THE SHIELDS DUEL
An incident which occurred during the summer preceding
Mr. Lincoln’s marriage, and which in the opinion
of many had its influence in hastening that event,
deserves some attention, if only from its incongruity
with the rest of his history. This was the farce—which
aspired at one time to be a tragedy—of his
first and last duel. Among the officers of the
State Government was a young Irishman named James
Shields, who owed his post as Auditor, in great measure,
to that alien vote to gain which the Democrats had
overturned the Supreme Court. The finances of
the State were in a deplorable condition: the
treasury was empty; auditor’s warrants were
selling at half their nominal value; no more money
was to be borrowed, and taxation was dreaded by both
political parties more than disgrace. The currency
of the State banks was well-nigh worthless, but it
constituted nearly the only circulating medium in
the State.
In the middle of August the Governor, Auditor, and
Treasurer issued a circular forbidding the payment
of State taxes in this depreciated paper. This
order was naturally taken by the Whigs as indicating
on the part of these officers a keener interest in
the integrity of their salaries than in the public
welfare, and it was therefore severely attacked in
all the opposition newspapers of the State.
The sharpest assault it had to endure, however, was
in a communication, dated August 27, and printed in
the “Sangamo Journal” of September 2,
not only dissecting the administration circular with
the most savage satire, but covering the Auditor with
merciless personal ridicule. It was written in
the dialect of the country, dated from the “Lost
Townships,” and signed “Rebecca,”
and purported to come from a farmer widow of the county,
who expressed in this fashion her discontent with
the evil course of affairs.
Shields was a man of inordinate vanity and a corresponding
irascibility. He was for that reason an irresistible
mark for satire. Through a long life of somewhat
conspicuous public service, he never lost a certain
tone of absurdity which can only be accounted for by
the qualities we have mentioned. Even his honorable
wounds in battle, while they were productive of great
public applause and political success, gained him
scarcely less ridicule than praise. He never could
refrain from talking of them himself, having none of
Coriolanus’s repugnance in that respect, and
for that reason was a constant target for newspaper
wits.
After Shields returned from the Mexican war, with
his laurels still green, and at the close of the canvass
which had made him Senator, he wrote an incredible
letter to Judge Breese, his principal competitor,
in which he committed the gratuitous folly of informing
him that “he had sworn in his heart [if Breese
had been elected] that he should never have profited
by his success; and depend upon it,” he added,
in the amazing impudence of triumph, “I would
have kept that vow, regardless of consequences.
That, however, is now past, and the vow is canceled
by your defeat.” He then went on, with threats
equally indecent, to make certain demands which were
altogether inadmissible, and which Judge Breese only
noticed by sending this preposterous letter to the
press.
