Lincoln and the Leonid Meteor Shower

On November 13, 1833, Abraham Lincoln was awoken to the Leonid meteor shower, which is again happening now in 2022. Preachers thought it was the end of the world, but Lincoln knew better.

I briefly mentioned this incident in my earlier post, Abraham Lincoln’s Interests in Astronomy, but since this is the anniversary of that event wanted to dig deeper. The story comes to light by way of Walt Whitman, who worked in Washington as a nurse during the Civil War. He remarked that he routinely saw Lincoln riding to and from the Soldiers’ Home (now called President Lincoln’s Cottage) during the hot and pestilence-filled summer months. In a reminiscence written in 1882, Whitman provides an anecdotal recounting of a meeting Lincoln held with bank presidents during a time of great uncertainty in the Union war effort. There was great concern that the Union would fail.

After the meeting, one of the bankers gloomily asked Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken. Lincoln reassured the men, as he so often did, by telling a little story:

“When I was a young man in Ilinois, I boarded for a time with a Deacon of the Presbyterian Church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, & I heard the Deacon’s voice exclaiming ‘Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!’ I sprang from my bed & rushed to the window and saw the stars falling in great showers! But looking back of them in the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”

Now known as Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle after the two astronomers who independently discovered it (officially) in 1865, we experience the Earth’s passage through the debris of the comet’s tail every year as meteor showers due to the way the tiny particles burn up in our atmosphere. In Lincoln’s time, such fiery showers created widespread panic as “the very heavens seemed ablaze.” The Lakota people saw it important enough to reset their calendar to commemorate it, while the Mormon leader Joseph Smith saw it as a sign of the Second Coming. It took astronomer Denison Olmsted to scientifically investigate the event, calling for the public across the country to report their observations, noting that “As the cause of ‘Falling Stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible.” After evaluating the incoming data and publishing his results, Olmsted rapidly advanced the knowledge of comets and birthed meteor science. Two years after the Leonids, Olmsted and his colleague Elias Loomis became the first American investigators to observe Halley’s Comet.

Lincoln continued his interest in astronomy throughout his presidency, inspiring his son Robert to become an amateur astronomer himself.

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.