Great Darkness Overwhelms New England

The Horror of a Great Darkness Overwhelms New England

Fourteen hours of seemingly interminable horror on May 19 1780 and the following night descended on New England. No one who lived through the experience of the Dark Day, the Dark Night, and the Blood-Red Moon would ever forget those long black hours. There was nothing about the sunrise that morning that would have indicated that the day would turn out to be one never to be erased from memory. True, the past several days had seen a reddish and rather dim Sun climb the morning sky in the east, and the Moon, nearing full, had looked discolored. But no one was particularly alarmed by this, as it was spring, and New England, the most populated part of the British colonies was, as every year,

cutting down large sections of forested land, burning the waste timber, and preparing the land for cultivation. Sometimes the fires that were set raged out of control, producing in the process large amounts of smoke and ash. And New England in the spring of 1780 was on fire to a greater extent than usual.

Accounts differ as to just what happened on the morning of May 19 1780. Though it looked as though a storm might be brewing, none appeared. There was rain, and some thunder and lightning in scattered parts of New England, but nothing in the way of strong winds, at least not at the ground level. Beginning as early as nine o'clock that morning, some areas began to notice a quite dark air mass being blown in from the west, at the same time that an easterly wind blew in a thick layer of fog from the ocean. The black blanket from the west, combining with the fog bank from the east, resulted in a sky increasingly impervious to the rays of the Sun. By ten o'clock the sky had darkened considerably. Somewhere between eleven o'clock and noon, the heavens became as black as midnight. All those engaged in outdoor tasks put down their tools and returned to their habitations. Schools closed and children hurried to the comfort of their homes. By eleven or so that morning candles began to be lit throughout the dwellings of New England. The noonday meal, if it was eaten at all, was by candlelight.

People, understandably, were terrified. They had no memory of such an occurrence as had rather suddenly without warning blotted the Sun from the heavens. Books were not that common in the average home, but one book that every home had was the Bible, and it was read with a frequency and an interest that is not matched in our day and age. The inky blackness caused many to consider whether the Day of Judgment had not in fact come, and with it the very real possibility of the imminent appearance of CHRIST THE JUDGE in blazing glory in the darkened sky. Earnest prayers of repentance and heartfelt pleas for forgiveness of
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sins rose across the land from many homes in the young United States of America, now in the midst of a very unequal contest with Great Britain, seeking to make stick the Declaration of Independence that had rather boldly been proclaimed nearly four years before.

Churches were packed as people thronged to hear whatever words of consolation and reassurance that their pastors could provide to them. Not infrequently, however, sermons that day were notably short on consolation and reassurance, but long on warning and condemnation of sin.

Humans understood that something unusual was happening. No one thought that nightfall had truly come. But the brute creation, the various farm animals, and their wild cousins, behaved as though the day, but so shortly before begun, had come already to its premature close. Cows returned for their evening milking, chickens sought their roosts, and dogs, sensitive to the concern and fright that their masters so obviously felt, cowered at the doorsteps of houses, seeking whatever comfort their terrified owners could give them. The birds of the air vacated the skies and sought their nests; frogs began their evening serenade, as all nature welcomed the end of a day that only to human minds had not really

ended.

The Moon on the evening of the preceding day had been full.

So the Moon should have risen big and bright on the night of May 19, but it failed to do so. Not a trace of it. Nor could any stars be seen either. The day had been as dark as midnight over much of New England, and though there were neither gas lights nor electric lights at that early era, there were candles to light the homes. Accustomed as Americans of that time were to the nighttime hours, they had never seen a night so utterly black as this. Those who, for one reason and another, were out and about on the roads of rural America that unusual night, found themselves confronted by a darkness that was no less remarkable than that of the daytime hours had been. Horses, the primary means of transportation, could not see to put one foot in front of the other, and simply refused to move. At various times that evening after the Moon rose, though invisibly, the sky cleared sufficiently to present the dreadful specter of a blood-red disc rising to the zenith of the heavens. This phenomenon especially was noted after midnight had ushered in the 20th of May. Bloody and round, the Moon at least offered some small hope that the darkened heavens were at last beginning to clear. Gradually stars began to appear, and the next morning the Sun, to the immense relief of all, rose at its accustomed time and

place.

The darkness of May 19 1780 was not of the same intensity everywhere. George Washington from New Jersey took note of an unusually gloomy day in his diary. Boston, then the largest city of New England, and in many ways the spiritual and intellectual center of the developing nation, was also virtually the heart of darkness on that remarkable day, enduring the full fourteen hours of its unsettling intense blackness. Twenty-five years previously Boston had received the brunt of the severe shaking that the Cape Ann earthquake had inflicted on New England, and fifty-three years later it would have a ringside seat for the pyrotechnics of the great Leonid meteor shower. These events shaped the character of Boston and the nation.