by Niall O'Dowd
James Shields was born in Altmore, County Tyrone, on May 12, 1806. His father died when he was six, and his Scottish mother reared her family singlehanded.
He grew up in an Ireland where old soldiers abounded, Irish men who had fought Britain’s Napoleonic wars. From them, from an early age, he learned the stagecraft of military skills and became an accomplished swordsman and shooter. His uncle, also James, came home from America for a time. A veteran of the War of Independence, he had been injured at the Battle of New Orleans.
From him, most likely, James also learned how to lead men. He received an education in the classics from a priest relative and learned to speak French from the old soldiers. He came to America unusually talented.
He put to sea for a time and rose to the rank of purser, but after an accident that badly injured him, he decided on a career as a lawyer. He also served as a soldier when on home leave from the ship.
Home from the sea, he moved to Illinois to the territorial capital called Kaskaskia and was admitted to the bar in 1832. He ran for public office soon after, winning a seat in the state legislature and moved to Vandalia, the state capital.
There he met the young Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Party veteran Stephen Douglas, two men who would go on to dominate American discourse for the most vital years in US history. Shields befriended Douglas so much that he was best man at his second wedding. He also followed him into politics as a Democrat.
It is no exaggeration to say that a man selected three times as a senator from separate states and a war hero to boot could also have been a leading presidential contender, were it not for his Irish birth.
He was described thusly in the Minnesota Historical Society Collections: “His personal appearance and manners were engaging. He was five-feet-nine inches tall, of fine figure and graceful bearing. His voice was well modulated; his speech frank, clear and resolute. He was prominent in debate and influential in council.”
Another contemporary account described him as a “gallant, hot-headed bachelor from Tyrone County, Ireland.”
It was clear that Shields was a hit with the ladies but also a politician on the rise, when he was elected State Auditor of Accounts in 1841, a statewide office. Soon he and Lincoln would cross paths in a near duel that, if it had gone ahead, might have changed history as surely as John Jackson blocking the bullet meant for King William did.
The near duel with Shields haunted Abraham Lincoln his entire lifetime. “If all the good things I have ever done are remembered as long and well as my scrape with Shields, it is plain I will soon be forgotten,” he told James Herndon.
The genesis of the Lincoln-Shields feud was Lincoln’s view that Shields was levying excessive taxation. In August of 1842, the Illinois State Bank declared bankruptcy and said it would no longer accept paper money, and gold and silver, which most ordinary citizens did not have access to, would be needed to pay debts. Shields decide to close the bank and became a target of Whig fury.
Abraham Lincoln took to the pages of the Springfield Journal under the pseudonym “Rebecca” to mock the Irishman Shields. It was nasty stuff, and Shields did not take to it kindly. Chiefly, Lincoln sneered at Shields’s ladies’ man reputation, which may also have reflected a tinge of jealousy on the part of the less-than-handsome Lincoln.
The letters were spiteful. “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.”
Lincoln showed the letter to Mary Todd—the couple had only recently gotten back together after Lincoln had called off their earlier engagement—and she found it delightful. A few days later, without Lincoln’s knowledge, Mary Todd submitted her own critique to the Journal under the pen name “Cathleen.”
Mary Todd composed a sneering ditty, the first few lines of which ran:
Ye Jews Harp awake the auditors won
Rebecca the widow has gained Erin’s son
The pride of the North from the Emerald Isle
Has been wooed and won by a woman’s smile.
Shields was infuriated by the low satire. He demanded Simeon Francis, the newspaper’s editor, reveal the author, which Francis surprisingly did.
Declaring it an affair of honor, Shields demanded a duel. “I have become the object of slander, vituperation and personal abuse. Only a full retraction may prevent consequences which no one will regret more than myself.”
Lincoln refused to retract his remarks. He returned Shields’s letter with the request that Shields rewrite it in a more “gentlemanly” fashion. Instead, Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel. It would be held in Missouri, where dueling was still legal.
Since Lincoln was challenged by Shields, he had the privilege of choosing the weapon of the duel. He chose cavalry broadswords “of the largest size.”
“I didn’t want the damned fellow to kill me, which I think he would have done if we had selected pistols,” he later said. He was right; going back to his military upbringing in Ireland, Shields would surely have won a pistol duel.
Subsequently, Shields also exhibited great bravery in the war with Mexico and as a Civil War general. Lincoln, with his much longer reach, had chosen wisely.
The Lincoln-Shields duel is one of these “what if” moments in history. If Shields had won, history would have changed dramatically. Stephen Douglas would likely have been president, and the issue of slavery might have turned out very differently.
Luckily, Lincoln had his pick of weapon.
How heavy were the swords? In the early 1870s, Army Captain M. J. O’Rourke, an Irish-American historian and teacher of the history of the sword, in referring to cavalry swords, described them as those “ponderous blades, in wielding which they required all the strength of both [hands].”
Lincoln created conditions so favorable to him because of his towering height that he was sure that Shields would demur. 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.”
Forced to literally toe that line, the five-foot-nine Shields had no chance against the long-limbed Lincoln swinging a mighty broadsword. Surely Shields would concede?
But even that condition, which likely meant certain death, was still not enough to deter Shields, who certainly did not lack bravery. So on September 22, 1842, Shields left his home state, where a duel was a criminal act, and headed for Bloody Island, Missouri, where Lincoln awaited him. It was a “to be a kill or be killed” standoff.
They advanced to the field where the score was to be settled once and for all. Both men were surrounded by seconds, close friends to ensure a fair fight. It was clear the rival supporters wished for a settlement.
At the last moment, the seconds intervened and cobbled together a Lincoln apology that satisfied both parties, so the duel was called off. The duelers left the field in much better form than when they arrived, laughing and talking. Subsequently, the men became friends.
Lincoln never forgot the incident, which troubled him deeply the rest of his life. In a letter written about the aftermath of the incident on December 9, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln wrote that an army officer during a receiving line at the White House asked her husband, “Is it true … that you once went out, to fight a duel and all for the sake of the lady by your side?”
Lincoln replied, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.”
However, it was not the end of the Shields-Lincoln relationship. The two men would soon enough be comrades in arms against the South in yet another twist of fate. Shields was set to become a war hero; he was a senator from three different states, had a record never surpassed, and success that was a rallying point for the Irish in the Union Army. He was also a strong proponent of Irish resettlement in the Midwest.
But all that was in the future. In the present, the American political l
andscape was rearranging itself, and a rising Lincoln and the newly arrived Irish found themselves at the center of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lincoln’s New Party, Anti-Irish and Anti-Slavery
By 1856, the Whig party Lincoln belonged to had destroyed itself over slavery and the violence of the Know-Nothings, an extremist group of nativists with a deep hatred of immigrants and Catholics that existed as an independent force but who were much closer to the Whigs and later the new Republican Party.
Lincoln by then was well steeped in Irish culture, history, and politics. It was one reason he would have no truck with the Nativists and the Know-Nothings. His favorite ballad as a young man was titled “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant,” set to music. It is an elegy for a young girl, Mary, who died of starvation during the Famine. We also know Lincoln contributed $10 to Famine relief, the equivalent of $500 today.
Lincoln’s contribution came after a mass meeting in Washington to raise money for Ireland. He urged that every American state should follow suit. The Washington meeting was attended by many politicians.
During the meeting, letters were read from Ireland, including one from the women of Dunmanway in County Cork. It was addressed to the Ladies of America. It said, “Oh that our American sisters could see the laborers on our roads, able-bodied men, scarcely clad, famished with hunger, with despair in their once-cheerful faces, staggering at their work… . Oh that they could see the dead father, mother, or child, lying coffinless, and hear the screams of the survivors around them, caused not by sorrow, but by the agony of hunger.”
Professor Christine Kinealy, director of the Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, rates Lincoln’s contribution to famine relief highly. “This was back in 1847, when Lincoln was only a newly elected politician to the House of Representatives. It was an insubstantial sum from an unimportant figure at the time, but it is retrospectively very interesting,” the Trinity College graduate stated.
Kinealy asserts that this donation was not out of character for Lincoln, who had a lifelong rapport with the Irish.
“I suppose Lincoln always had a great affinity for the Irish and their plight. He knew and recited Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock and his favorite ballad was Lady Dufferin’s poem ‘The Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ set to music.”
Perhaps it was the poignant lyrics of that song that inspired the generous donation. A verse runs:
I thank you for the patient smile
When your heart was fit to break,
When the hunger pain was gnawin’ there,
And you hid it, for my sake!
I bless you for the pleasant word,
When your heart was sad and sore—
O, I’m thankful you are gone, Mary,
Where grief can’t reach you more!
Lincoln didn’t just absorb the maudlin side of the Irish. He also told Irish jokes, gently poking fun without any real malice.
Lincoln may also have gotten his Irish affinity from his first schoolmaster Zachariah Riney, an Irish Catholic who Lincoln subsequently held in very great respect. According to the oral history of the Rineys of Kentucky, four Riney brothers emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland, in the late 1700s. These four brothers were probably James, John, Thomas, and Jonathan, a Revolutionary War soldier. Many of the Rineys migrated to Kentucky. Thomas was the father of Zachariah Riney, the first schoolteacher of Abraham Lincoln.
Riney insisted on correct spellings but also, with the older boys, distilling sentences down so that the bare minimum of words sufficed. Some historians have credited Riney with Lincoln’s uncanny ability, as with the Gettysburg Address, to distill profound thoughts into such simple sentences.
But despite the help of the much-respected Irish American schoolteacher and the immediate Irish connections through domestic help and a cultural affinity, there were deep and very strongly held differences between Lincoln and the Irish.
During his early political battles, Lincoln could often be ambivalent about them. They favored the Democrats and were hostile to his Republican party. There were many in his own party who despised them.
In the twenty years before the Civil War, four million people from Europe emigrated. It was the Irish, fleeing the Famine, who made up the largest numbers, and their massive influx right at the time that Lincoln was shaping his political career presented formidable problems to him. With an alien culture and religion, and arriving in terrible straits after the dreadful impact of the Famine, the Irish were ripe for sparking a wave of nativism.
The Know-Nothings were born and quickly became identified with the fledgling Republican Party and, by association, with Lincoln. Their aim was simple—to rid America of the despised foreigners. They believed the Irish in particular paid allegiance to the pope and not to their new country, and they made a compact to destroy them.
The intensity of the hatred of Irish immigrants can be gauged by what happened in Louisville on August 5, 1855, in Lincoln’s home state where, urged on by rabble-rousing newspaper editor George Prentice, the Know-Nothing mob descended on a shanty Irish neighborhood.
Prentice called the Irish and German the “most pestilent influence of the foreign swarms,” loyal to a pope he called “an inflated Italian despot who keeps people kissing his toes all day.”
The bigotry, raw even for its time, of Prentice’s comments inflamed the mob, who were determined to stop Irish and German Catholics from voting. What happened next became known as “Bloody Monday,” with estimates ranging from twenty-two to one hundred Irish slaughtered, many as they tried to escape being burned alive.
An editorial in the Louisville Daily Journal entitled “Bloody Work” revisited the terrible events:
After dusk, a row of frame houses on Main Street between Tenth and Eleventh, the property of Mr. Quinn, a well-known Irishman, was set on fire. The flames extended across the street and twelve buildings were destroyed. These houses were chiefly tenanted by Irish, and upon any of the tenants venturing out to escape the flames, they were immediately shot down. No idea could be formed on the number killed. We are advised that five men were roasted to death, having been so badly wounded by gunshot wounds that they could not escape from the burning buildings.
Of all the enormities and outrages committed by the American Party (the official name for the Know-Nothings) yesterday and last night, we have not time now to write.
Upon the proceedings of yesterday and last night we have no time, nor heart, now to comment. We are sickened with the very thought of the men murdered, and houses burned and pillaged, that signalized the American victory yesterday.
Similar Know-Nothing riots had taken place in Philadelphia, leaving fourteen dead and the destruction of two Catholic churches and neighborhoods. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots took place in 1844 between May 6 and 8, and July 6 and 7. The riots were the result of a rumor that Catholics were trying to remove the Bible from public schools. The connection between the Know-Nothings and the fledgling Republican Party was well known to the Irish. The paradox was that many Republicans were both nativist and anti-slavery. But hatred of Irish Catholics topped their list. In order to be a member of the Know-Nothing Party, one had to meet the following criteria: be twenty-one years of age, believe in God, be a native-born Protestant American, be raised a Protestant, and never marry a Catholic.
One Know-Nothing summarized the issue: “[In order to protect our country, we will hire only those not under] … the insidious policy of the Church of Rome, and [avoid] all other foreign influences against the institutions of our country, by placing in all offices … whether by election or appointment, none but native-born Protestant citizens.” Even though the Know-Nothing Party denounced all immigrants, it especially hated Irish Catholics. Their credo was very similar to that of the Orange Order.
On August 24, 1855, in the wake of the killings in Louisville on Bloody Monday, Lincoln wrote to his close friend Joshua Speed, who had asked his opinion on the Know-Nothings. Lincoln co
uld not have been clearer:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy [sic] those and foreigners, and Catholics.
It was a remarkable stance for the time, and the total opposite of many in the new Republican Party he had just helped create. Exactly how despised the Irish were among close associates was revealed by the comments of Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer. He suspected gangs of Irish were being paid to stuff ballot boxes. In a rage, he called them “Wandering, roving, robbing, Irish. Robbing, bloated, pockmarked Catholic Irish.” Herndon had to admit Lincoln himself did not feel that way about the Irish. Lincoln, he said, “had no prejudices against any class, … tolerating—as I never could—even the Irish.”
Casual anti-Irish sentiment was rampant. Sullivan Ballou, a Union soldier whose celebrated letters to his wife Sarah formed a major centerpiece of the groundbreaking Ken Burns PBS history on the Civil War, was downright racist in a letter to Sarah that was quite different in tone to the warm and fuzzy love letters. Marching through Virginia on July 19,1861, he wrote, “We can get nothing from the people here, they are all against us. They all live miserably, I think, and the slaves are to me more filthy than our Irish.”
The much beloved author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, was scathing about the “incapable” Irish and happily used a “No Irish Need Apply” addendum on her help-wanted ads.
Massachusetts was the hotbed of the Know-Nothings, the state where the most destitute Irish were landing. Not surprisingly, the Irish saw in them the mirror image of the landlords they had fled in Ireland after being driven off their land. Here now was a similar group trying to destroy them again.
