1861 (64 page)

E
VENTUALLY, ASTRONOMERS WOULD LEARN
a good deal about the mysterious comet—still known today as the Great Comet of 1861—which happened to arrive at a moment in history when scientists’ ability to gauge, measure, and predict the natural world was improving at an astonishing rate. They quickly ascertained its size, velocity, trajectory, and distance from Earth. Comparing their measurements to historical data, they decided
initially that it was the same comet that had last passed by in 1556, alarming Charles V to the point of abdicating the throne of the Holy Roman Empire; upon further consideration, however, they decided that the new comet was in fact previously unknown, an uncharted traveler of the heavens. It turned out to have been first spotted on May 13 by a sheep farmer and amateur stargazer in New South Wales. Not long after this, it appeared in the skies above Cape Town, and Dr. Livingstone,
the explorer, saw it from his campsite in deepest Africa.

Telegraphic communications in the Southern Hemisphere were still a few years away from the point when scientists there would have been able to alert their colleagues in London, Berlin, and Washington. So by the time the comet blazed into view of the top half of the globe, in late June, it was already extremely close by the standards of astronomy—about twelve million miles away. One reason it had been so hard to spot at first is that it was
headed almost straight for Earth (but, luckily, not quite). Astronomers calculated—correctly, it seems—that on the comet’s closest approach, Earth actually passed through its tail, which was believed to explain why certain vicars in rural England reported a strange greenish haze in the air that night, requiring them to light their altar candles unusually early.

Yet, for all the closely printed columns of explanatory data in all the major newspapers, many Americans were still not really sure what to make of the wandering star.

For some, the magnificent nocturnal spectacle was simply a pleasant distraction from the political troubles around them. Eighteen sixty-one was a time just before electric light would pollute the skies above the world’s cities and towns—a time when the heavens were, at least for the moment, still visible.
Mary Chesnut, who had followed the Confederate government to Richmond, described how gentlemen enticed ladies out
under the stars during those humid Southern nights: “Heavens above, what philandering there was, done in the name of the comet! When you stumbled on a couple in the piazza they lifted their eyes—and ‘comet’ was the only word you heard.”
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Others gazed at it a bit more searchingly. Like grizzled Ralph Farnham on the train to Boston, they were uncertain travelers between an old world and a new one, a world of faith and a world of reason. They laughed about how astronomy had debunked the ancient superstition that comets were omens from Heaven, portending war and the death of kings—and then they proceeded to speculate on what it might foretell.

So much had changed in the past few years—even in the past few months. Fixed truths seemed to be casting themselves adrift; familiar stars departing from their orbits.
Revolution,
in the sense that astronomers at Washington’s Naval Observatory used the term, meant something stately and predictable, an orbit tethered by the gravity of the sun. Elsewhere in the capital city, of course, the word meant something quite different; elsewhere in the
nation, different things still. Until recently, America’s own revolution had come to seem like a fact moored safely to the ever-more-distant year 1776. That was now no
longer the case. It blazed again across the sky, a thing of wonder and terror, still uncertain in its import.

Groping for words adequate to express their thoughts, some yoked the language of science to that of prophecy. “
History is like the progress of a comet, moving slowly, at a snail’s pace, for hundreds of years, far away in the unfathomable abysses of space, then pitching down headlong on the sun,” one essayist wrote. “We are now, as a nation, in our perihelion of light and heat. We are in our blossoming
period.… [These] are times in which a whole people or a community are filled with a common conviction, united in the same faith, inspired by the same purpose, are of one heart and one soul.”
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This announcement of universal harmony seems to have been premature, in light of other responses to the comet. Americans may all have looked up at the same starry wanderer, but each saw something different.

Yankees, flattered that it graced the northern part of the sky, hailed it as an augury of triumph for the Union, though several also expressed the fond hope that it would change course and hit Richmond. Meanwhile, a Southerner noticed on closer inspection that “the tail of the comet sweeps directly over the north star, which is the fixed representation of northern power, and bans it with its baleful influence, while its light gleams as a pillar of flame to the
south, beckoning her armies on to victory.” Abolitionists, naturally, said it heralded the liberation of the slaves, like the ancient Hebrews’ pillar of fire. One artist drew a cartoon that showed the comet with the head of Lincoln, trailing red stripes across a starry blue sky; he captioned this “Star of the North, or the Comet of 1861.” Another artist copied this drawing, but gave the comet the unmistakable jowly head of
Winfield Scott, while an editorial writer, for reasons not fully explained, compared it to Colonel Frank Blair. A Richmond newspaper proposed that the comet be dubbed “the Southern Confederacy” in tribute to the new nation, to which one in Providence retorted: “The name might be appropriate to that body, which has the least conceivable head with the largest conceivable tail, and is running away as fast as possible.”

The president saw the comet, too.

Seventy years later, a woman who had played often as a girl with the Lincoln children, until Willie’s death from typhoid fever in 1862, wrote down her recollections of that long-ago spring and summer. The memoirist,
Julia Taft Bayne, remembered how the Negroes of Washington “cowered under the great war comet blazing in the sky.” There was, she said, one particular slave named Oola, a woman so old
she was said to have been born in Africa, and to possess the gift of prophecy. “You see dat big fire sword blazin’ in the sky?” she supposedly said. “De handle’s to’rd de Norf and de point to’rd de Souf and de Norf’s gwine take dat sword and cut de Souf’s heart out. But dat Linkum man, chilluns, if he takes de sword, he’s gwine perish by it.” Mrs. Bayne described how she had gone and told Tad and Willie
of this prediction, leaving out the part about their father, and how they, in turn, ran immediately to tell him.

“I noticed him, a few evenings later, looking out of the window intently at the comet and I wondered if he was thinking of the old Negro woman’s prophecy,” Mrs. Bayne wrote in 1931. But she was very old herself by then, grasping at a few frayed strands of memory, and if there had ever been any truth to the story, it may have been lost somewhere along her passage from one century into the next.
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Perhaps it was
James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
that, for once, came closest to the truth—closest, even, to prophecy. On Independence Day, 1861, a remarkable article appeared on the paper’s editorial page. It was headlined “Annus Mirabilis”:

In any event, the comet began to fade as quickly as it had appeared. By the Fourth of July, it had already peaked; over the next few days, it
would rapidly dwindle. Late that month, as the shattered Union army retreated from the field of Bull Run, it could still be discerned with the naked eye, a fast-receding pinpoint among the night stars.

In April of the following year, an astronomer at the Imperial
Russian Observatory near
St. Petersburg glimpsed it one last time through the lens of his telescope. And then it was gone, continuing on its own mysterious errand toward some incalculable future rendezvous, beyond human sight.

Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865 (
photo credit 9.1
)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“Reconciliation” (1865)

D
ESPITE HEAVY NAVAL BOMBARDMENTS
of the citadel throughout 1863 and 1864,
Fort Sumter
did not fall into Union hands again until the surrender of Charleston at the end of the Civil War.

On April 14, 1865—the fourth anniversary of the original Union garrison’s evacuation—a ceremony was held
at Sumter to celebrate the war’s end. Some three thousand people attended, both civilians and soldiers, black and white. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the famous “Glory” regiment, served as a color guard; Abner Doubleday,
Charles Sumner, and
William Lloyd Garrison were among the guests of honor.
Charleston Harbor was full of flag-bedecked gunboats, steamers, and ironclads, firing salutes throughout the morning.

Just before the ceremony, according to
The New York Times,
a large steamship arrived “loaded down with between 2,000 and 3,000 of the emancipated race, of all ages and sizes. Their appearance was warmly welcomed.”

After a brief prayer, Major—now General—Robert Anderson stepped to the fort’s flagpole and slowly raised the same tattered banner that he had lowered there four years before.

Memories of the ceremony were overshadowed by the assassination that night of President Abraham Lincoln.
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James Buchanan
never returned to Washington, D.C. He spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name, and supported the Lincoln administration throughout the war as a pro-Union Democrat. He died in 1868.
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Eight months after the close of his Peace Conference,
John Tyler
was elected a congressman of the Confederate States of America. He died of a stroke in January 1862, before he was able to take his seat. His villa just outside Hampton, Virginia, remained a Freedmen’s Bureau school for black children until his widow finally regained possession in 1869.
Hampton University is currently building a new dining hall on the
site where it once stood.
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Notwithstanding
John J. Crittenden
’s intention to retire from public life at the beginning of the Civil War, his friends pressured him
to return to Washington as a congressman and continue striving to peacefully reconcile North and South. This he did until his death in July 1863, three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg.
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Abby Kelley Foster
remained an outspoken critic of Lincoln throughout the war, maintaining that he was not aggressive enough in his policies on slavery and race. After emancipation, she joined
Frederick Douglass in arguing that the
American Anti-Slavery Society should not disband but should continue fighting for black
civil rights. The society held its last
meeting in April 1870. Foster gave one of the final speeches, in which she rejoiced at all the changes that she had seen over the course of her life: “Have we not moral as well as physical rail-roads and telegraphs? I feel as if I had lived a thousand years.”
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