The total eclipse of February 12, 1831 began at 5:21 p.m. in Cape Cod Massachusetts, swept across the eastern seaboard through Maryland, North and South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, and exited an hour past sunset (6:36 p.m.) in the Mexico territory that would soon become Texas. This eclipse is historically important for a few reasons. First, it was the subject of the earliest known eclipse map in the United States, printed in the American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge. Second, it happened on Abraham Lincoln’s twenty-second birthday, and third, because it provided the impetus for Nat Turner’s slave uprising in Virginia. Turner, an enslaved African-American preacher, would pay with his life. Lincoln, just over a year after leaving Indiana for Illinois on March 1, 1830, would emancipate Turner’s descendants three decades later and also pay with his life.
Nat Turner was born into slavery around October 2, 1800, and by his own account, he was born with special powers. In a jailhouse interview published just before he died in 1831, Turner told author Thomas Ruffin Gray for the pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner that when he was three or four years old, he could provide details of events that occurred before his birth. His mother and other family members believed that Nat was a prophet who was “intended for some great purpose.” Turner learned how to read and write at a young age. He grew up deeply religious and was often seen fasting, praying, or immersed in reading the Bible. Pastor Turner, while preaching to his fellow enslaved people, testified, “To a mind like mine, restless, inquisitive and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed.”
Turner had visions that he interpreted as messages from God, believing that God used the natural world as a backdrop for the placement of omens and signs that guided his life. After Turner witnessed the solar eclipse, he took it as a sign from God to begin an insurrection against slaveholders. Turner, convinced that he was destined for greatness, began preparing for a rebellion against local slaveholders. Nat confessed to author Gray that his divine vision was to avenge slavery and lead his fellow enslaved people from bondage. Turner said the most vivid of those visions came on May 12, 1828, when “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.”
Turner purchased muskets and enlisted over 70 freed and enslaved men to his cause. On August 22, 1831, they rebelled and swept through the countryside of Southampton County, Virginia, killing whites and freeing upwards of 75 slaves. By the end of the rebellion, one of the largest slave rebellions in American history, over 60 whites were dead. After it was revealed that Turner and his small band of hatchet-wielding enslaved people had killed his master, Joseph Travis, along with his wife, nine-year-old son, and a hired hand as they slept in their beds, the white citizens became incensed. Then, after it was discovered that two of Turner’s men returned to the Travis home and killed “a little infant sleeping in a cradle” before dumping its body in the fireplace, the die was cast. As a result, over 120 Black people, some of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were killed.
Militias were formed and law enforcement was called in to put down the two-day rebellion. Hundreds of federal troops and thousands of militiamen quelled the uprising, capturing most of the participants (except for Turner himself). He remained hidden in the woods only a few miles away from the Travis farm for two months. On October 30, 1831, Benjamin Phipps was walking across a nearby farm. He noticed “some brushwood collected in a manner to excite suspicion,” below an overturned pine tree, according to a Richmond newspaper. When Phipps raised his gun, a weak, emaciated Turner emerged from the foxhole, surrendered, and was taken to the Southampton County Jail. Six days after his arrest, he stood trial and was convicted of “conspiring to rebel and making insurrection” and sentenced to death. Turner was hanged from a tree on November 11, 1831. Ironically, his death came in a small town called Jerusalem (present-day Courtland, Virginia). According to many historians, Nat Turner’s revolt contributed to the radicalization of American politics and helped chart the course toward the Civil War.
Equally ironic is that Turner’s revolt brought to an end an embryonic abolitionist movement in Virginia. Following the insurrection, the Virginia legislature narrowly rejected a measure for gradual emancipation that would have followed the lead of the North. About 40 petitions, signed by more than 2,000 Virginians, urged the General Assembly to address the issue of slavery. Some petitions called for outright emancipation, others for repatriation of the enslaved to Africa. Many advocated the removal of free Blacks from the state, seeing them as a nefarious influence. The House established a select committee and the debate finally spilled over into the full body. After vigorous debate, members declined to pass any law. Pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist opinion hardened in Virginia in the years that followed, citing Turner’s intelligence and education as a major cause of the revolt. As a result, measures were passed in Virginia and other southern states making it unlawful to teach enslaved people, or free African Americans for that matter, how to read or write.
As for Abraham Lincoln, no one knows what the 22-year-old did on his birthday that year. But for the 1831 total solar eclipse, all that we know for sure is that sometime that year, Lincoln struck out on his own, arriving in New Salem via flatboat and remaining in the village for about six years. The citizens of New Salem first took notice of the lanky fellow when his flatboat became stranded on a nearby milldam in the Sangamon River. A crowd gathered to watch the crew work to free the boat, noticing that Lincoln was obviously in charge. Lincoln directed (and assisted) the other crew members to unload the cargo from the stern which caused the flatboat to free itself from the barrier. Much to the amazement of the gawkers on shore, the flatboat still refused to budge, so Lincoln calmly waded ashore and borrowed an auger from Onstot’s cooper shop. Wading back to the flatboat, auger held high, Lincoln then drilled a hole in the bow allowing the water to drain out, which caused the flatboat to ease over the dam.
The auger’s owner, Denton Offutt, was so impressed with Lincoln’s handling of the incident, that he offered him a job as a clerk in his store in the flourishing village of New Salem. The store operated from July 1831 to 1832 but the business failed and Offutt moved on. It was at Offutt’s store where the young Lincoln accidentally overcharged a customer six cents (about $1.50 today) and traveled two miles to return the money. Legend states the incident is one of the acts that earned him the nickname “Honest Abe.” It is a great story, but in truth, the fact is that it was Offutt who forced Abe to run those many miles.
One thing is for sure, around the time of the eclipse, Lincoln nearly lost his feet to frostbite. Midwestern winters can be brutal, especially in February, and the winter of 1831 in New Salem is remembered as the “deep snow.” According to the book Lincoln Day by Day. A Chronology 1809-1865, in February of 1831, “While crossing Sangamon River, Lincoln breaks through the ice and gets his feet wet. In going two miles to the house of William Warnick he freezes his feet. Mrs. Warnick puts his feet in snow, to take out frostbite, and rubs them with grease.” The “grease” was likely goose grease, skunk oil, or rabbit fat. Lincoln recalled the episode with typical humility and humor recalling that he was “comfortably marooned” for weeks in the cabin belonging to Macon County Sheriff William Warnick.
Lincoln was a voracious reader known throughout his young lifetime to travel miles in search of reading material. So, it is at least plausible to imagine that the young rail-splitter may have had a copy of an American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge to peruse the map of the eclipse found within its pages. Nothing like it had ever been published and it certainly would have been a topic of conversation and focal point of interest by any inquisitive frontier mind.
After all, everyone knew it was coming. The Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin, citing Ash’s Pocket Almanac, proclaimed, “THE GREAT ECLIPSE OF 1831 will be one of the most remarkable to be witnessed in the United States for a long course of years.” Afterwards, newspapers proclaimed that “the darkness was such that domestic fowls retired to roost” and “it appeared as if the moon rode unsteadily in her orbit, and the earth seemed to tremble on its axis.” On the day of the eclipse, Americans from the Atlantic seaboard to Galveston Bay cast their eyes toward the heavens in anticipation of this much-ballyhooed celestial event. One diarist saw “men, women, and children … in all directions, with a piece of smoked glass, and eyes turn’d upward.” The Boston Evening Gazette reported that “this part of the world has been all anxiety … to witness the solar eclipse… Business was suspended and thousands of persons were looking at the phenomena with intense curiosity.” “Every person in the city,” noted the Richmond Enquirer, “was star gazing, from bleary-eyed old age to the most bright-eyed infancy.”
The fears of evil and gloomy predictions of the end of days were mostly absent from big cities in 1831. The eclipse was viewed as a natural atmospheric occurrence aptly explained by science. Rational explanations of atmospheric events, however, offered little solace to many rural Americans. In his book 1831 Year of Eclipse, author Louis P. Masur notes that, “a kind of vague fear, of impending danger-a prophetic presentiment of some approaching catastrophe prevailed” in small towns and “the reasonings of astronomy, or the veritable deductions of mathematical forecast,” did little to diminish the anxiety. One correspondent reported that an “old shoe-black accosted a person in front of our office, the day previous to the eclipse, and asked him if he was not afraid. For, said he, with tears in his eyes, the world is to be destroyed tomorrow; the sun and moon are to meet … and a great earthquake was to swallow us all!—Others said the sun and the earth would come in contact, and the latter would be consumed. Others again, were seen wending their ways to their friends and relations, covered with gloom and sadness; saying that they intended to die with them!”
The day after the eclipse, though, life returned to normal and newspapers diminished the event, reporting that “The darkness was that of a thunder gust,” and that “The light of the sun was sickly, but shadows were very perceptible.” Edward Everett, a senator from Massachusetts, reported that “a motion was made in the House of Representatives to adjourn over till Monday in consequence of the darkness which was to prevail.” The motion did not pass, and Everett later quipped, “After sitting so frequently when there is darkness inside the House, it would be idle I think to fly before a little darkness on the face of the heavens.”
Now understood (and survived) eclipses would be better understood by the people experiencing them. Just three years later, another total solar eclipse would cross the U.S. territories from Montana to South Carolina, swooping through parts of the American heartland and the South, on Nov. 30, 1834. While in Springfield, Lincoln experienced another annular solar eclipse on February 12, 1850, his 41st birthday. That event began at 5:54 a.m. and lasted 8 minutes and 35 seconds. If Lincoln witnessed the event, he never noted it. What we do know is on that day, another notable American was experiencing the same celestial event on his own special day. For whenever Lincoln experienced an eclipse on his birthday, so did Charles Darwin. Abraham Lincoln was born on Feb.12, 1809, the same day as Charles Darwin.
Next Week: Part 3 — Abraham Lincoln, the Blood Moon, and History.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
