Abraham Lincoln Prepares to Fight a Saber Duel

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It was a grim errand that sent Abraham Lincoln hurrying toward Alton, Illinois, early on the morning of September 22, 1842. At Alton, he would cross the Mississippi River to a small island over the Missouri border-Bloody Island. There, he would prepare himself to kill or be killed in a saber duel to the death.

The idea of Lincoln fighting a duel begs a burning question for the perennial speculator, the intensely curious sort of history aficionado who wonders what might have happened if Major General George Meade had pursued the Army of Northern Virginia after the Battle of Gettysburg, or if Lieutenant General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson had survived his wounds at Chancellorsville. The question is this: What if Abraham Lincoln had been killed by a saber slash in 1842? It could have happened by the hand of 36-year-old James Shields if events had gone differently on September 22, 1842. Before circumstances turned Shields and Lincoln into mortal enemies, the two politicians had had a peaceable, professional relationship. They had been in the Illinois state legislature together, Lincoln having won election as a Whig in 1834, and Shields, as a Democrat in 1836. Illinois had an enormous debt in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the legislature had its hands full just keeping the government operating. In 1837, as the state bank teetered on the brink of collapse, Whigs and Democrats fought over what to do. Lincoln and Shields, however, were able to negotiate a compromise that saved the banks. On one key issue of the time–building new infrastructure such as railroads and other public works–the Whig party wanted private corporations to own the facilities. Democrats favored state ownership. Shields, though faced with heavy pressure from his party, often supported private ownership. So, despite party differences on major issues, Shields and Lincoln often managed to land on the same side of the final vote.

When the state bank defaulted in 1842, however, there was no such camaraderie. Shields, now the state auditor, aligned with the state’s governor and treasurer to adopt a policy in which the state would refuse to accept its own paper money as payment of taxes and other debts. Lincoln cleverly assailed this sitting duck of a policy, simultaneously striking a blow at the Illinois Democratic party in general and at Shields in particular. In a letter to the editor of the Sangamo Journal published in the paper on September 2, 1842, Lincoln presented a polemic designed to embarrass Shields. He chose the Journal as his forum because he had fairly free rein in the paper’s columns; editor Simeon Francis was friendly to him and sympathetic to his views. Mrs. Francis had even opened her home as a rendezvous for Lincoln and his future wife, Mary Todd.

Lincoln offered up some pungent prose in his letter to the editor. He began with an earthy character, Jeff, complaining to the rough-hewn but shrewd Rebecca: ‘I’ve been tugging ever since harvest getting out wheat and hauling it to the river, to raise State Bank paper enough to pay my tax this year, and a little school debt I owe; and now just as I’ve got it…, lo and behold, I find a set of fellows calling themselves officers of State, have forbidden to receive State paper at all; and so here it is, dead on my hands.’

When Rebecca identifies Shields as one of the ‘officers of state’ and reads aloud from his declaration against accepting state money, Jeff explodes. ‘I say–it-is-a-lie…. It grins out like a copper dollar. Shields is a fool as well as a liar. With him truth is out of the question.’

Lincoln went on to deride his adversary on the social scene, with Jeff recalling Shields at a recent fair attended by the eligible women of Springfield. ‘His very features, in the ecstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly and distinctly–’Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.’

Tags: Civil War Times, Historical Figures, Social History

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