Shortly after his miraculous survival, the owners of the cotton on board the Lexington presented Second Mate Crowley with the same bale that had carried him to land. He had it transported to his home in Providence, Rhode Island, where he kept it standing in his living room for many years. When the price of cotton skyrocketed during the Civil War, Crowley sold his bale for charity. From it sprang the famous Lexington brand of cotton cloth.

There were other intriguing sequels to the burning of the Lexington.

Lithography was becoming a popular profession in the 1800s.

People throughout the country bought lithographs from their general stores and hung them in their living and dining rooms. For the price of a few pennies, the public came into the habit of changing the colored lithographs on the wall every week, especially when the subject that was illustrated struck their fancy.

Right after the burning of the Lexington, a young artist, struggling to launch a lithography studio, was contracted by the New York Sun to produce a lithograph of the disaster. Working night and day, he turned out his masterwork in just sixty hours, and splendiferously titled it: THE AWFUL CONFLAGRATION OF THE STEAMBOAT LEXINGTON IN LONG ISLAND SOUND, MONDAY EVE, 13TH JANUARY 1840 BY WHICH MELANCHOLY OCCURRENCE OVER 100 PERSONS PERISHED.

Appearing in the New York Sun's extra edition, the portrayal of the frightful catastrophe became a sensation and hung in almost every home in America. Considered a breakthrough in journalism, the use of graphics to illustrate a hot news story quickly became a traditional style that is with us today in newspapers and magazines.

The young artist's reputation was made, and he went on to become world famous. If the tragedy of the ill-fated Lexington did nothing else, it gave the country the remarkable talents of Nathaniel Currier, who in seventeen years would join forces with another artist/lithographer, James Merritt Ives, to produce evocative color lithographs that became the illustrated soul of early America.

The man that arrived late at the dock and who wisely decided not to make an attempt to jump onto the Lexington read of the disaster in the extra edition of a newspaper late the next morning. He could not believe his luck. If he hadn't been delayed because of an argument with his editor, Park Benjamin, over editorial changes in his poem The Wreck of the Hesperus, set for publication in the World newspaper, he certainly would have been one of the 150 frozen bodies floating in the Sound.

He folded the newspaper, set it aside, and asked the waiter for a sheet of the hotel's stationery and an envelope. After the dishes were cleared, he began writing his wife and father to inform them their husband and son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was still alive and well in the restaurant of a New York hotel.