Who watches Jeopardy?

[David Lockmiller]

I believe that it was on the Friday, May 31 episode of Jeopardy that there was a question on meteor showers in the 1830's. I was hoping that the answer somehow might relate to Lincoln, but it did not. It turns out that Walt Whitman published a story on Lincoln and the 1833 Leonid meteor shower.

Lincoln's Meteor Shower post by Karen Stevens, astronomer

https://www.slooh.com/community/post/3661

Did Abraham Lincoln witness the dramatic 1833 Leonid meteor shower? Yes, says Donald Olson of Southwest Texas State University. Deep on a November night in 1833, people all over North America were awoken by a spectacular meteor shower. Many witnesses interpreted it as an omen of catastrophe, but not – according to poet Walt Whitman -Abraham Lincoln. Whitman lived in Washington D.C. during the Civil War and was a contemporary of Lincoln, publishing an anecdote about Lincoln’s interpretation of the meteor shower in 1882 in Specimen Days & Collect. Although Whitman’s account doesn’t name a year for the meteor shower, Donald Olson ferreted out clues based on the period when he boarded with a Presbyterian deacon in New Salem, Illinois. In Whitman’s account, Lincoln employed the meteor shower as a metaphor for state of the country, illustrating his faith in the Union and revealing his sage leadership during dark and chaotic times:


“As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employ’d with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment — and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken — whereupon the homely President told a little story. “When I was a young man in Illinois,” said he, “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.”