Thomas J. Campanella

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Thomas J. Campanella | 'Mark Well the Gloom': SHedding Light on the Great Dark Day of 1780 | Environmental History, 12.1 | The History Cooperative

'mark well the gloom': SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE GRAET DARK DAY OF 1780

ABSTRACT

This essay is about one of the most extraordinary natural events in early American history, the great "Dark Day" of May 19, 1780. On that morning a preternatural gloom settled upon the New England landscape, and by noon the sun had been all but blotted from the sky. Using accounts drawn from contemporary diaries, journals, newspapers, broadsides, and other sources, this essay reconstructs the events of the Dark Day and explores the manifold ways—from theological speculation to amateur scientific inquiry—in which New Englanders sought to explain and rationalize the sudden darkness.

Ye Sons of Light who saw the Night,
triumphing at High noon,
The nineteenth Day of th' Month of May,
Mark well the dismal Gloom.¹

THE RISING SUN first struck the fir-quilled hump of Porcupine Mountain, on the northern coast of Maine, at 3:52 on the morning of Friday, May 19, 1780.² An hour later the sunbeams had cast their way across New England, reaching Connecticut's south shore and the western flank of the Housatonic Valley. Night melted into day; songbirds greeted the dawn and a thousand Yankee farmsteads stirred to life. It seemed a perfectly ordinary spring morning in New England. But things were far from ordinary on this vernal day. It had been a rough and long winter—one of the coldest in memory—and though the breath of spring was in the air, so were troubling signs. For several days now the weather had been unseasonably warm. In many parts of New England the atmosphere was cloudy and vaporous at dawn, and some had observed an odd pinkish hue to the sun's normally yellow disk earlier in the week. "A remarkable thick air," had been evident for several days now, noted merchant and judge Samuel Phillips Savage of Weston, Massachusetts; "the sun rises and sets very red."³ Others had noted that in evening the waning moon, too, blushed a strange hue of pink.	1
Now, as this Friday morning progressed, an eerie transformation was underway. Savage noted that shortly after nine o'clock there "came on an appearance over the whole visible heavens ... a light grassy hue, nearly the color of pale Cyder." The bilious sky was soon "attended with a gloom nearly resembling that of an Eclipse of the Sun." By ten o'clock the sun had almost entirely disappeared, and the skies grew rapidly dark. The songbirds that cheered the day only hours before now fell silent. "Fowles retired to their Roosts, or collected together in clusters," wrote Savage, while cocks crowed and crickets shook their fiddles. It was all as if night was falling.⁴ From downeast Maine to the Connecticut coast, in kitchens and barnyards, schoolhouses and churches and workshops, on boats plying the coastal waters, in forests and fields and pastures, New Englanders put down their tools and books and looked up to the sky in fear and wonder. This was no coming thunderstorm, no hoary pile of clouds. A great and terrible shadow was coming over the land, and soon "every thing bore the appearance and gloom of night."⁵	2
The noonday meal was served by candlelight, if it was served at all. By then it had become so dark that a single candle "cast a shade so well defined ... that profiles were taken with as much ease as they could have been in the night."⁶ So complete was the murk "that those who had good eye sight," wrote a correspondent to the Massachusetts Spy, "could scarcely see to read common print, [and] it was the judgment of many that at about 12 o'clock ... the day light was not greater, if so great, as that of bright moon-light."⁷ In Weston, Sam Savage could hardly read the time on his watch, even while wearing his spectacles and standing in front of a large window. Next door his neighbor had been spreading manure in a field, but was forced to quit by the diminishing light (no longer being "able to discern the difference between the ground and the Dung"). Like the fowls and songbirds, the farmer soon retreated. The brief day ended, and now "the birds of the Night were abroad," Savage observed, "and by their melancholy notes added to the Solemnity of the Scene."⁸	. . .

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