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.
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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.
My interview on 
Abraham Lincoln was fascinated by science. One particular fascination was astronomy. Lincoln had attained some knowledge of basic astronomy in Indiana. By his seventeenth year, he had reached his adult six-foot-four-inch height, his 160 pounds glued to a taut muscular frame. Awkward in movement and dress, the uniqueness of his mind managed to impress at least some of the girls. One fifteen-year-old, Anna “Kate” Roby, found him more scientifically instructive than romantic as they sat on the banks of the Ohio River. After Roby noted in awe that the moon was going down, Lincoln lapsed into a rather clinical discourse on the nature of planetary movement: “That’s not so,” he said, “it don’t really go down; It seems so.” He went on to explain: “The Earth turns from west to East and the revolution of the Earth carries us under, as it were: we do the sinking as you call it. The moon as to us is comparatively still. The moons sinking is only an appearance.” Notwithstanding the rudimentary nature of this description, Roby concluded that “Abe knew the general laws of astronomy and the movements of the heavenly bodies,” which she attributed to him being better read than anyone else in the region—“a learned boy among us unlearned folks.” What he read to gain this knowledge is unknown, but Roby admitted that “No man could talk to me that night as he did unless he had known something of geography as well as astronomy.” At least one early researcher suggested Lincoln had access in Indiana to John O’Neill’s New and Easy System of Geography and Popular Astronomy. The book provides a basic introduction to geographical terms and how to read maps, plus an extensive history of each continent. This is followed by an extensive discussion of popular astronomy, the basics of the earth and moon’s movement, the causes of solar and lunar eclipses, and explanations of comets, meteors, and constellations. There are even chapters on the moon’s effect on tides, calculations of longitude, and weather prediction.
Abraham Lincoln is well known as having interests in science, but he also had an interest in the arts. Join me at the Arts Club of Washington on October 26th to explore the arts and sciences of Abraham Lincoln. The event is open to the public.
Lincoln took a scientific approach to military strategy. The Anaconda plan’s focus was on securing the coastlines and the Mississippi River. Recognizing New Orleans as the hub of the cotton trade and commerce, Lincoln saw it as the first port to be targeted for blockade. He also hoped to block southern ship traffic from Charleston, South Carolina to cut off Confederate attempts to woo Great Britain and France to their side. Helping him make this happen was Alexander Dallas Bache and the Coast Survey. The Coast Survey had been authorized by Thomas Jefferson, and Bache, who was Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, was quick to send nautical charts of the Chesapeake Bay to Lincoln. He also forwarded two terrestrial maps produced by the Survey that had far-reaching influence on Lincoln’s decisions on emancipation and military strategy.
I was interviewed for the summer 2022 issue of The Lincolnian, the newsletter of the Lincoln Group of DC. This is Part 3, the final part. Here is 
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I was interviewed in the summer 2022 issue of The Lincolnian, the newsletter of the Lincoln Group of DC. The Lincolnian is sent to all Lincoln Group members quarterly (
