A Light in the American Darkness
To Americans who had spent four years watching their country tear itself apart, the heavens themselves seemed to offer a portent.
Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis (1865)
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Arctic explorer Isaac Israel Hayes returned from the frozen north to discover that the republic he had left behind was coming apart. He vowed to carry the American flag, with every star of the Union intact, to the furthest reaches of the earth. His friend Frederic Edwin Church took the sketches from Hayes’s expedition and transformed them into this extraordinary vision of the northern lights, completed in 1865. Beneath a terrible and magnificent sky, a tiny vessel sits trapped in the ice. To Americans who had spent four years watching their country tear itself apart, the heavens themselves seemed to offer a portent.
