The golden age of almanacs coincided with the birth and formative years of the United States of America, and we can see in texts like Andrew Ellicott’s The United States Almanac (first published in 1782) how the genre could be used to substantiate the new nation’s legitimacy. Ellicott directly connected the data collected in his almanac with US independence in a letter he wrote to then-president Thomas Jefferson calling for longitude calculations to be reckoned “from our own Capitol, and not from a place within another country” (i.e., Greenwich, in London). Ellicott viewed this reliance on British calculations as one of “a number of small ligaments, which tho apparently unimportant, are nevertheless a drawback upon that absolute independence we ought as a nation to maintain.”
Exactly sixty years later, the editors of the Nashville Confederate almanac would use a similar strategy to represent their own “absolute independence” from the Union. Its title page attests that its calculations were “made at the University of Alabama,” and the data it provides on timings like sunrise and sunset are divided into two geographical groupings: Nashville, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina. It’s interesting to note that the Nashville timings were also said to pertain to North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and California, while the Charleston timings also applied for Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. These groupings have obvious scientific flaws (how can the sun rise at the same time in Tennessee and California?), and they also point to areas of divided loyalty like Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri, and California that troubled the ideological boundaries of the Confederacy.
Despite these difficulties and inconsistencies, the 1862 almanac yokes numerical data to the geographical span, actual and potential, of the CSA to assert its nationhood. The timings of the moon’s phases, for example, are given for Nashville, Charleston, New Orleans, and San Francisco—with the last city included, perhaps, in the hope that California’s Southern transplants and sympathizers might succeed in encouraging the young state to join the Confederacy. The deluge of numbers provided by the almanac includes not only astronomical data, but also dates in history. Thus for July 4, we learn, for example, not only the sunrise, sunset, and moonrise times for both Nashville and Charleston, but also the following “miscellanea”: “First Q [First Quarter Moon]. Independence. Jefferson d., ’26. Monroe d., ’31.” Among these miscellanea are various key moments from the first year of the war: for June 1, “Battle of Aquia Creek begun, 1861;” for April 18, “Davis inaug., 1861;” for September 21, “St. Matthew. Lexington, Mo., captured, 1861.”