second intimated to Shields’s man that Lincoln had been forced into the duel to protect the honor of a young lady, causing Shields to be satisfied with a toned-down apology. Whatever the reason, Lincoln agreed to admit writing the first letter, adding that he never intended to harm Shields’s character, a sort-of apology that Shields accepted. The duel was called off before Lincoln’s long arms had to go into action.
Lincoln later told a confidant that he felt confident he could have disarmed Shields, and that he no intention of killing him. He found the whole episode profoundly embarrassing and for the rest of his life refused to discuss it. When asked by an army officer years later if the rumor that he had once nearly dueled James Shields was true, Lincoln replied that he would not deny it, but that if the officer wished to remain his friend, he would never speak of it again.
Lincoln and Shields patched up their differences and had a cordial relationship afterwards. During the Civil War, Shields was a general in the Federal army and his commander in chief was the man he once nearly fought with broadswords on an island in the Mississippi.
Abraham Lincoln and James Shields met on Bloody Island, Missouri on the morning of September 22, 1842, one hundred eighty years ago today, to fight a duel, which fortunately was averted.
