The letter ended with an appeal to the editor: let your readers ‘know who and what these officers of State are. It may help to send the present hypocritical set to where they belong and to fill the places they now disgrace with men who will do more for less pay….’ Lincoln signed it ‘Rebecca.’

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Before sending the letter to the Journal, Lincoln showed it to Mary Todd and her friend Julia Jayne. The two women had a grand time helping Lincoln sharpen his barbs. They apparently got carried away with excitement of the situation; later, they picked up where Lincoln left off and wrote a letter of their own, a feeble aping of Lincoln’s cutting wit that ended with a derisive verse signed ‘Cathleen.’ Shields was an amusing if volatile target for taunting. Lincoln’s future presidential secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, both familiar with the Illinois capital and its characters, described him as ‘a man of inordinate vanity…, an irresistible mark for satire.’ Shields’s law partner, Gustave Koerner, said, ‘He was exceedingly vain and very ambitious, and like most ambitious men, on occasions, quite egotistical… In his manner he was peculiar, not to say eccentric.’

Needless to say, Shields was incensed by the Rebecca letter. In an effort to get to the bottom of the situation, Shields asked Francis for Rebecca’s true identity. Francis responded, as Lincoln had instructed him, that it was Lincoln. Lincoln, of course, had had help, but apparently he wanted to keep Mary Todd out of it. If the reason for that protective measure was not obvious at the time, it would become so on November 4, 1842, when he married her. On finding the source of his public humiliation, Shields, emotionally wounded and furious, had a menacing note hand-delivered to Lincoln in Tremont on September 17. ‘I have become the object of slander, vituperation and personal abuse,’ Shields wrote. Only a full retraction ‘may prevent consequences which no one will regret more than myself.’ Lincoln discussed the predicament with his friends Dr. Elias Merryman, a Springfield physician, and William Butler, the clerk of Sangamon County Court, and decided not to retract his pointed words. Shields was not appeased and again demanded ‘absolute retraction.’ Lincoln refused, suggesting that Shields take back his hand-delivered letter and submit one that was more ‘gentlemanly.’ There would be no further negotiation. Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel.

As the party who had been challenged, Lincoln got to set the fight’s conditions. He did so on September 19 in a letter that demonstrated a personal trait that historian Gary Wills has described as ‘letting nonsense work itself out to its own demise.’ First, Lincoln selected ‘cavalry broad sword of the largest size’ rather than pistols as the dueling weapons. ‘I did not want to kill Shields and felt sure I could disarm him…,’ he later wrote, adding, ‘I didn’t want the d—-d fellow to kill me, which I think he would have done if we had selected pistols.’ Next, Lincoln prescribed conditions so advantageous to himself that his opponent would be forced to write off the martial affair as a lost cause. He ordered ‘a plank ten feet long, and from nine to twelve inches abroad, 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.’ Such unusual conditions would allow Lincoln to take advantage of his superior reach; Shields was only five feet, nine inches tall, while Lincoln soared to six feet, four inches. Once again Lincoln had underestimated Shields. Shields was an ambitious, perseverant man, and his professional experience proved that. He had been a state legislator and now was the state auditor. He had been in the Black Hawk War, and during the Mexican War and Civil War, he would serve as a brigadier general. In the 1840s and 1850s he would win elections to the U.S. Senate–first representing Illinois, then Minnesota, then Missouri. In Minnesota, he would found a town and name it Shieldsville. Such a driven and determined man fights stubbornly over his reputation.

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