By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  THEY LOOM SOME 3,064 FEET HIGH, CARVED FROM THE MOUNTAIN granite of the Black Hills of South Dakota—the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, four of the greatest presidents of the United States. The Mount Rushmore National Memorial was begun in August 1927 and finished only in 1941, two years before the death of its creator, Gutzon Borglum. The original idea is said to have come from the superintendent of the local historical society, but was soon taken up nationally and made a reality by President Coolidge. The memorial was conceived as a “shrine of democracy,” with the four presidents representing the founding, expansion, and preservation of the United States. Washington was an inescapable choice, although his carving bears a nose a full foot longer than initially calculated. Jefferson joined him less for his intrinsic greatness, Borglum explained, than for “taking the first steps towards continental expansion” with the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln was added for his “preservation of the Union.” Roosevelt was a trickier decision. He finally got the nod for the Panama Canal—as Borglum described it in a letter to Roosevelt’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt, thus “breaking the political lobby that had blocked for half a century every effort to cut the Isthmus.”1

  Borglum was a rare bird. The son of a Danish Mormon immigrant, he came to specialize in monumental edifices. He had completed another, of Woodrow Wilson, for a huge memorial in Warsaw: it was under Wilson’s presidency and due to his support that Poland had won its independence. Borglum became a voluble critic of Hitler only after 1939, when the Führer had the sculpture torn down. It was an antagonism he might not otherwise have felt so keenly, being himself a racist bigot and an active supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. Borglum was an outdoor type who loved boxing, fishing, riding, and hunting and had one other great enthusiasm: fencing. I like to think that as he chiseled away, he knew that each of the formidable statesmen he was sculpting had shared that passion.

  At least three other presidents took up the sword: Andrew Jackson, Harry S Truman, and Ulysses S. Grant, who fenced at West Point, though he does not mention it in his memoirs. (Second Lieutenant Ronald Reagan, U.S. Cavalry Reserve, was celebrated between 1937 and 1942 as his regiment’s “greatest swordsman,” but alas the accolade was metaphorical.) Of all the American presidents, Washington was by far the most committed fencer. At ten years old, he was already whittling sticks into makeshift swords and battling away in imitation of his elders. “In those days,” writes one biographer, “when battles still were decided by hand-to-hand fighting with the ‘cold steel,’ when gentlemen were expected to settle their quarrels sword in hand, and when all men of fashion, except clergymen, still wore light swords when in full dress, dexterity in swordplay was expected of all Virginia cavaliers.”2 Washington’s paternal greatgrandfather had wielded a sword in battle; his father had carried a cutlass as captain of his own ship; his stepbrother, while at school in England, had been taught to fence by a fashionable master. Young George was trained by his father, his brothers, and their friends, first to use a cutlass and later at foil, the French smallsword, the claymore, and the cavalry saber.

  In his expense ledger for 1756 there is an entry for £1, 1s, 6d paid to one Sergeant Wood, a fencing master. Later coaches included a Dutchman, Jacob Van Braam, and George Muse of Fredericksburg, under whose tutelage Washington blossomed, until he was reputedly “the best swordsman in Virginia.” He even founded a club, called the “Virginian Fencibles,” with Van Braam as resident master. Van Braam was as much friend as coach, accompanying Washington on three long marches through the wilderness against French forts in the French and Indian War, where Washington made his reputation; the two are said to have relieved the tedium of these journeys with bouts of swordplay.

  Washington’s other teacher, Muse, became an adjutant in the army. When he was discharged for cowardice he petulantly wrote to his old pupil, attempting to blame him for his behavior. He received the marmoreal reply:

  Sir,

  Your impertinent letter was delivered to me yesterday. As I am not accustomed to receive such from any man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally, without letting you feel some marks of my resentment, I would advise you to be cautious.

  Such a letter generally presaged a challenge; but Muse, evidently knowing his man, backed down.

  AS FAR AS THOMAS JEFFERSON IS CONCERNED, WE KNOW VERY little—only that as a young man in Virginia in the 1760s he was “acquainted with dancing, boxing, playing the fiddle, and small sword.” Jefferson was an excellent violinist and kept it up in later life. It is possible that he did so with his fencing as well, but we have no record of it.3 An old children’s book shows him in friendly swordplay with the Marquis de Lafayette, and the third president of the United States may have done some fencing while minister to the court of Louis XVI in the 1780s—he records buying a sword and belt in August 1784, most probably to be properly turned out for levees—but he is unlikely to have fenced with Lafayette in America. The Frenchman did challenge the Earl of Carlisle, one of England’s commissioners to the United States during the Revolution.

  ANDREW JACKSON HAD FOUGHT AT LEAST FOURTEEN DUELS, MAINLY with pistols, by the time he was elected president in 1828. Ambitious and quick-tempered, he was known as the most famous duelist in the old South. He too met Lafayette, sometime between 1824 and 1826, placing a saber and pair of pistols on a table between them; but the Frenchmen was interested only in examining the two guns. Later Jackson came to be involved in one of the more ludicrous quarrels ever decided by a sword. In his time there was a vogue for minimally orchestrated violence, resorted to when a duel proper could not be arranged—or perhaps was not wanted. A man might scorn the effete, rule-bound “satisfaction” of a duel and prefer to have it out with his antagonist, rough and tumble. Jackson, habitually truculent, got into an argument with Governor John Sevier, founding father of Tennessee, and the two agreed to meet just beyond the state’s borders.

  Unlike the governor, Jackson arrived in good time, waiting for two whole days before giving up and starting back for Knoxville. He had not gone a mile when he saw Sevier in front of him. Indignant at this further impertinence, Jackson sent off a letter of justification, which the governor refused to accept. Jackson spurred furiously to within a hundred yards of his man and, leveling the cane he was carrying like a medieval jouster, charged. The astounded governor dismounted, and in so doing stepped on his own scabbard and fell prostrate under his horse. That was that. The whole affair seemed so ridiculous that the argument was soon patched up and the two parties rode off together.

  IN THE FIRST EIGHTY YEARS OF THE REPUBLIC IT WAS HARD FOR ANY prominent public figure, especially in the South and especially one with a militia commission, to avoid a duel of some kind. Abraham Lincoln was caught up in at least two challenges (as well as a third, but that involved flinging cow dung at twenty paces). The first took place in 1832, when a fellow militia officer in the Black Hawk War, James Zachary, called Lincoln a coward. Captain Lincoln of the Illinois militia, as he then was, answered, “If any man thinks me a coward, let him test it.” Captain Zachary replied, “You think you can get away with it, just because you are larger and heavier than me.” Lincoln told him, “You can guard against that. Choose your own weapons.” But Zachary, like Washington’s opponent, backed off.

  Lincoln’s second challenge effectively won him both honor and a wife. It touches on his romantic history and deserves a brief digression. The problem was that once any woman was attracted to him Lincoln tended to lose interest, unable to believe that any person of judgment could find him worth loving. In 1835 he thought he had found the woman he wanted to marry, a cheerful twenty-two-year-old from New Salem, but she suddenly died of a fever, leaving Lincoln heartbroken. Within a year he met and proposed to another girl, Mary Owens, and was decisively rejected.

  Around Christmas 1840, two months shy of his thirty-second birthday, Lincoln found himself romantically involved once more. This time the girl was a pretty twenty-one-year-o
ld, Mary Todd, with a quick, sarcastic tongue. Lincoln proposed to her, was accepted, then within a few days wrote saying that it was all a mistake. Mary wrote back, saying she was devastated but understood. Her letter must have been artfully worded, because its effect on Lincoln was immediate and persuasive. He reversed himself once again, announced that he should never have given her up, and fell into such a deep depression that friends began to fear for him. To his law partner, John Todd Stuart, he confessed, “I am now the most miserable man living.” Eventually, Mrs. Simeon Francis, “the matchmaker of Springfield” and wife of the editor of the local newspaper, the Sangamo Journal, decided to take the matter into her own hands. The following summer she invited Lincoln and Mary to her house, without warning either. “Be friends again,” she urged. They were “shyly delighted” and agreed to try.4

  Lincoln had for some time been penning satirical squibs for the Journal under the pseudonym “Aunt Rebecca,” a couple of which had been aimed at a prominent local Democrat (Lincoln was then a Whig), James Shields, later a general and a senator of three different states. Shields, a “gallant, hot-headed bachelor” of County Tyrone, Ireland, then occupied the influential post of state auditor of public accounts. In his thirty-six years he had been a sailor (and indeed shipwrecked) and had been wounded fighting the Indians in Florida. A genial, rather dressy ladies’ man, he was quick to take offense, especially at criticism of a personal kind. That autumn, the Democratic state officers had been forced by the sudden collapse of the state bank to repudiate their own currency, forcing on Shields the “unhappy fate” of informing the people of Illinois that their banknotes could not be used to pay their taxes; only gold and silver would be accepted.5

  This was a heaven-sent gift to the Whigs. Lincoln’s first article about the auditor appeared in August 1842. It was uncharacteristically personal: “Shields is a fool as well as a liar. With him truth is out of the question.” At the outset, Shields kept silent. Mary Todd and a friend, Julia Jayne, wrote a further gibe, also as “Aunt Rebecca.” Baiting Shields had become a summer sport. Lincoln wrote the next piece, in which he referred to the unfortunate auditor as “floating about on the air, without heft or earthly substance, just like a lock of cat fur where cats have been fightin’.” A fourth article followed, again by Mary and Julia Jayne, then a fifth, this time in rhyme, asserting that Shields had “won” Aunt Rebecca and that the two were to be married. It was lame stuff, but Shields’s patience broke. He sent an envoy, General Whiteside, to Francis’s office to demand his attacker’s true name, under threat of exacting satisfaction from Francis himself.

  Shields, though not tall—about five feet nine—was active and alert. As a boy, he had imbibed a good deal of military science from veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, and had actually taught fencing while stationed in Quebec. The large, portly Francis was most unwilling to fight. Nevertheless, he refused to disclose Whiteside’s identity to his correspondent.

  The next day, Francis encountered Lincoln in the street and poured out his alarm. Lincoln said airily, “Just tell Shields that it was me” and left for Tremont, where he had legal business. As soon as Shields and Whiteside heard that Lincoln had declared himself the culprit, they set off in pursuit. Meanwhile, two of his friends, Dr. Elias Merryman and Mr. Butler, fearing he might be attacked unawares, also took to horse, passing Shields and Whiteside in the night.

  The two men were hardly emissaries of peace. Both believed Lincoln to be “unpracticed” in swordplay and the “diplomacy” of dueling, but they were anxious to have him fight. Merryman, a fine swordsman, was combative by nature; his first piece of advice was not on how to avoid a confrontation but for his friend to choose the strong cavalry broadsword as his weapon. (This was not surprising; since the middle of the eighteenth century sabers, in one form or another, had become predominant, making up more than 80 percent of all European and American swords; by 1800 the gentleman’s dress smallsword had virtually disappeared.)

  As it turned out, their man was not the greenhorn they supposed. Although pacific by nature and physically lanky, he was very tall—just under six feet five—and strong: in his younger days in the militia, he had “had, it is said, only one superior in the whole army” in the art of wrestling. According to the later testimony of Major J. M. Lucas, who knew him well, Lincoln had been thoroughly drilled by another officer in broadsword use and had gained experience with cavalry swords during the Black Hawk War—around the time of his confrontation with Captain Zachary. Lucas “had no doubt Lincoln meant to fight. He was no coward, and he would unquestionably have held his own against his antagonist, for he was a powerful man in those days, and was quite well skilled.”

  Shields and Whiteside arrived in Tremont on Saturday, September 17. Shields immediately sent Lincoln a note: “I have become the object of slander, vituperation and personal abuse.” Merryman, who had already started giving Lincoln dueling lessons, wrote Lincoln’s reply for him. It was highly aggressive in tone and called on Shields either to back down or be prepared to fight, since Lincoln had no intention of apologizing.

  On the old northwest frontier, men often settled their differences by force, but that usually meant a fistfight. In the self-consciously patrician circles with which Lincoln was increasingly associated, however, disagreements were expected to take a more formal turn. For someone like Shields, an ambitious and self-made immigrant, to appeal to the code duello was a way to assert his pretensions. Thus a duel was inevitable—but could not be held where they were. The practice was outlawed in Illinois, under penalty, at least in theory, of up to five years in prison. Even to send a challenge or make an oral agreement to fight could entail heavy fines. Quickly—for the news had spread—the parties made their way outside the state, choosing a neck of land near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, just outside the towns of Springfield and Alton, Lincoln quipping that the site was most conveniently close to the penitentiary. The two men reached Springfield late on Monday night—to find, as Merryman later recorded, that “the affair had got great publicity … and that an arrest was probable.”

  Lincoln, as the man challenged, now set out his “instructions,” under four headings. First, the weapons were to be “cavalry broadswords of the largest size, precisely equal in all respects.” Second, he specified the terms of engagement: “A plank ten feet long, and from nine to twelve inches broad, to be firmly fixed on edge, on the ground, as the line between us which neither is to pass his foot over upon forfeit of his life. [It is not clear here, or in other dueling literature, who would implement this threat.] Next, a line drawn on the ground on either side of the said plank and parallel with it, each at the distance of the whole length of the sword and three feet additional from the plank; and the passing of his own such line by either party during the fight shall be deemed a surrender of the contest.” Third, the time was set as “On Thursday evening at five o’clock if you can get it so.” Finally, the place was fixed for three miles outside of Alton, “on the opposite side of the river, the particular spot to be agreed on by you.”

  The conditions were accepted, and on the day chosen the two parties made their way to the dueling ground, known as Bloody Island. Before the bout could begin, however, two horsemen rode up: an associate of Shields, Revill W. English, and John J. Hardin, a political colleague of Lincoln and a kinsman of Mary Todd. Hurried words passed, Lincoln and Shields agreeing to exchange apologies, and a reconciliation took place. Lincoln even proposed to Shields that they play a game of “Old Sledge” to determine who should pay for the expenses of their trip. Shields “pungled”—chipped in his share.

  Lincoln’s later attitude to the fight was by turns bellicose and pragmatic. “I did not intend to hurt Shields unless I did so clearly in self-defense,” he explained. But “if it had been necessary I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone.” He repeated this claim to Major Lucas: “I could have split him in two.” Another witness, General Linder, had a different impression:r />
  After this affair … in a walk we took together, seeing him make passes with a stick, such as are made in broadsword exercises, I was induced to ask him why he had selected that weapon with which to fight Shields. He promptly answered, in that sharp, earsplitting voice of his, “To tell you the truth, Linder, I did not want to kill Shields, and felt sure I could disarm him, having had about a month to learn the broadsword exercise; and furthermore, I didn’t want the damned fellow to kill me, which I rather think he would have done had we selected pistols.”

  Never again would Lincoln write a pseudonymous article, and for the rest of his life he would be ashamed of the episode. Once during the Civil War, when an officer asked him at a White House reception if he had ever fought a duel, the president reddened and snapped, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship never mention it again.” Even so, at least in one respect his actions had done the trick. Mary Todd was deeply struck that he should have protected her part in rousing Shields in such a way, while in the whirl of their reconciliation he was able to put aside his own misgivings. Ten days after the duel was called off, on November 4, 1842, they were married.

  Had anyone bothered to take a closer look at Lincoln’s carefully worded instructions, they might have dismissed his later braggadocio, even while admiring his cunning. The cavalry broadsword was large and heavy; it was designed not for artful swordplay but for slashing. To wield it effectively required considerable strength and technique. More important, the two men were separated by a plank nearly a foot high, then by a sword’s length, and a further three feet on each side. Lincoln had eight inches on Shields and disproportionately long arms to boot. Thus he had specified rules that allowed him to reach his opponent, leaving the latter unlikely to land a single blow.6

  U. S. GRANT’S ACTIVE FENCING WAS CONFINED TO HIS DAYS AT West Point, where exercise at smallsword and bayonet was compulsory. In Grant’s day there was no physical training and no organized sport—indeed, there was no gymnasium for the 112 cadets—but from the academy’s founding in 1802 swordplay was “for a long time the only regular athletic activity other than horseback riding” that was considered an essential part of a cadet’s training.7*