Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  For guidance, Lincoln turned to his friend, Dr. Elias Merryman, who had once fought a duel and had, as a surgeon, witnessed several others. (Merryman “boasted in his peculiar way that he had killed a white man, a negro and an Indian by virtue of his diploma.”)167 Lincoln told Merryman that “he was wholly opposed to duelling, and would do any thing to avoid it that might not degrade him in the estimation of himself and friends; but, if such degradation or a fight were the only alternative, he would fight.”168 The notoriously combative Merryman, known as “the bully of Springfield,” rather than bringing a cool head to the situation, relished the prospect of a duel between Lincoln and Shields.169 Acting on Merryman’s advice, Lincoln formally replied to Shields that “there is in this so much assumption of facts, and so much menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer that note.”170 When Shields responded with a more temperate and specific letter of complaint, Lincoln again refused to answer until the auditor withdrew his first note. Frustrated by such maneuvers, Shields without further ado issued a challenge.

  Perplexed, Lincoln consulted his fellow Whig leader, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who recalled that Lincoln came to his office one night “with somewhat more than the usual gloom seated on his melancholy face” and said: “That fool letter which I wrote for the Sangamo Journal has made Shields mad, and he has challenged me. I have accepted the challenge, and, without thinking, I have chosen Dr. Merryman for my second. I believe he would rather see a fight than not; if I have to fight, I will fight; but I don’t care about fighting just to gratify Dr. Merryman. Now, if you will come in, and make Dr. Merryman do right (for I know you have more influence with him than any other man), the whole difficulty may be settled.” When Bledsoe asked about Merryman’s role, Lincoln replied: “the friend of Shields says that if I will explain or apologize he will withdraw the challenge, and the quarrel can be settled honorably to both parties. But Dr. Merryman says, if Shields will first withdraw the challenge, then I will explain or apologize, and the quarrel may be settled honorably to both parties. And there they have come to a deadlock. Now I don’t see, if both things have to be done, that it makes much difference which is done first. It seems to me that Dr. Merryman is disposed to stand upon niceties, and I don’t think he ought to stand upon niceties in a case of life and death.”171

  Bledsoe recommended to Lincoln, who had the choice of weapons, that he select cavalry broadswords. “I know Shields well,” Bledsoe said, “and his courage is not of the truest stamp; there is altogether too much of bluster and bravado about the man …; he is trying to make you back out, and you can make him back out very easily … if you will choose broadswords.” Bledsoe assured Lincoln that Shields “will never fight you in the world. You are at least seven inches taller than Shields, and your arms are three or four inches longer than his; so that you could cut him down before he could get near enough to touch you. I know you will never do this; because he will never fight you with broadswords. He will show the white feather first.”172 (Shields was approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall; Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inches.)

  Following Bledsoe’s advice, Lincoln stipulated that the weapons be broadswords “of the largest size” and that the field of honor be divided into two contiguous rectangular zones, each 10 feet wide and 6 feet deep, which the combatants would occupy during the fight. Separating the two zones would be a plank set on edge, which neither duelist could cross over. When Shields’s second protested that broadswords were “[b]arbarous weapons for the nineteenth century” and insisted that the duelists use pistols or rifles, Lincoln’s second replied: “they are barbarous; so is dueling, for that matter. It is just as well to have the whole thing of a piece.”173

  Lincoln explained his choice of broadswords to Usher F. Linder: “I did not want to kill Shields, and felt sure that I could disarm him …; and furthermore, I didn’t want the d–d fellow to kill me, which I rather think he would have done if we had selected pistols.”174 With a broadsword, Lincoln declared, “I could have split him in two.”175 (Lincoln’s clever tactic seemed to violate the spirit of the code of honor, which dictated that participants should be equally matched.) Lincoln may have received coaching from Bledsoe, who had learned the broadsword drill at West Point, or from Dr. Merryman, an accomplished swordsman, or from Major Thomas Duncan, a brother-in-law of his friend Josiah M. Lucas.

  Because dueling was illegal in Illinois, the affair of honor, scheduled for September 22, was to take place on Missouri soil across the Mississippi River from Alton. (Known as Bloody Island, it had been the scene of earlier duels.) En route to that location, Lincoln and Dr. Merryman stopped at White Hall, where Merryman’s friend Elijah Lott, the local postmaster, learned of the impending duel. Eager to avert bloodshed, Lott notified John J. Hardin, who was attending court in nearby Carrollton. Hardin immediately left for Alton, accompanied by Dr. Revel W. English, a Democratic legislator.

  On his way to Alton, Lincoln cracked a joke. The situation reminded him, he said, of a Kentuckian who volunteered for service in the War of 1812. As he was about to leave home, his sweetheart presented him a bullet pouch and belt with the embroidered motto: “Victory or Death.” In expressing his gratitude, the young man said: “Isn’t that rather too strong? Suppose you put ‘Victory or Be Crippled.’ ”176 When Lincoln and his entourage (Merryman, Bledsoe, and Bledsoe’s father, Moses O. Bledsoe) arrived and unloaded a bundle of huge broadswords, onlookers became curious and began speculating. After breakfast at the hotel, Lincoln and Shields, with their seconds and surgeons, boarded a ferry.

  Word spread quickly, drawing hundreds of excited residents to the hotel galleries, the streets, and the riverbank. Many clambered aboard the ferry, including the town constable and some would-be peacemakers, among them Lincoln’s friends William Butler and John J. Hardin as well as Dr. English and two Altonians, Samuel Buck-master, director of the state penitentiary, and Dr. Thomas M. Hope, editor of the Democratic Union (who five years later would fight a duel himself). The dueling parties sat at opposite ends of the boat.

  After the ferry reached Bloody Island, seconds prepared the field of honor while Lincoln remained silent, looking quite sober. He slowly removed from its scabbard a saber resembling a fence-rail (cavalry sabers were 3 ½ feet in length and weighed nearly 5 pounds), and like a man testing a knife or scythe he had just ground, lightly ran his thumb along the edge. He then arose, lifted the sword high and sliced a twig from an overhanging willow tree.

  Meanwhile, the peacemakers sought a compromise. Hardin and English urged both Merriman and Whiteside to submit the matter to four men of their choice who would examine the case and make a recommendation. The leading role was taken by the brusque, loud-voiced Dr. Hope. After vainly begging Shields to compromise, Hope grew angry and declared that the auditor “was bringing the Democratic party of Illinois into ridicule and contempt by his folly.” Impatiently, he blurted out: “Jimmy, you — little whippersnapper, if you don’t settle this I will take you across my knee and spank you.”177

  That seemed to break the deadlock. Shields’s seconds thereupon agreed to withdraw his notes, and in return Lincoln acknowledged: “I did write the ‘Lost Township’ letter which appeared in the Journal of the 2nd. Inst but had no participation, in any form, in any other article alluding to you. I wrote that, wholly for political effect. I had no intention of injuring your personal or private character, or standing as a man or a gentleman; and I did not then think, and do not now think that that article could produce or has produced that effect against you, and had I anticipated such an effect I would have forborne to write it. And I will add, that your conduct towards me, so far as I knew, had always been gentlemanly; and that I had no personal pique against you, and no cause for any.”178

  All participants in the near-duel took the ferry back to Alton, where a crowd awaited them. A humorist on the boat draped a sheet over a log, making it look like a human body, and fanned it vigorously as if caring for an injured duelist. Shields and Lincoln debarked together, pl
easantly conversing as if nothing had happened.

  Not surprisingly, the Democratic press lashed out at Lincoln, derisively calling him “Aunt Becca,” rebuking him for his “most unwarrantable and unprovoked attack” on Shields, sneering at him for imagining that “an Irishman would run at the sight of a broad sword,” and ridiculing him as a “valiant man, who once attempted to frighten an Irishman with a broad sword, and who, when he found that impracticable procured his friends to manage ‘an amicable settlement.’ ”179 The editor of the Shawneetown Illinois Republican, Samuel D. Marshall, was less indignant: “We are gratified to learn that the duel which was to have taken place between our friends Shields and Lincoln did not come off, and that the whole affair was arranged satisfactorily to the parties, without bloodshed. They are both gentlemen of undoubted personal and moral courage, and we feel highly gratified that the matter has terminated thus happily.”180 When the Chicago Democrat demanded that Shields and Lincoln be punished, Marshall protested that “the evils of dueling like those of Intemperance must be cured by public opinion and not by the Legislature.” Marshall contended that if “Lincoln had refused to fight Mr. Shields no one would have gone further in denouncing him as a coward than the Editor of the Democrat,” John Wentworth, who “now seeks to impose an infamous punishment on him for doing the very thing he would have abused him most unmercifully for not doing.” Marshall declared that once “public opinion makes the refusal to accept as honorable as the offer of a challenge, then come on with your laws but not till then.” But as things stood, with “the present most repugnant and incomprehensible state of public opinion upon this subject,” Marshall would “deem a conviction for this offence highly disgraceful to the State. So long as public opinion countenances fighting let men fight in ‘peace.’ ” If dueling is to be outlawed, “let the man who sends a challenge be punished alone.”181

  Although Lincoln may have derived some solace from Marshall’s words, he was probably startled when a Whig editor, George T. M. Davis, attacked him in the Alton Telegraph and Democratic Review for getting involved in a near-duel. Davis scolded the would-be combatants, pointing out that they were lawyers, legislators, and leaders of their communities who had nonetheless blatantly violated the law. Dueling, Davis insisted, “is the calmest, most deliberate and malicious species of murder—a relict of the most cruel barbarism that ever disgraced the darkest periods of the world—and one which every principle of religion, virtue and good order, loudly demands should be put a stop to.”182 Another Whig paper, the Jacksonville Illinoisan, chastised Lincoln, Shields, and other potential duelists in Springfield, warning that if they passed through Jacksonville en route to their appointed fields of honor, those “vaunted knights of chivalry” would “be unceremoniously arrested and taken to the first hog-hole and there cooled off.”183 In late September, a Chicagoan sarcastically told Lyman Trumbull that “We are very busy here, indeed too much so to fight duels; but there are a number of gentlemen practicing cut and thrust to prepare themselves for a Winter Campaign in Springfield.”184

  The affair embarrassed Lincoln terribly. The following year the Whig Party rejected his bid for a congressional nomination in part because, as he put it, he “had talked about fighting a duel.”185 After a participant in the near-duel later attempted to discuss it with him, Lincoln said that he “seems anxious to revive the memory of an affair that I am trying to forget.”186 Shortly before his death, he replied abruptly to a question about the Shields affair: “if you desire my friendship you will never mention the circumstance again!”187 Mary Lincoln told a friend that Lincoln “was always so ashamed” of the near-duel that they agreed never to allude to it.188 Whenever his colleague at the bar, Henry C. Whitney, tried to get him to talk about the matter, “he always parried the subject, as if he was ashamed of it.”189 In 1858, when Herndon reported to him that people in the East were eager to hear about the Shields affair, Lincoln “regretfully” observed: “If all the good things I have ever done are remembered as long and well as my scrape with Shields, it is plain I shall not soon be forgotten.”190 His embarrassment prompted Lincoln to stop writing abusive anonymous and pseudonymous letters, though he continued to ridicule political opponents in speeches.

  Marriage

  Five days after helping Lincoln reconcile his differences with Shields, John J. Hardin assisted him in effecting another reconciliation, this time with Mary Todd. Hardin and his wife, who fancied herself a matchmaker, invited Lincoln and Mary to attend the wedding of Hardin’s sister Martinette at their home in Jacksonville on September 27. When the young people who were assembled at the Hardins’ went for a ride, they left Mary behind because she had no escort. As she sadly watched their carriage depart, she was astonished to see Lincoln ride up. According to the wife of John Todd Stuart, Mary “went down & he said he had come for her to join the party.” Off they went and soon were reconciled. Thereafter they met clandestinely at the house of Simeon Francis.191

  Sarah Rickard recalled a different version of the event: “I sat next to Mr. Lincoln at the wedding dinner.… Mary Todd sat just across. Of course, rather than bring constraint upon the company, they spoke to each other, and that was the beginning of the reconciliation.”192 They renewed courting secretly because, as Mary later explained, “the world—woman & man were uncertain & slippery and [we thought] that it was best to keep the secret Courtship from all Eyes & Ears.”193

  A week after that reunion with Mary in Jacksonville, Lincoln asked Joshua Speed a pointed question: “Are you now in feeling as well as judgement, glad you are married as you are?” He acknowledged that such a query would be “impudent” coming from anyone but himself, but he was sure Speed would pardon him. “Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know.”194 Lincoln believed he could not wed Mary Todd unless Speed had found happiness in matrimony. In reply, Speed advised him “not to hesitate or longer doubt that happiness would be the result of his marriage to Miss Todd,” and assured Lincoln that he found contentment once “he and Miss Henning had finally made up and determined to risk their happiness in each other’s keeping.”195

  Taking this advice, Lincoln wed Mary Todd on November 4 with virtually no advance notice. That morning, the bride-to-be announced to her sister that “she and Mr. Lincoln would get married that night.”196 Similarly, Lincoln informed Charles Dresser, an Episcopal minister, “I want to get hitched tonight.”197 The abruptness startled Elizabeth Edwards, who told an interviewer that the “marriage of Mr L & Mary was quick & sudden—one or two hours notice.”198 The license was issued on the day of the ceremony. Three years earlier, Mrs. Edwards had given her sister Frances an elaborate wedding—“one of the grand affairs of its time”—and counted on providing one for Mary.199 Such grand events were common among Springfield aristocrats like the Edwardses and Todds.

  When Lincoln also told Ninian Edwards of their plans to wed that evening at Dresser’s home, he responded: “That will never do. Mary Todd is my ward. If the marriage is going to take place, it must be at my house.”200 His wife Elizabeth also insisted that the ceremony take place in their home, admonishing Mary: “Do not forget that you are a Todd. But, Mary, if you insist on being married today, we will make merry, and have the wedding here this evening. I will not permit you to be married out of my house.”201 She added angrily: “Mary Todd even a free negro would give her family time to bake a ginger cake.”202 Instead they would be compelled to send into town for gingerbread and beer instead of more appropriate fare. Mary, who resented the patronizing attitude of her sister and brother-in-law toward Lincoln as a man of humble origins, replied: “Well, that will be good enough for plebeians I suppose.”203 Those cakes, still warm, arrived just before the ceremony.

  A handful of people, including the two groomsmen, James H. Matheny and Beverly Powell, and the two bridesmaids, Julia Jayne and Ann Rodney, gathered in the Edwards home that evening, where the Reverend Dr. Charles N. Dresser performed the ceremony. Matheny recalled that at first “there was more or l
ess stiffness about the affair due, no doubt, to the sudden change of plans and resulting ‘town talk,’ and I could not help noticing a certain amount of whispering and elevation of eyebrows on the part of a few of the guests, as if preparing each other for something dramatic or unlooked-for to happen.” That “something” was provided by the rotund, crude State Supreme Court Justice Thomas C. Browne, known as “the Falstaff of the bench,” who habitually blurted out whatever was on his mind. Unfamiliar with the Episcopal service, Browne was nonplussed when the groom turned to the bride and said “with this ring I thee endow with all my goods and chattles, lands and tenements.” At that point the judge blurted out: “Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty, Lincoln, the Statute fixes all that.” Startled and amused by this outburst, Parson Dresser paused to stifle the impulse to burst out laughing; after a minute or so he managed to regain his composure and pronounce the couple man and wife.204

  In commenting on his marriage a week after the ceremony, Lincoln told Samuel D. Marshall: “Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.”205 A newspaper in Winchester found it noteworthy that the duelist of September had become the bridegroom of November: “Linco[l]n, who was to have been flayed alive by the sword of Shields, has given up the notion of dueling, and taken up one no less fatal to bachelors than the sword is to animal existence—in short, he is married! ‘Grim visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,’ and now ‘he capers nimbly in a ladys’ [chamber].”206