1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [220]
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.”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