The Moon Was Hanging Low

Your child listens; you read. This page is here so you can answer the questions that come after the story. The script itself is available from the script button while the audio plays.

What this episode covers

In 1858, years before he became president, the lawyer Abraham Lincoln met a murder-case witness who said he had seen the fight "by the light of a three-quarters moon high in the sky." Lincoln checked that claim against an almanac — a book that tells you, ahead of time, when the sun and the moon will rise and set on each day. At that hour the moon was low, and about an hour from setting.

But the real point of this episode goes one step further. The famous story itself split into different versions over the years, and historians had to check it against the record all over again. A story about checking a witness against the record turned out to be a story that needed the same checking. This is not an episode that praises Lincoln.

What actually happened

• In August 1857, outside a camp meeting in Mason County, Illinois, a fight broke out. James Norris and Duff Armstrong fought James Metzger. Most of the people involved, and many of the witnesses, had been drinking heavily.
• Metzger rode home on his horse, falling off a few times on the way, and died two days later. Both men were charged.
• Norris was tried first and received eight years for manslaughter.
• Armstrong's case was moved to the Cass County Circuit Court, and his mother, Hannah Armstrong, asked Lincoln for help. Lincoln had known the family in his New Salem years; his wrestling match with Duff's father, Jack Armstrong, was how he was accepted in that community (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.24.1.07).
• Lincoln told Duff's mother that he would not charge her a cent. The remark comes down to us as part of a private conversation (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.41.2.13).
• The trial ran one day, in May 1858, at Beardstown (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.41.2.13).
• The state's key witness, Charles Allen, testified that he saw the assault "by the light of a three-quarters moon high in the sky." Lincoln produced an almanac showing that at that hour the moon was low and about an hour from setting (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.24.1.07).
• A doctor also testified that a single blow from behind could explain the injuries — and so could a fall from the horse.
• Lincoln closed with an appeal to the jury on behalf of Duff's parents, and the jury found Duff not guilty.
• The case appears in the literature as both People v. Armstrong and State v. Armstrong.

Questions your child may ask

"Isn't Lincoln the president who freed the slaves?" Yes — but that came long after this trial. In 1858 he was a lawyer riding the circuit courts of rural Illinois. The Emancipation Proclamation came in 1863, when he was president. Paperis carries a separate piece for adults, "Why September 1862? The Timing of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation," which follows date by date what converged on that moment.

"So Duff didn't do it?" Go carefully here. What the evidence supports is that the jury found him not guilty. A jury is a group of ordinary people who hear the whole case and decide whether someone is guilty — and "not guilty" is not the same sentence as "nothing happened." Scholars who have worked through this trial keep the question open: did Lincoln free an innocent man, or did he free a murderer? (DOI: 10.5040/9798400606267)

"Was the witness lying?" We cannot know. Memory shifts over time without the person noticing, and the people at the scene that night had been drinking heavily. The story never calls him a liar. It goes only as far as this: what a person says, and whether it could have happened that way, are two things you have to line up separately.

"If he was 'Honest Abe,' why do people say he did something wrong?" This is the heart of the episode. A writer, John Walsh, rejected the forged-almanac story but argued instead that Lincoln quieted a witness who knew too much and suppressed evidence. Another scholar answered that the main support for that charge is a third-hand recollection written some fifty years after the trial. Note the shape of the answer: not "the conclusion is false," but "that evidence cannot carry a charge that heavy" (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.24.1.07).

"What does third-hand mean?" A man who had served on the jury wrote down, fifty years later, something he had been told by someone else about two months after the trial. His original letter no longer survives; only a portion, copied out by another writer, remains. The memory has passed through three pairs of hands.

Ideas inside the story

• Testimony and the record — lining up what a person says against something that was written down independently of them.
• Memory makes poor evidence — recollections are rebuilt out of what we think now and what we learned later. Until an independent document confirms them, they are not facts on their own (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.35.2.05).
• The more famous the story, the more it needs checking — an anecdote repeated without a source hardens into fact by repetition alone (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.30.1.04).

What is evidence, and what is received story

Well-established — the August 1857 fight and the death two days later, Norris's eight-year sentence, the change of venue, the one-day trial in May 1858, the moonlight testimony and the almanac, the doctor's evidence, and the acquittal.

Where scholars divide — exactly what won the case. One study traces how the account split into three tellings: a dramatic cross-examination, an impassioned closing argument, and a forged almanac — and records that the forged-almanac version is a discredited story. The same book, after stripping away the mythical parts, judges that Lincoln's conduct at this trial was above reproach. That is the judgment of that book, and not everyone shares it (DOI: 10.5040/9798400606267).

Deliberately left out — the weapon, the injuries, the post-mortem findings. This episode is about testimony and records, not about how terrible the event was. Conversation, faces and weather inside the courtroom are left out too: filling in scenes that the record does not hold is precisely the habit this episode is questioning (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.41.2.13).

Not in this episode — the Gettysburg Address (1863) and the assassination (1865) come later and belong to a different thread. "That happened after he became president" is answer enough if your child asks. The long tradition of hostility to Lincoln, running from the Civil War onward, is its own field of study (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.4.1.03).

Try this together

• The next time your child says "I saw it!", instead of believing or doubting, check together whether it could have happened that way. A clock, the timestamp on a photo, the day's schedule — anything written down independently of the people involved will do.
• Look at tonight's moon, then look up when it rises and sets. What the almanac did, a phone does now.
• Pick a famous anecdote your child likes and ask together: who said it first? You will find that a surprising number of them have no traceable source.