Scottish-American history Archives - New England Historical Society

Williamina Fleming worked as a maid for an astronomer who got frustrated with his staff at Harvard. One day he supposedly exclaimed, “My Scotch maid could do better!” To prove his point, he gave Williamina Fleming a promotion to the observatory staff.

Well, that’s the story at least. More likely, the astronomer’s wife recognized the maid’s talents and then encouraged him to give her a part-time job.

Williamina Fleming then became one of the most prominent female astronomers in the world.

A Long Way From Dundee

Williamina Fleming

She was born Williamina Stevens on May 15, 1857, in Dundee, Scotland, to Robert Stevens and Mary Walker Stevens. Robert Stevens, an artisan, carved and gilded picture frames and furniture. But he also had a scientific bent and an inquiring mind, which his daughter apparently inherited. He experimented with daguerreotype processing before anyone else did in Dundee.

But Robert Stevens died when Williamina was six, leaving the family in poverty. So Williamina went to work at age 14 as an assistant teacher.

At 20, Williamina married a widower, James Orr Fleming, who worked in a bank as an accountant. She taught school in Scotland for a short time until the couple emigrated to Boston.

Abandoned

She was pregnant when Fleming suddenly abandoned her. So she went to work as a maid for Professor Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory.

The observatory employed computers, people who did mathematical calculations by hand. Pickering’s male computers supposedly disappointed him with inferior work. Hence the apocryphal exclamation about his Scotch maid.

Edward Charles Pickering

Pickering then gave Williamina Fleming a job in 1879 as a part-time administrator at the observatory.

Fleming soon returned to Dundee to give birth to her son. She named him Edward Charles Pickering Fleming, but she left him with his grandmother and returned to Boston.

In 1881, Pickering had embarked on an ambitious project. He was classifying the universe by analyzing glass plate photographs of the stars. The photographs, taken through a prism, captured more detail than the naked eye could see through a telescope. He had taught another woman, Nettie Farrar, to measure spectra, the bands of color and lines that form when starlight is dispersed through a prism.

Williamina Fleming Takes Over

Farrar, though, was leaving Harvard to get married. Pickering asked Williamina to take over the job of examining and classifying the plates.

Dava Sobel describes the meticulous work involved in examining a plate in her book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

Williamina removed each 8″-by-10″ glass plate from its kraft paper sleeve without getting a single fingerprint on either side. She had to hold the fragile packet by its side edges between her palms. Then she set the open end of the envelope on the lip of a specially designed stand, and eased the paper up and off without letting go of the plate. Sobel compared it with undressing a baby.

Williamina then made sure the emulsion side faced her, released her grip and let the glass settle into place.

‘The wooden stand held the plate in a picture frame, tilted at a 45-degree angle,” wrote Sobel. “A mirror affixed to the flat base caught daylight from the computing room’s big windows and directed illumination up through the glass.”

Pickering’s Harem at the Harvard College Observatory

She had to tag each of the hundreds of tiny spectra on the plate with a new catalog number identified by its coordinates. Those were indicated by millimeter and centimeter rules on the wooden frame. Then Williamina read off the numbers to a colleague who penciled them into a logbook.

Over the course of her career, Williamina Fleming examined more than 200,000 photographic plates. She developed a new system of classification and put 10,000 stars in it. She also discovered 10 novae (exploding stars), 310 variable stars and the Horsehead Nebulae.

Glass Ceiling

With Pickering’s support, she helped open the field of astronomy to women. He put her in charge of hiring and supervising a team of women to study Harvard’s growing collection of star photographs. She hired and supervised 20 other women, including her protégé, Annie Jump Cannon.

Pickering employed a lot of women to do the math required for astronomy. He recruited more than 80 women at the observatory from 1881 to his death in 1919. They were known as Pickering’s Harem.

In 1893, Fleming gave a speech on women’s work in astronomy at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Newspapers picked up her comments, and other U.S. observatories began hiring women.

But did women get paid the same as men? Fleming didn’t.

Unequal Pay

She worked 60 hours a week for $1,500 a year, much less than the newest male assistant at the observatory earned. Her 1900 journals, discovered much later, show her frustration with trying to make ends meet and put her son through MIT.

Williamina Fleming died of pneumonia at the age of 54. Annie Jump Cannon wrote her obituary, describing a woman with a magnetic personality and many interests.

Fond of people and excitement, there was no more enthusiastic spectator in the stadium for the football games, no more ardent champion of the Harvard eleven. Industrious by nature, she was seldom idle, and long years of observatory work never unfitted her for the domestic side of life. As much at home with the needle as with the magnifying eyepiece, she could make a dainty bag, exquisitely sewed, or dress a doll in complete Scotch Highland costume. She was never too tired to welcome her friends at her home or at the observatory, with that quality of human sympathy which is sometimes lacking among women engaged in scientific pursuits. Her bright face, her attractive manner, and her cheery greeting with its charming Scotch accent, will long be remembered by even the most casual visitors to the Harvard College Observatory.

Women Scientists

Williamina Fleming and the rest of the women in Pickering’s Harem had company in the annals of women scientists.

Maria Mitchell discovered a comet from a Nantucket rooftop before Williamina was born. Read about her here.

Years after Williamina died, Margaret Hamilton helped put Neil Armstrong on the moon with her software for the Apollo space program. Read about her here. And Amazing Grace Hopper invented COBOL.

This story was updated in 2022.

When William Scott of Groton, Vt., signed up to fight for the Union at the start of the Civil War, the eager, forthright soldier would not have anticipated the fame in store for him. While he died heroically in battle, he will always be best known as the sleeping sentinel of Vermont.

Private William Scott, Groton, Vermont’s Sleeping Sentinel. (Abraham Lincoln and the Sleeping Sentinel of Vermont)

This story starts as August turned to September in 1861. The boys of Vermont’s Third Regiment, Vermont Volunteer Infantry had traveled as far away from home as they could ever imagine. In the mountains of their home state, the cool nights would be starting to draw out the bold colors of autumn.

But in Virginia, where the regiment camped less than two months after being called up, the soldiers stewed in the South’s swampy, late-summer heat. These soldiers found themselves in the divided country’s most hostile environment. Posted as sentries along the Potomac River, they had to keep the newly independent Confederate States from storming the nation’s capital.

Borderlines

These were strange times for the Washington region. Virginia and the capitol city frequently sparred. Loyalties were still fluid, and distinguishing enemies from friends was not always easy. The war that started in South Carolina had recently burst into action at Bull Run in Manassas, Va.

Still, around the capital the Union troops protecting Washington and the Confederate troops on the Virginia side of the river had developed a casual attitude toward one another. This relationship probably reflected the naiveté on the part of Union soldiers. While they relaxed, southern spies operated in and around the region and gathered intelligence.

The dire nature of the situation was not lost on the Vermont regiment’s Brig. Gen. William Farrar Smith of St. Albans, better known as “Baldy.” Smith had advanced himself into leadership when, first, several Vermonters passed on the “opportunity” to lead the Vermont men south. Once in Washington, other officers began wilting under the heat, and Smith won a promotion from colonel to general.

A West Point-trained military man, Smith had ambition and no inclination to sentimentality. Army brass thought at the time that executing a soldier or two for dereliction of duty would quickly instill better discipline in the green troops. That attitude put Smith on a collision course with his fellow Vermonter, Private Scott.

Private Scott Goes to Washington

A second-generation American whose parents had emigrated from Scotland, Scott was one of four brothers who joined up when Congress authorized the president to raise an army. He was stationed at Camp Lyon in what is now Alexandria, Va. As one of its principle duties, the encampment had to guard the Chain Bridge and other Potomac crossings that connected Virginia to Washington.

Union troops crossing the Long Bridge into Virginia following Virginia’s Secession.

Virginia officially seceded in May of 1861, and within days Union forces crossed over from Washington to Alexandria to establish fortifications. Camp Lyon was a busy place, and in its early days anything but restful.

Scott was committed to the fight, but like most of his regiment he disliked this new environment. “I’d rather see all the snow that ever fell in Vermont than to endure the weather we have to endure here,” he wrote home at one point. In another letter, he said, “It rained like everything, and we never slept a wink all night. A soldier’s life is nothing more or less than a dog’s life. “

Vermont Capt. Francis Randall wrote that soldiers were often exhausted. “I have seen the boys walking their beat regularly when they were so completely asleep that they could not observe my approach till I spoke to them. They would mechanically execute their duty, but consciousness had fled,” he wrote.

On the evening of August 31, Scott was assigned to stand watch. Customarily, three individuals stood at a post. They would take turns, one man standing a two-hour shift while the other two men slept.

First page of William Scott’s Death Warrant (Abraham Lincoln and the Sleeping Sentinel of Vermont)

Scott was discovered sleeping at his post in the early hours of September 1. The military charged him with sleeping on duty, and the sleeping sentinel legend was born. For a sentry to fall asleep was a capital offense. Col. Breed Hyde of Hyde Park, Vt., promoted with Smith, ordered Scott’s execution on September 4.

Intervention

The decision stirred Scott’s comrades to action. They gathered 191 signatures on a petition asking for leniency. They pleaded Scott’s case right up the chain, and eventually their appeals reached President Lincoln, who took pity on the Vermont soldier. Scott had conducted himself as an exemplary soldier, but for one moment when exhaustion got the better of him.

Rev. Moses Parmelee, the regiment’s chaplain, most likely took the case to the White House. However, no one really knows exactly ow it reached Lincoln’s attention. Parmelee may have simply waited to meet with the president. Lucius Eugene Chittenden, a fellow Vermonter from Williston and register of the treasury, may have brought the petition to him. He would later write an account of the sleeping sentinel.

Lincoln Intervenes

Over the years, historians have disputed the details of the pardon. Waldo Glover documented the ins and outs of those arguments in his Lincoln and the Sleeping Sentinel of Vermont. Lincoln pardoned many soldiers. He didn’t like to issue the death penalty against men who committed minor offenses in the military.

Some historians record that Lincoln traveled to Scott’s camp to deliver the pardon and make sure the Army enforced it. It would not be impossible for this to have happened. Lincoln often visited the troops. But many historians believe he did not make the trip himself to follow up once he’d sent the pardon order to Gen. George McClellan.

Historians do agree that the officers in charge of the camp determined to use the sentence to demonstrate the seriousness of sleeping while on picket duty.

The Pardon

Capt. Randall, who was in charge of Scott’s company, recalled the event in his letters:

Gun Crews at Fort Lyon, Virginia.

“To make a suitable impression on the men, the fact of this pardon was not communicated, and on the morning all the regiments of the brigade were drawn up in hollow square and arrangements for the execution all made. And the prisoner brought out to the stand as though he was to be shot, he of course knowing nothing of the pardon. He was deadly pale and shook from head to foot and was almost unable to sustain his weight.

“After all was ready, the pardon was read to him in the hearing of all. This took a great load off from the minds of that vast crowd, all of whom sympathized most keenly with the unfortunate young man, and they gave vent to their joy in cheer upon cheer for the president that made the land of Dixie ring for miles around.

“But I tremble for fear that some of our boys may yet get into trouble this way. It is hard to make them realize the fact that the responsibility of a sentry is great – awfully great in an enemy’s country. This, however, will do them some good.”

Some say General Smith intended to pardon Scott all along, that he always intended to throw a scare into the men. Others say no. Regardless, newspapers across the country repeated the story of Lincoln’s pardon of the sleeping sentinel. It had what was probably its planned effect. It increased Lincoln’s popularity, especially among potential soldiers pleased to see Private Scott treated fairly.

With the trial behind him, Scott returned to his regimental duties where he established himself as a hard-working, able soldier.

Aftermath

The sleeping sentinel never did return home to Vermont. He died a hero’s death at Lee’s Mill in April of 1862 in the run up to the siege of Yorktown. He was killed leading a charge of the rifle pits (an extremely high-risk mission) to clear the path for the siege.

Fellow soldiers remembered him as a brave and diligent man. Many apocryphal stories say that in his final words he prayed for President Lincoln. He was buried in Yorktown.

By the end of the Civil War, two of his brothers had also been killed. A fourth Scott brother died soon after returning home because of injuries suffered in the war.

Thomas Scott, William’s father, traveled to Washington in the wake of his son’s ordeal to personally thank the president. Upon hearing that the older Scott managed his farm without help from his sons, the president slipped him $10. Then he issued a pass to allow him to visit his sons at the front.

Captain Randall received a promotion to colonel, though his history had some blemishes. He was charged early in the war with deserting his post at Falls Church, Va., and suspended from his command for 30 days. He redeemed himself, however, for his actions at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Baldy Smith

William “Baldy” Smith had a long and up-and-down career in the army. He was twice thrown from his horse at Lee’s Mill and was accused of drunkenness (a charge he was cleared of). He participated in a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Later he received credited for exceptional skill as general in charge of the Army of the Cumberland, which won him a promotion.

His sponsor, Gen. Ulysses Grant, soon regretted that promotion. And critics said his hesitant performance at the Battle of Petersburg extended the war for a year. He lost his command following that incident. Upon his demotion, the New York Times reported that his “spirit of fault-finding” and pursuit of personal aggrandizement caused his troubles.