Framing History: Echoes of the Aurora

ECW welcomes back guest author Melissa A. Winn

With the promise of Northern Lights sightings in Northern Virginia on November 12, I hauled my cameras and tripod to the Manassas National Battlefield Park and waited for their arrival. They took their time. When they finally unfurled, a faint pink ribbon swept over the horizon and hung in the sky behind the Henry House on Henry Hill, where I framed my shot. I felt the landscape shift. It was exhilarating, but also affecting. The quiet ground beneath my feet once shook with musket fire and cannon blasts, yet here it was illuminated by the same celestial wonder that soldiers witnessed on another battlefield more than 160 years ago.

On December 14, 1862, the night after the battle of Fredericksburg, Union and Confederate soldiers alike recorded an astonishing sight: the aurora borealis shimmering above the devastated field. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, then a lieutenant colonel in the 20th Maine, wrote that as his men carried the bodies of fallen comrades, “their own loved North lifted her glorious lights… Fiery lances of gold…pointing and beckoning upward. Befitting scene!” To him, the spectacle seemed to honor his fallen men, “Dead for their country’s honor, and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their Northern home.”[1]

Confederates remembered the sight, too. Private Robert A. Moore, of the 17th Mississippi Regiment, recorded in his December 15 diary entry that “the Northern Lights were very brilliant last night, more so than ever I recollect to have seen.”[2]

As my shutter clicked open, I was linked to those long-ago witnesses—separated by time and war, but united in wonder.

Melissa A. Winn is the Director of Marketing and Communications for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Previously, she was the Marketing Manager for the American Battlefield Trust and Director of Photography for HistoryNet, publisher of nine history-related magazines, including America’s Civil War, American History, and Civil War Times. She’s a Senior Editor for Military Images magazine; Editor of Shavings, the member newsletter of the Early American Industries Association, is a member of the Board of Directors of the Civil War Roundtable Congress; and President of the Bull Run Civil War Round Table.

Endnotes:

[1] Tom Desjardin, ed. Joshua L. Chamberlain: The Life in Letters of a Great Leader of the American Civil War (Osprey, 2012) Pg. 180

[2] James W. Silver, ed. A Life for the Confederacy: As Recorded in the Pocket Diaries of Pvt. Robert A. Moore Co. G, 17th Mississippi Regiment Confederate Guards Holly Springs, Mississippi (Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press), 1959), 124.