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.”32
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.”33
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.34
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”:
The present is a year productive of strange and surprising events. It is one prolific of revolution and abounding in great and startling novelties. Our own country is resounding with war’s alarms, and half a million of Northern and Southern men are preparing to engage in a deadly conflict. And meanwhile all Europe is threatened with one tremendous revolution, growing out of our own, which will shake thrones to their foundations. The premonitory symptoms of change are already observable here and there. Even Russia will not escape; for the troubles in Poland and the emancipation of the serfs have already made her empire ripe for revolt. In China and Japan, too, the hand of revolution is also busy. This is indeed a wonderful year; for while all the world is more or less filled with apprehension and commotion, a luminous messenger makes its appearance in the heavens, to the consternation of astronomers.… That we are entering, to say the least, upon a new and important epoch in the history of the world, all these wars and rumors of wars, these miracles on earth and marvels in the sky, would seem to indicate.35
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)
POSTSCRIPTS
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again,
and ever again, this soil’d world …
—WALT WHITMAN,
“Reconciliation” (1865)
DESPITE 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 ir
onclads, 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.1
•
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 1868.2
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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.3
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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.4
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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.”5
•
Lucy Bagby liberated herself a second time from slavery in June 1861, becoming a contraband when Union forces entered Wheeling, Virginia. Her master, a leading secessionist, was imprisoned by federal troops in the same jail where he had once placed her.
On her return to Cleveland as a free woman in 1863, she was greeted with an enthusiastic welcome; the city’s black community held a “Grand Jubilee” in her honor. She later remarried, to a Union Army veteran, and died in Cleveland in 1906.6
•
In the late summer of 1861, James A. Garfield received his commission as colonel of the new Forty-second Regiment of Ohio Volunteers. In its ranks were many of his old pupils from Hiram College. The regiment would play a key role in securing Kentucky for the Union, and its early victories made Garfield a brigadier general, bringing him national acclaim. He later commanded troops at Shiloh and Chickamauga. Garfield resigned from the army in 1863, at Lincoln’s behest, to take a seat in the House of Representatives. In 1865, he was one of Congress’s most committed advocates of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the United States.7
Garfield fought staunchly not just for emancipation, but also for black civil rights. On Independence Day, 1865, he returned to the site of his Fourth of July oration five years earlier and gave a passionate speech rebutting those who believed that “the Negro” did not deserve the right to vote:
He was intelligent enough to understand from the beginning of the war that the destiny of his race was involved in it. He was intelligent enough to be true to that Union which his educated and traitorous master was endeavoring to destroy. He came to us in the hour of our sorest need, and by his aid, under God, the Republic was saved. Shall we now be guilty of the unutterable meanness, not only of thrusting him beyond the pale of its blessings, but of committing his destiny to the tender mercies of those pardoned rebels who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat? But some one says it is dangerous at this time to make new experiments. I answer, it is always safe to do justice. However, to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.
Garfield’s nomination and election to the presidency came about unexpectedly. After several candidates ended up in a deadlock at the 1880 Republican National Convention, delegates began stampeding toward the relatively obscure Ohioan. The party placed him at the head of its ticket (“I don’t know whether I am glad or not,” the somewhat dazed nominee said), and he went on to win by a slim plurality in November.
The new president’s inaugural address, almost wholly forgotten today, is a remarkable document, a clarion call for the nation to fulfill its promises to the former slaves. Indeed, over the course of more than two centuries, no other chief executive has begun his term with such a bold, firm, specific statement on the dangerous subject of civil rights, to which Garfield devoted more than half his speech. The emancipation of the Negro, he said, was the most important event in the nation’s history since the signing of the Constitution:
It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than five million people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.
Yet, Garfield continued, this epochal transformation would not be complete until blacks were granted their full privileges as Americans: voting rights, educational parity, and equal access to economic opportunities. All of these, his listeners knew, had been largely abrogated four years earlier when the previous Republican administration decreed the abrupt end of Reconstruction.
“There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States,” Garfield now warned. “Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.”
In the end, he offered a hopeful vision, in words eerily foreshadowing others that would be spoken, eighty-two years later, at the opposite end of the National Mall. Garfield said:
Let our people find a new meaning in the divine oracle which declares that “a little child shall lead them,” for our own little children will soon control the destinies of the Republic.
My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers’ God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation.
Garfield would continue espousing such views throughout his short presidency, notably in a speech at the Hampton Institute on June 4, 1881.
But that occasion at Hampton, almost exactly twenty years after the first contrabands’ liberation, would be his last public address. Less than a month later, as he walked through Washington’s train station on his way to a summer holiday with his family, Garfield was shot by a mentally deranged man, Charles Guiteau. The president lingered throughout the summer in great physical pain—as much from the inept medical care he received as from the wounds themselves—before dying on September 19.
He was succeeded by Chester Arthur, who showed little of his predecessor’s interest in achieving racial justice. James Garfield’s inaugural prophecy would wait much longer than fifty years to be fulfilled.
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Exhausted mentally and physically by his ordeal at Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson was never able to file an official report on the bombardment and surre
nder. He was appointed brigadier general in May 1861 and briefly commanded Union forces in his native Kentucky, but for reasons of health was relieved from active duty that October. He died at Nice, France, in 1871.
•
After being spurned by Jefferson Davis in his attempts to win a high post in the rebel government, Louis T. Wigfall joined the Confederate Congress and became Davis’s fiercest political foe. In March 1865, he strongly opposed the Confederates’ last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of defeat by conscripting blacks into military service. He fled to Texas in May of that year, hoping to continue the struggle by leading Southern troops across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
When this plan failed to materialize, Wigfall left for England, where he spent the next five years attempting to restart the war by first provoking hostilities between the United States and Great Britain. He finally returned to Texas and died of apoplexy in 1874.8
•
The dead at First Bull Run included Noah Farnham, Elmer Ellsworth’s successor as commander of the New York Fire Zouaves. Already sick with typhoid, Farnham was wounded by a Confederate bullet and died several days later. After the battle, the Zouaves were scapegoated in the press for the Union defeat and ridiculed as cowards; the flashy uniforms of the firemen soldiers became (and for some historians, remain) symbols of the early pride and folly of the Northern side. A few weeks after the battle, when the Zouaves’ regimental flags—the same ones they had paraded so proudly down Broadway that spring—were found abandoned on a trash heap in Alexandria, it was the unit’s final humiliation. By autumn, more than half the men had deserted, and a few months later, the regiment officially disbanded.
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