"'T was on a May-day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the spring,
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness, like the night."
WHITTIER.
"Yellow Friday," or "the Dark Day," in New England, was the l9th
of May, 1780. For nearly a week before this day the air had been
full of smoke and haze, and the sun at noontime and the full moon
at night had looked like great red balls in the misty sky.
Thursday night the sun went down red and threatening.
Friday morning it rose as usual, but, as the weather was
overcast, it only peered now and then through the broken gray
clouds. There were mutterings of thunder and a few drops of rain
fell, big and heavy with black soot. Then the shower stopped and
a stillness like that before a great storm settled over the land.
The day, instead of growing lighter, grew darker and darker. Yet
no storm came.
Strange colors edged the low-hanging clouds, red and brown and a
brassy yellow, while the fields and woods below were a deep,
unnatural green. The white roads and houses and the white church
steeples turned yellow. Even the clean silver in the houses
looked like brass. These colors foreboded an eclipse of the sun;
yet there was no eclipse.
By noon it was as dark as early night, and the birds sang their
evening songs and disappeared. Some of the smaller ones,
frightened and fluttering, flew into the houses or dashed
themselves against the window panes. Chickens went to roost, the
cows came home from pasture, and the frogs croaked in the ponds.
Men planting corn in the fields stopped work because they could
not see the corn as it dropped. Women at home lighted candles to
find their way about the house. No one could see the time of day
by the clocks, and white paper looked like black velvet. Many
people were terrified and wondered what was coming. Some expected
a great tornado; others said a comet was due and feared it
portended some great calamity, perhaps a disaster to the armies
in the field who were fighting England in the war of the
Revolution. Still others, more ignorant and superstitious, were
sure that the end of the world had come, that the last trumpet
would soon sound and the dead be raised. One woman sent a
messenger in haste to her pastor to ask what this dreadful
darkness meant, but he only replied that he was "as much in the
dark" as she.
Several gentlemen, who happened to be at the house of Reverend
Manasseh Cutler, the minister in Ipswich, Massachusetts, have
left us a record of their observations that day.