The night the stars fell, Lincoln knew it was not Judgement Day ... (see below)

Photo © Bill Kovarik

Looking south from the top of the Empire State Building a few days before Christmas 1999. You can just make out the Statue of Liberty to the west (right) of the World Trade Center on Liberty Island.

I found this story the day after the Sept. 11 attacks:

"When I was a young man in Illinois," said [Abraham Lincoln], "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 Judgement has come.' I sprang from my bed and 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 immoveable and true in their places. No, gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now." -- From Walt Whitman's "A Lincoln Reminiscence" describing a story told to Union generals by President Abraham Lincoln in the early days of the Civil War. The Leonid meteor shower of 1833 is what he is probably describing. Carl Sandburg also tells the story in his book, Abraham Lincoln, the prairie years.