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1 Fire in the Night Sky
- Wesleyan University Press
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[ 1 ] T hroughout her life, Prudence Crandall wanted to teach. Education offered the potential for opportunity , self-sufficiency, even freedom, especially for women, blacks, and the poor.Crandall discovered, however, that educating the oppressed involved risk and clashed with deep-rooted traditions in American society. In 1833 Crandall’s school for black women in Canterbury , Connecticut, attracted hostility and national attention . Newspapers throughout the country reported on the opposition to Crandall’s school and the danger of emancipating blacks. On the evening of November 12, 1833, as Crandall’s twenty black female students went to sleep, a natural phenomenon—some thought it was the end of the world—briefly overshadowed the controversy surrounding Crandall’s school. In the slave quarters of the Brodess farm in Bucktown , Maryland, thirteen-year-old Harriet Tubman slept soundly. Tubman was still recovering from a severe head injury that nearly had killed her; a slave owner had thrown an iron weight that hit her in the head after she had refused to restrain a fellow slave.1 That November evening, her brother Robert stood guard watching for the white men known as the “slave patrol,” who often harassed the slaves. Robert saw numerous bursts of light and shouted for Harriet to come outside. She watched silently as hundreds of stars broke free from their anchors and poured down from the sky.2 On the same November night, twenty-four-year-old Abraham Lincoln returned to a tavern in New Salem, Illinois , where he boarded. Lincoln, a struggling merchant who managed a general store and surveyed land, read the law books he had borrowed from a friend in the hope of becoming a lawyer and went to bed.3 “I was roused from 1 : Fire in the Night Sky [ 2 ] Prudence Crandall’s Legacy my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon’s voice exclaiming, ‘Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!’”4 Through the glare of light streaming through his window Lincoln saw the sky ablaze with a thousand fireballs. In the early morning hours of November 13, 1833, a meteor shower of extraordinary brilliance and intensity—“one of the most terrorizing spectacles ” ever witnessed by Americans—turned night into day throughout North America.5 One man compared it to a gigantic volcano exploding and filling the horizon with flying molten glass.6 In many communities, including Natchez, Mississippi, and Baltimore, Maryland, residents believed that their cities were engulfed in flames, and sounded alarms. Tourists at Niagara Falls directed their attention to the flashes of light that descended “in fiery torrents” over the dark and roaring water.7 Yale Professor Denison Olmstead said no other celestial phenomenon in history had created such widespread fear and amazement. He calculated that he had seen hundreds of thousands of meteors in New Haven for many hours that night. It was “the greatest display of celestial fireworks that has ever been seen since the beginning of the world,” Olmstead wrote.8 Some saw the meteors as a sign of hope. “I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle and was awe struck,” said Frederick Douglass, who was fifteen years old and a slave in Maryland. “I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of Man; and in my then state of mind I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer.”9 Others were certain that the meteors foreshadowed a time of great conflict . A minister inWinchester, Kentucky, opened his church in the middle of the night to accommodate frightened parishioners who feared they were witnessing the end of the world.10 A columnist in Maine at the Portland Evening Advertiser concluded that the meteors signaled the beginning of the “latter days” and the end of civilization.11 Another observer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said the country could expect the rise of widespread violence and war. “The whole starry host of heaven seemed to be in a state of practical secession and revolt . . . which finds parallel only in the affairs of earth.”12 ■ During the 1830s racial tensions in the United States exploded. Nat Turner, a slave in Virginia, believed God had chosen him to lead other [3.80.211.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:34 GMT) Fire in the Night Sky [ 3 ] slaves in a violent overthrow of slavery throughout the South. After witnessing a solar eclipse in 1831 that Turner took as a divine signal, he commenced a...