[Sidenote: "National Intelligencer," Feb. 28, 1849.]
It may easily be imagined that a man who, after being elected a Senator of the United States, was capable of the insane insolence of signing his name to a letter informing his defeated competitor that he would have killed him if the result had been different, would not have been likely, when seven years younger, to bear newspaper ridicule with equanimity. His fury against the unknown author of the satire was the subject of much merriment in Springfield, and the next week another letter appeared, from a different hand, but adopting the machinery of the first, in which the widow offered to make up the quarrel by marrying the Auditor, and this, in time, was followed by an epithalamium, in which this happy compromise was celebrated in very bad verses. In the change of hands all the humor of the thing had evaporated, and nothing was left but feminine mischief on one side and the exasperation of wounded vanity on the other.
Shields, however, had talked so much about the matter that he now felt imperatively called upon to act, and he therefore sent General Whitesides to demand from the "Journal" the name of its contributor. Mr. Francis, the editor, was in a quandary. Lincoln had written the first letter, and the antic fury of Shields had induced two young ladies who took a lively interest in Illinois politics—and with good reason, for one was to be the wife of a Senator and the other of a President—to follow up the game with attacks in prose and verse which, however deficient in wit and meter, were not wanting in pungency. In his dilemma he applied to Lincoln, who, as he was starting to attend court at Tremont, told him to give his name and withhold the names of the ladies. As soon as Whitesides received this information, he and his fiery principal set out for Tremont, and as Shields did nothing in silence, the news came to Lincoln's friends, two of whom, William Butler and Dr. Merryman, one of those combative medical men who have almost disappeared from American society, went off in a buggy in pursuit. They soon came in sight of the others, but loitered in the rear until evening, and then drove rapidly to Tremont, arriving there some time in advance of Shields; so that in the ensuing negotiations Abraham Lincoln had the assistance of friends whose fidelity and whose nerve were equally beyond question.
It would be useless to recount all the tedious preliminaries of the affair. Shields opened the correspondence, as might have been expected, with blustering and with threats; his nature had no other way of expressing itself. His first letter was taken as a bar to any explanation or understanding, and he afterwards wrote a second, a little less offensive in tone, but without withdrawing the first. At every interview of the seconds General Whitesides deplored the bloodthirsty disposition of his principal, and urged that Mr. Lincoln should make the concessions which alone would prevent lamentable results. These representations seemed to avail nothing, however, and the parties, after endless talk, went to Alton and crossed the river to the Missouri shore. It seemed for a moment that the fight must take place. The terms had been left by the code, as then understood in the West, to Lincoln, and he certainly made no grudging use of his privilege. The weapons chosen were "cavalry broadswords of the largest size"; and the combatants were to stand on either side of a board placed on the ground, each to fight in a limit of six feet on his own side of the board. It was evident that Lincoln did not desire the death of his adversary, and did not intend to be materially injured himself. The advantage morally was altogether against him. He felt intensely the stupidity of the whole affair, but thought he could not avoid the fight without degradation; while to Shields such a fracas was a delight. The duel came to its natural end by the intervention of the usual "gods out of a machine," the gods being John J. Hardin and one Dr. English, and the machine a canoe in which they had hastily paddled across the Mississippi. Shields suffered himself to be persuaded to withdraw his offensive challenge. Lincoln then made the explanation he had been ready to make from the beginning; avowing the one letter he had written, and saying that it had been printed solely for political effect, and without any intention of injuring Shields personally.
One would think that, after a week passed in such unprofitable trifling, the parties, principal and secondary, would have been willing to drop the matter forever. We are sure that Lincoln would have been glad to banish it, even from his memory; but to men like Shields and Whitesides, the peculiar relish and enjoyment of such an affair is its publicity. On the 3d of October, therefore, eleven days after the meeting, as public attention seemed to be flagging, Whitesides wrote an account of it to the "Sangamo Journal," for which he did not forget to say, "I hold myself responsible!" Of course he seized the occasion to paint a heroic portrait of himself and his principal. It was an excellent story until the next week, when Dr. Merryman, who seems to have wielded a pen like a scalpel, gave a much fuller history of the matter, which he substantiated by printing all the documents, and, not content with that, gave little details of the negotiations which show, either that Whitesides was one of the most grotesque braggarts of the time, or that Merryman was an admirable writer of comic fiction. Among the most amusing facts he brought forward was that Whitesides, being a Fund Commissioner of the State, ran the risk of losing his office by engaging in a duel; and his anxiety to appear reckless and dangerous, and yet keep within the statute and save his salary, was depicted by Merryman with a droll fidelity. He concluded by charging Whitesides plainly with "inefficiency and want of knowledge of those laws which govern gentlemen in matters of this kind," and with "trying to wipe out his fault by doing an act of injustice to Mr. Lincoln."
[Illustration: HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS MARRIED, THEN OWNED
BY NINIAN W. EDWARDS, NOW OCCUPIED AS ST. AGATHA'S SCHOOL.]
The town was greatly diverted by these pungent echoes of the bloodless fight, and Shields and Whitesides felt that their honor was still out of repair. A rapid series of challenges succeeded among the parties, principals and seconds changing places as deftly as dancers in a quadrille. The Auditor challenged Mr. Butler, who had been very outspoken in his contemptuous comments on the affair. Butler at once accepted, and with a grim sincerity announced his conditions—"to fight next morning at sunrising in Bob Allen's meadow, one hundred yards' distance, with rifles." This was instantly declined, with a sort of horror, by Shields and Whitesides, as such a proceeding would have proved fatal to their official positions and their means of livelihood. They probably cared less for the chances of harm from Butler's Kentucky rifle than for the certainty of the Illinois law which cut off all duelists from holding office in the State.
But, on the other hand,—so unreasonable is human nature as displayed among politicians,—General Whitesides felt that if he bore patiently the winged words of Merryman, his availability as a candidate was greatly damaged; and he therefore sent to the witty doctor what Mr. Lincoln called "a quasi-challenge," hurling at him a modified defiance, which should be enough to lure him to the field of honor, and yet not sufficiently explicit to lose Whitesides the dignity and perquisites of Fund Commissioner. Merryman, not being an office-holder and having no salary to risk, responded with brutal directness, which was highly unsatisfactory to Whitesides, who was determined not to fight unless he could do so lawfully; and Lincoln, who now acted as second to the doctor in his turn, records the cessation of the correspondence amid the agonized explanations of Whitesides and the scornful hootings of Merryman, "while the town was in a ferment and a street fight somewhat anticipated." In respect to the last diversion the town was disappointed.
Shields lost nothing by the hilarity which this burlesque incident created. He was reserved for a career of singular luck and glory mingled with signal misfortunes. On account of his political availability he continued throughout a long lifetime to be selected at intervals for high positions. After he ceased to be Auditor he was elected a judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois; while still holding that position he applied for the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office, and his application was successful. When the Mexican war broke out he asked for a commission as brigadier-general, although he still held his civil appointment, and, to the amazement of the whole army, he was given that important command before he had ever seen a day's service. At the battle of Cerro Glordo he was shot through the lungs, and this wound made him a United States Senator as soon as he returned from the war. After he had served one term in the Senate, he removed from Illinois, and was soon sent back to the same body from Minnesota. In the war of the rebellion he was again appointed a brigadier-general by his old adversary, and was again wounded in a battle in which his troops defeated the redoubtable Stonewall Jackson; and many years after Lincoln was laid to sleep beneath a mountain of marble at Springfield, Shields was made the shuttlecock of contending demagogues in Congress, each striving to make a point by voting him money—until in the impulse of that transient controversy, the State of Missouri, finding the gray-headed soldier in her borders, for the third time sent him to the Senate of the United States for a few weeks—a history unparalleled even in America.
We have reason to think that the affair of the duel was excessively distasteful to Lincoln. He did not even enjoy the ludicrousness of it, as might have been expected. He never—so far as we can learn—alluded to it afterwards, and the recollection of it died away so completely from the minds of people in the State, that during the heated canvass of 1860 there was no mention of this disagreeable episode in the opposition papers of Illinois. It had been absolutely forgotten.