Honor Culture Is Back. We Eradicated It for a Reason – By Ryan Grim (The Intercept) / March 29, 2022
Abraham Lincoln, Will Smith, and dueling.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS dogged throughout his career by an unseemly moment that almost cost him his life. It was 1842, and Illinois, under Democratic control, announced it would no longer accept state currency to pay debts. There was no national currency yet, and the decision to accept nothing but silver and gold made the state’s paper money worthless. Lincoln, then a 33-year-old state legislator, never passed up an opportunity to attack Democrats, and he lit into the Democratic state auditor, James Shields, a close ally of state kingpin Stephen Douglas, over the decision.
And, as was strangely common at the time, Lincoln did it under a pen name: Rebecca. Playing off of drunken Irish stereotypes, “Rebecca” mocked Shields as a womanizer, writing, “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.’”
Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, penned a poem under the name Cathleen, joking that Shields and “Rebecca” had gotten married. “Ye Jew’s harps awake! The Auditor’s won./Rebecca the widow has gained Erin’s son.”
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/03/29/oscars-will-smith-duel-honor/
