Signs in the Heavens and the Distress of Nations

This essay argues that in the early nineteenth century, the heavens functioned as a non-linguistic medium of communication. Meteor showers, eclipses, and comets seized the attention of viewers across the United States and were subsequently harnessed by community leaders to validate religious and political movements. Using people's responses to different heavenly signs as they were recorded in newspapers, court depositions, almanacs, speeches, and religious tracts, this essay reconstructs the interpellative power of astronomical events—their capacity to seize people's attention—and the conflicts between religious and reform communities over how to interpret them. This conflict provides the context for one of the most unusual claims about heavenly media in the early nineteenth century—Nat Turner's assumption that an astronomical event could coordinate a revolt among geographically dispersed viewers.