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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