American Eclipse Read online

  AMERICAN

  ECLIPSE

  A Nation’s

  Epic Race to Catch

  the Shadow of

  the Moon and Win

  the Glory of the World

  David Baron

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE:

  SHALL THE SUN BE DARKENED

  PART ONE • 1876

  CHAPTER 1: Reign of Shoddy

  CHAPTER 2: Professor of Quadruplicity

  CHAPTER 3: Nemesis

  CHAPTER 4: “Petticoat Parliament”

  PART TWO • 1878

  CHAPTER 5: Politics and Moonshine

  CHAPTER 6: The Wizard in Washington

  CHAPTER 7: Sic Transit

  CHAPTER 8: “Good Woman That She Are”

  CHAPTER 9: Show Business

  PART THREE • 1878

  CHAPTER 10: Among the Tribes of Uncivilization

  CHAPTER 11: Queen City

  CHAPTER 12: Nature’s Editor

  CHAPTER 13: Old Probabilities

  PART FOUR • 1878

  CHAPTER 14: Favored Mortals

  CHAPTER 15: First Contact

  CHAPTER 16: Totality

  CHAPTER 17: American Genius

  PART FIVE • 1878–1931

  CHAPTER 18: Ghosts

  CHAPTER 19: Shadow and Light

  EPILOGUE: TENDRILS OF HISTORY

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  TO BE HUMAN, IT SEEMS, IS TO SEEK PURPOSE IN OUR TRANSIENT lives. Many people find meaning in the eyes of their children or in the words of Scripture, but I discovered it on a beach outside a Hyatt Regency in Aruba. I had journeyed south that winter of 1998 to escape the snows of Boston and, more notably, to take in nature’s grandest spectacle, a total solar eclipse, which would cross the Caribbean on a Thursday afternoon in late February. As a science journalist, I thought I knew what to expect. For 174 seconds, the blue sky would blacken, stars would appear, and the sun would manifest its ethereal outer atmosphere, the solar corona. What I had not anticipated was my own intense reaction to the display.

  For three glorious minutes, I felt transported to another planet, indeed to a higher plane of reality, as my consciousness departed the earth and I gaped at an alien sky. Above me, in the dim vault of the heavens, shone an incomprehensible object. It looked like an enormous wreath woven from silvery thread, and it hung suspended in the immensity of space, shimmering. As I stood transfixed by this vision, I felt something I had never experienced before—a visceral connection to the universe—and I became an umbraphile, an eclipse chaser, one who has since obsessively stalked the moon’s shadow—across Europe, Asia, Australia—for yet a few more fleeting moments of lunar nirvana.

  Over the years, this eccentric passion naturally led me to wonder how humans in the past have responded to the same imposing sight, and my curiosity eventually steered me to the Library of Congress. That institution holds not just books but also millions of artifacts culled from American history—from Lincoln’s early draft of the Gettysburg Address to the correspondence of Groucho Marx—and among its vast collections are the personal papers of astronomers of the nineteenth century, the eclipse chasers of their time, who probed the hidden sun for nature’s secrets. During long days at the James Madison Memorial Building, across from the U.S. Capitol, I requested box after dusty box from storage and discovered a priceless lode: faded, handwritten letters; dog-eared news clippings; telegrams and train tickets, photographs and drawings; and fragile, yellowing diaries that retained the observations, dreams, and desires of people who, like me, found magic in the shade of the moon. As I read these aging documents in the sterile glow of fluorescent lights, I grew immersed in a narrative far richer than any I had imagined. Those relics revealed a tale not just about eclipses, but about how the United States came to be the nation that it is today.

  If indeed we all seek purpose in our lives, this longing applies not only to individuals but also to societies. The story I happened upon in the Library of Congress, and which I subsequently traced through archives across the continent, describes nothing less than a search for existential meaning. The tale ultimately reflects how an unfledged young nation came to embrace something much larger than itself—the enduring human quest for knowledge and truth.

  Eclipses suns imply.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  AMERICAN ECLIPSE

  PROLOGUE

  SHALL THE SUN BE DARKENED

  JULY 29, 1878—

  Johnson County, Texas

  SOME WOULD CLAIM THAT THE TRAGEDY’S FATEFUL COURSE had been set several months earlier, in the winter of 1878. “That was the coldest weather I have [ever] gone against,” one longtime Texan remembered, recalling that Dallas had witnessed something exotic that season: ice-skating. “They built brush and log fires all around the lake to keep from freezing while they were taking in the novel spectacle.” Another local told how, after the ice had melted and the earth had thawed, the Texas summer brought another portentous phenomenon, a plague of grasshoppers. “[They] passed up nothing that was green. There were millions on millions of them.” The cold snap and the locust swarms lodged in the minds of individuals who were prone to reading biblical significance into natural events. To them, these were signs that the world was soon to end.

  Predictions of the world’s imminent demise were not uncommon in nineteenth-century America. In the 1830s and early 1840s, followers of the millenarian preacher William Miller filled enormous tents to hear of the awesome day of Christ’s return, when “the earth will be dashed to pieces” and Jesus “will destroy the bodies of the living wicked by fire.” By means of an elaborate formula, Miller calculated when Judgment Day would occur, which he established as October 22, 1844—a date that became known as the Great Disappointment after the Lord did not come to retrieve his faithful, foiling the hopes of those who had climbed rooftops to prepare for their ascent into heaven. Later, the Adventist preacher Nelson H. Barbour revised Miller’s calculations and offered a new forecast that he published in the book Evidences for the Coming of the Lord in 1873, yet another year that passed without Christ’s longed-for return. By the mid-1870s, Dwight Moody, a shoe salesman turned evangelist who preached to standing-room-only crowds, steered a wiser, potentially less humiliating course. He fixed no specific date for the Rapture but implored his audiences simply to be ready at all times. “The trump of God may be sounded, for anything we know, before I finish this sermon,” he intoned.

  For those on the lookout for the Second Coming, celestial trumpets would not be the only harbinger of Christ’s return. According to the Book of Matthew, just before Jesus appeared “in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory,” another sign would manifest itself: at that moment, Christ proclaimed, “shall the sun be darkened.”

  ON THE SCORCHING AFTERNOON of July 29, 1878, in a landscape recently transformed from open range to farmland, the people of Johnson County were cultivating their fields. This part of North Central Texas was a mix of West and South, cowboys and cotton. The region had seen its share of slaveholding, and although the Emancipation Proclamation had ostensibly abolished the practice, for many freedmen it felt as if slavery had continued. Without property of their own, black laborers, forced to sharecrop from white landlords, still slept in rough-hewn shacks, woke before dawn, and worked interminable hours—from “can’t see to can’t see”—for
scant reward.

  What had motivated one Ephraim Miller to journey to this hardscrabble part of Texas some six months earlier is not recorded, but he had come from West Tennessee, a region that in this era saw a great exodus of “Exodusters,” former slaves fleeing racial violence and economic oppression. Arriving in Texas, Miller rented a small prairie farm near the old Johnson County seat of Buchanan, with an eastward view of the Cross Timbers—dense oak woods that provided lumber for fences, plow handles, and coffins. With a wife and four children—the eldest a son, about ten—Miller was said to be prospering, at least enough to afford a recent purchase, a hatchet.

  That July day had begun unremarkably, an overcast morning yielding to scattered storm clouds in the afternoon. The air was thick and hot, and lightning flashed against the summer horizon. As the sun inched westward and the hour approached four, the Texans noticed peculiarities in their surroundings. A farmer near Waco puzzled at a sight beneath his cottonwoods: the specks of light between the shadows of the leaves bizarrely turned to crescents, miniature moons dappling the ground. In Dallas, a woman on the banks of the Trinity heard the melancholy croaking of frogs. On the plains to the northwest, a nine-year-old boy caught sight of bats flying aberrantly in the afternoon. The oppressive heat began to lift as the quality of daylight shifted. The squat homes, the cornstalks, the barbed-wire fencing—everything took on an air of unreality, seemingly thrown into bold relief. The landscape dimmed—not turning gray, as if beneath cloud cover, but a faint yellow, as if lit by a fading kerosene lamp. Fireflies winked on. A star suddenly materialized, then two. The air stopped moving. The birds ceased their chatter. Then a few final ripples of light rushed over the ground—and darkness descended.

  Fear swept over the fields. A man fell to his knees in supplication, between the handles of his plow. Others fled toward church. Looking up, the people of Johnson County saw an unfamiliar sky; the sun was gone, replaced by a magnificent ring of golden light—a halo. This heavenly crown was finely textured, as if made from spun silk, with hints of ruby at its base and luminous, pearly wings projecting toward the east and west.

  It was then that Ephraim Miller was seen running toward home, hatchet in hand. A devout man, Miller had been heard to say that morning that he had learned the world would end that very evening, and if so, he intended to be “so sound asleep that Gabriel’s trumpet wouldn’t wake him.” He apparently wished to avoid the apocalypse and to speed his passage to the hereafter. He did not plan to go alone. Entering the house, he encountered his son and struck hard with the axe. The boy fell, gasping for life in a pool of blood. Miller’s young daughters—age two and four—wailed and hid beneath the bed, while his littlest child, an infant, crawled on the floor. Clutching a new razor with his right hand, Miller climbed a ladder to the tiny attic. There, closer to the kingdom of heaven, he cut his own throat from ear to ear. Then he fell back to earth beside his dying son.

  Miller’s wife, witnessing the murder-suicide, screamed and burst out the back door. “Come on, sweet chariot,” she cried as she wrung her hands, crossing a cotton field in the deep twilight at the end of time.

  FOR MILLENNIA, TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSES have awed, frightened, and inspired.

  In the sixth century B.C., in Asia Minor, two warring powers—the Medes and the Lydians—laid down their weapons after six years of fighting when confronted by the sudden darkness of an eclipse. (The soldiers were “zealous to make peace,” Herodotus relates.) In A.D. 840, in Europe, a total eclipse so unnerved Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious—who had long been anxious about strange events in the heavens—that, according to an advisor, the emperor “began to waste away by refusing food” and died a month later, plunging his realm into civil war. In 1806, in North America, the appearance of a “black sun”—an omen predicted by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa—emboldened a Native American uprising that his brother Tecumseh would lead against the United States in the War of 1812. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose tales of wilderness adventure would captivate the nation, witnessed that same eclipse in upstate New York, and years later he recalled it vividly. “I shall only say that I have passed a varied and eventful life, that it has been my fortune to see earth, heavens, ocean, and man in most of their aspects,” he wrote, “but never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man as a total eclipse of the sun.”

  A total solar eclipse is a singular experience, not to be confused with other, more common types of eclipses. Partial solar eclipses, which occur at least twice a year over a large portion of the earth, offer a curious sight (through darkened glass, you can watch the moon take a bite out of the solar disk), but the effects are otherwise subtle. Lunar eclipses, in which the earth casts its shadow on a reddened moon, can be memorable and strangely beautiful, but they too are not especially rare. Total solar eclipses, on the other hand, in which the moon completely obscures the face of the sun, are exceptional—passing any given point on earth about once every four hundred years—and create an experience that is otherworldly. With a total solar eclipse, you come to appreciate that the very word—eclipse—is misleading, because what is notable is not what is hidden, but what is revealed. A total eclipse pulls back the curtain that is the daytime sky, exposing what is above our heads but unseen at any other time: the solar system. Suddenly, you perceive our blazing sun as never before, flanked by bright stars and planets.

  Eclipses inevitably reveal much about ourselves, too. What we see in them reflects our own longings and fears, as well as our misconceptions. For Ephraim Miller, the total solar eclipse that descended over Texas on July 29, 1878, held deep religious significance, but for many others who witnessed it—especially to the north, in Wyoming and Colorado—a whole different meaning imbued the historic event. The eclipse occurred at a pivotal time in post–Civil War America. This adolescent nation, once a land of yeoman farmers, had in a mere century expanded exponentially in population, wealth, and physical extent. New technologies of the industrial age were accelerating the pace of life. Women, long confined to the home and to challenges of childbirth and child-rearing, were rebelling against cultural strictures. And now, in this consequential age of national maturation, a group of American scientists aimed to use the eclipse to show how far the country had evolved intellectually.

  Although Ephraim Miller did not anticipate the eclipse, astronomers did. They computed the heavenly motions and plotted where darkness would fall, and then they endeavored to meet it, for while the event would be exceedingly brief—just three minutes in duration—it offered a chance to solve some of nature’s most enduring riddles. These scientists, male and female, trekked to the western frontier in an age of train robberies and Indian wars. Bearing telescopes and wielding theories, they sought fame for themselves and glory for their country.

  Among this hardy crew were a few scientists with much to prove. One astronomer was determined to find a new planet and, along with it, the acclaim he held he was due. Another meant to transform American culture by expanding the paltry opportunities for women in science. And a third, a young inventor, sought to burnish his reputation as a serious investigator, and what he learned on his journey would help him inaugurate our modern technological era. Together, these three individuals and those three minutes of midday darkness would enlighten a people and elevate a nation, spurring its rise to an honored place on the global stage.

  PART ONE

  1876

  CHAPTER 1

  REIGN OF SHODDY

  MONDAY, JUNE 26, 1876—

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  EIGHT DAYS SHY OF AMERICA’S HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY, TOURISTS thronged to Philadelphia for the approaching Fourth of July festivities. Elsewhere in the country, there was cause for despair. In Washington, President Ulysses S. Grant, the great Union hero of the Civil War, presided over a scandal-plagued White House. In New York, unemployment ran high among tradesmen—plumbers, shipwrights, coopers, hatte
rs—the interminable aftereffects of the financial Panic of 1873. Far out in Montana Territory, the dashing Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred of his men lay freshly slain, scalped, and dismembered above a river that the Sioux called the Greasy Grass—more familiar as the Little Bighorn—and when news of the carnage reached the East a week later, it would traumatize the nation. For now, though, in Philadelphia, a celebration was in progress. Here in the city where one hundred years earlier the country had declared its independence, Americans had come to mark the centennial at the Centennial.

  Officially called the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, the Centennial Exhibition was a grand world’s fair that sprawled along the Schuylkill River and across the expansive Fairmount Park. More than one hundred buildings housed thousands of exhibitors from fifty nations, showcasing everything from typewriters to pianos, sewing machines to Japanese art. During the Centennial’s six-month run, it would tally ten million admissions and serve as a fitting symbol for a country with world-class ambitions.

  The late-June sun baked the fairground’s asphalt walkways, tinging the air with the aroma of tar. Visitors escaped the heat by seeking the shade of parasols and willows, and by consuming ice cream sodas and chilled drinking water, the latter available free from the Sons of Temperance fountain on Belmont Avenue, its cistern cooled by twelve hundred pounds of ice. Others sought relief in an invigorating ride on the narrow-gauge railroad that offered a five-cent, fifteen-mile-per-hour tour of the grounds—past the Women’s Pavilion, Horticultural Hall, and the state buildings (New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), before arriving back at Machinery Hall, an imposing edifice of pine and spruce and wrought iron that spanned the equivalent of five city blocks.