On May 3, 1844, the American Republicans staged a rally in a vacant lot in the Third Ward of Kensington, less than half a mile north of Shiffler’s home and workplace. Predictably, the Third Ward’s many Irish Catholic immigrants took offense, heckling the speakers and eventually chasing them away. No one was hurt, and the hecklers even helped an old man off the nativists’ improvised stage before they dismantled it. But the nativists vowed to return.
On Monday, May 6, the nativists rallied in larger numbers back at the same vacant lot, only to be hit by a freak rainstorm that drove both nativists and hecklers to seek shelter in a nearby covered market, where Protestants and Catholics began brawling. Hoping to calm matters, an Irish Catholic fireman rushed to the market from the nearby Hibernia Hose House, which had been celebrating the arrival of a new bell. As he begged everyone to go home, someone—history doesn’t record who—shot him in the face.
Young men, Shiffler among them, poured into the street. One witness spotted him at the corner of Germantown Road and Master Street, in the middle of the action, among other youths throwing bricks at a rival mob. But while the nativists had to make do with whatever projectiles they could gather from the street, Irish American Third Ward residents could run home for their guns, then take up positions in windows and behind fences. One fired at Shiffler’s group, hitting Shiffler in the right arm and chest with a “heavy charge from a musket,” reported to consist of “about a dozen slugs and a handful of shot.” Shiffler staggered against a fence, then collapsed. Others pulled him a block south to a drug store—as close to a trauma center as 1844 Kensington could provide—but he died soon after. By the end of the day several more nativists had been shot. William Wright, also nineteen, died from a musket ball through the heart, while two nativists in their early twenties were mortally wounded.
Nativists immediately framed Shiffler’s death as a sacrifice to the American cause. “The scene which exhibited itself around this dying man was too much for every one possessing the ordinary feelings of sympathy to bear without shedding a tear,” wrote one newspaper. “One grey headed old man, in the midst of his tears, raised his staff aloft, and exclaimed in the fulness of his heart—‘On, on Americans! Liberty or death.’“ By the end of three days of riots, seven more Protestants were dead or dying, and nativists would collectively term them the “Kensington martyrs.” But as the first to fall, Shiffler earned special attention. On May 9, his body was borne to its burial place, accompanied by three hundred mourners. The coffin contained a silver plate attesting to his status as “The first Martyr in the Native American Cause.” And it was draped in a flag that, the nativists now claimed, Shiffler had been clutching at his death.