By Stuart Halpern

On April 1, 1860, B.F. Lemen wrote to the former House representative (and soon to be presidential candidate) Abraham Lincoln. Writing from Colorado, Lemen described his hope that "the labored calculations of the political astronomers of the South" would fail, and that "the great Southern Comet will not Strike, our American Earth and dash it into fragments." As opposed to this threatening metaphorical comet, the Northern "Star Spangled Atmosphere," Lemen wrote, was "well regulated in its revolutions" and "its universal laws are too well Founded to be over thrown."

As Eran Shalev, a professor of history at Haifa University, shows in "The Star-Spangled Republic," Lemen was hardly the only patriot with his head in the clouds. During the country's first decades, Americans of all backgrounds looked to the stars to map their country's course.

The pre-Revolutionary era aligned with advances in knowledge of the heavenly bodies, sparked by telescopes and a firmament not-yet-obstructed by skyscrapers and pollution. Colonists, Mr. Shalev writes, sought "a close knowledge of and relationship with the sky -- exponentially closer than that of later generations." They read popular almanacs, and learned and admired the intricacies of orreries -- mechanical models of the celestial sphere -- that they flocked to view at numerous colleges. Newspapers with names such as the Sun, the Mercury and the Globe proliferated.

But the American experiment required a rethinking of what seemed like a set stellar order. After all, since ancient times it was the monarch who was deemed to possess heavenly standing. This belief extended into the decades leading up to American independence. France's Louis XIV was known as the sun king, his throne the center of a political universe. Benjamin Rush, one of America's Founding Fathers, recounted how he had "been taught to consider [kings] nearly as essential to political order as the Sun is to the order of our Solar system."

Representative of the Revolutionary inclination, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (1776) argued that "in no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America . . . reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems." Americans had to conceptualize their liberation in alignment with the laws of nature. Thomas Pownall, the former governor of Massachusetts, expressed his belief that America's Congress was "a new primary planet, which, taking its course in its own orbit, must have an effect upon the orbit of every other planet, and shift the common center of gravity of the whole system of the European world."

The Constitutional Convention was symbolically presided over by the retired Gen. George Washington, who sat throughout in a chair with a gilded half sun at its top. Upon the successful conclusion of the convention, James Madison reported Benjamin Franklin as saying: "I have often looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

But the sun would not sit at the center of the American self-image. Rather, the Revolution (itself an astronomic term, Mr. Shalev points out, which denotes the rotation of the heavenly bodies) "gave rise to a wholly new mode of communicating the political-national order. Now, with the American states viewed as stars, no single sun, or kingly star, overshadowed and dominated others." As such, the Naval Committee of the Continental Congress declared on June 14, 1777, that "the Flag of the thirteen United States, be Thirteen Stripes, alternate red and white; That the Union be Thirteen Stars, white in a Blue Field, representing a new Constellation."

Emerging from that "old constellation" of the European state system, Mr. Shalev argues, "the American Union presented itself . . . as a new constellation of star-states that was regulated, predictable, harmonious and sublime." When Arkansas and Michigan joined the Union in 1836 and 1837, respectively, a commentator boasted that "the Galaxy of American Glory is brightened, and that star after star is added to that brilliant Constellation which is the pride of the Western World."

On the eve of the Civil War, the Columbian Register lamented the growing likelihood of "the stars of our political firmament" being "torn from their orbits, and plunging madly about, or tilting one the other." In turn, on Jan. 10, 1861, days before he left Congress to become the Confederacy's president, Jefferson Davis argued that "if our Government should fail," it would be because the North had "disturbed these planets in their orbit; it is this which threatens to destroy the constellation which, in its power and its glory, had been gathering stars one after another."

During the abolitionist movement and the war itself, the North Star became a practical element of enslaved African-Americans' looking to the heavens, a beacon of freedom and hope.

Alongside the Puritan John Winthrop's description of his project as building a "city upon a hill" and the country's founders envisioning it as "God's new Israel," an American constellation, Mr. Shalev notes, "echoed an already-existing idiom of an American mission to guide a yet-to--be-enlightened world." Other countries have followed America's lead -- from Micronesia to Brazil to the Republic of China. All have stars in their flags. But the image's original implications have largely been forgotten. Today our stars inhabit the cultural firmament, in sports and in entertainment. In that sense, at least, social astronomy still shines in America.

--Mr. Halpern is the senior adviser to the provost at Yeshiva University. He is the author, with Wilfred McClay, of "Jewish Roots of American Liberty."

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December 18, 2025 17:45 ET (22:45 GMT)

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