The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History
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There was no shortage of explanations put forth by self-appointed experts to account for the recent extraordinary weather. News of the eruption of Mount Tambora had reached the United States by June 1816, but no one had yet published a theory to link Tambora’s ash cloud to the frigid temperatures in North America. Instead, numerous newspaper stories attempted to connect the cold wave with the previously sighted sunspots. “The sun is no doubt the great fountain of caloric, or heat, as well as of light,” mused a typical report, “and it is very rational to suppose that the objects which exhibit to us the appearance of spots on the sun, by intercepting the calorific rays, may have deprived the earth of some part of the quantity which it usually receives.” Although sunspots visible to the naked eye had largely faded from view by the end of May, they suddenly reappeared during the first week of June. One enterprising amateur astronomer tried to revive the hypothesis by suggesting that even weakened sunspots might have combined with a total lunar eclipse on the evening of June 9—which left New Englanders in darkness for sixty-seven minutes—to somehow enable the moon’s gravitational pull to disrupt the normal flow of winds around Earth.
Skeptics remained unimpressed. “The alarm from spots on the Sun proves the small progress of science and of the advantages nominal science has over superstition and prejudice and ignorance,” sniffed Reverend William Bentley of Salem. “We think the alteration took place before the spots were observed,” scoffed Niles’ Weekly Register, “but it is foolish to be positive about any opinion in a question of this kind.”
Perhaps. But the proponents of the sunspot theory were correct in presuming a connection between sunspots and temperatures and weather patterns on Earth, albeit not in the manner they suggested. The spots on the sun’s surface appear darker than the rest of the sun because less heat from the sun’s fusion reactions reaches the surface there. While this would suggest a reduction in the energy emitted by the sun, the opposite is in fact the case: An increase in sunspot activity is associated with an increase in the energy leaving the sun.
Although the sunspots are cooler than the remainder of the sun, they are surrounded by warmer, brighter areas that are often more difficult to notice against the background of the sun itself. The net effect of the cool sunspots and the warmer regions around them is to slightly increase the total amount of energy that the sun produces. These changes in solar energy may affect temperature and precipitation patterns on Earth, but temperature variations associated with sunspot activity are considerably less than those caused by volcanic eruptions. The aerosol cloud produced by Tambora likely reduced the amount of solar energy reaching Earth’s surface by 0.5 percent, an effect ten times stronger than that caused by a normal minimum in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, and more than three times stronger than the Maunder Minimum, the period of lowest sunspot activity on record. While the coincidence of Tambora and the Dalton Minimum probably increased the cooling effect of the aerosol cloud on Earth’s climate, the volcanic ash was the primary and proximate cause for the exceptionally cold and wet summer of 1816.
An understanding of the relationship between sunspot activity and solar energy lay more than thirty years in the future, however. Not until 1848 did Joseph Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian Institution, demonstrate that sunspots were cooler than the surrounding sun. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of incorrect and conflicting theories over the origins and effects of sunspots circulated as North America’s weather began to change in 1816.
Other Americans attributed the snow and frigid temperatures to the unusually large concentrations of ice still floating in the Great Lakes and—according to British merchant sailors—in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Newfoundland. These immense fields of ice purportedly absorbed substantial quantities of heat from the atmosphere, and thereby reduced its temperature. Critics noted, however, that if this hypothesis were true, coastal areas in New England (specifically, Maine, eastern New Hampshire) would have endured deeper snows and lower temperatures than inland regions such as Vermont, more than one hundred miles from the ocean. But they had not. Perhaps the afflicted inland regions were cooled by the ice on the Great Lakes; yet this argument seemed to go only round in circles. “Very cold weather produced great quantities of ice,” concluded one skeptic quite properly, “and great quantities of ice, at their dissolution, were the cause of uncommon cold weather.”
Yet another theory linked disturbances in the atmosphere to a series of earthquakes that struck the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1811–12. From the Ohio River to the Mississippi, 1811 was known as “The Year of Wonders.” The sequence of exceptional events began with spring floods in the Ohio Valley, followed by the appearance of the Great Comet of 1811 (the brightest comet to cross the heavens in several centuries), an unusually cold summer with occasional hailstorms, and an epidemic of fever that swept across the frontier. In the fall, settlers were treated to the ominous sight of a total eclipse of the sun, then vast flocks of pigeons in the sky, and finally immense swarms of squirrels—tens of thousands, by one account—in a solid mass, heading south, altogether unafraid of humans, many drowning when they tried to swim across the Ohio River. (Squirrels are notoriously poor swimmers.) “The word had been given to them to go forth,” wrote one elderly pioneer, “and they obeyed it.”
In retrospect, these “wonders” seemed portents to many Americans of the shock that struck the region on December 16, 1811. An earthquake of magnitude 7.7, centered in northeast Arkansas, shook the earth from Cairo, Illinois, to Memphis, Tennessee. Settlers along this frontier—then the forward edge of American settlement—felt the ground rise and fall, and heard “a very awful noise resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating, which was followed in a few minutes by the complete saturation of the atmosphere, with sulphurious vapor, causing total darkness.” Fissures opened in the earth, throwing out sand and water, and swallowing up huge chunks of land. “At the same time,” recalled an eyewitness, “the roaring and whistling produced by the impetuosity of the air escaping from its confinement, seemed to increase the horrible disorder of the trees which everywhere encountered each other, being blown up cracking and splitting, and falling by thousands at a time.”
Initially the Mississippi River appeared to recede from its banks and flow backwards, taking with it stands of cottonwood trees; then immense waves arose and capsized boats on the river, or washed others ashore. Cliffs along the riverbank caved and collapsed into the river; entire islands vanished. Log cabins crumbled as far away as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and towns throughout Kentucky and Tennessee.
A series of aftershocks caused nearly as much destruction. A second major shock occurred on January 23, 1812, then a third on February 7, completely destroying the town of New Madrid, Missouri, the largest settlement on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Natchez. In all of these shocks, clustered around M 8.0, “the earth was horribly torn to pieces,” and the Mississippi littered with trees and the wrecks of ships.
Washington Irving claimed that this combination of earthquakes, pestilence, and extreme weather events produced “a feverish excitement” in the minds of many Americans, “and filled the imagination with dreams of horror and apprehensions of sinister and dreadful events.” To millennialists, the sequence of natural disasters appeared a portent of the apocalypse, and evangelistic preachers warned that the world would soon end.
Others of an ostensibly more scientific inclination argued that the earthquakes had altered the American climate by disrupting the normal exchange of electricity between earth and sky, thereby denying the Eastern United States the heat necessary to grow crops. “It is perfectly understood in South America,” claimed one newspaper editor, “that those natural convulsions [i.e., earthquakes] always produce effects on the weather.” Several years earlier, two European writers working independently—Scottish jurist and amateur climate scientist John MacLaurin (Lord Dreghorn) and French journalist Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet—had advanced a simila
r theory. MacLaurin claimed that the weather in Scotland had turned colder since the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and Linguet confirmed that in both Champagne and Picardy, vintners had been unable to grow the same grapes or make the same wine as they could before the earthquake.
In an essay published in the Daily National Intelligencer, Dudley Leavitt, a New England teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy, attempted to explain not only the snowstorms of June but the entire series of cool summers in the Eastern United States in the years immediately preceding 1816. Leavitt attributed the below-average temperatures to “the extensive forests in North America [which] naturally have an effect to prevent the sunbeams from reaching the ground.” Not only did the sun fail to heat the ground, but the process of evaporation of water from leaves and plants exerted a cooling effect on the atmosphere, particularly during periods of above-average precipitation. “On this principle,” Leavitt reasoned, “the increased coldness of our summers for several years past may be, in a great part, accounted for, since, as our summers lately have been … very wet, the consequent evaporation has greatly contributed to cool the air, and of course the seasons have become colder.” Leavitt predicted that a drier summer would thus increase the atmospheric heat, “unless the fire of Nature is really going out, which there is no sufficient reason yet to believe is the case.”
While Leavitt blamed the frigid summers on precipitation and vegetation, the Brattleboro Reporter took precisely the opposite view, claiming that the destruction of virgin forests by American and Canadian settlers created a cooler climate. Reversing earlier generations’ theory that widespread razing of woodlands created warmer temperatures, the Reporter proposed that chopping down forests simply allowed cold winds from Canada to swoop down unhindered into New England. David Thomas concurred. “A few years ago, our fields were sheltered by woods,” he observed, “and every farmer has observed the difference, in spring, between vegetables growing in bleak [that is, colder] and in secluded situations.” Thomas further speculated that repeated plowing of the soil in long-settled regions was turning up “paler coloured subsoil,” which presumably retained heat less efficiently than the black surface soil of virgin forests.
During his travels through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Thomas repeatedly heard local residents offer their own unique explanation for the recent series of unusually cool summers. They suggested that a solar eclipse in 1806 was responsible for the subnormal temperatures; some claimed that the eclipse had administered some type of powerful shock to the atmosphere, while others believed that “a pernicious vapour [had] escaped from the shade of the moon.”
While many Americans sought explanations for the unusually cold weather in the physical world, others looked to God, or at least Providence. In colonial times, Americans (particularly New England Puritans) were prone to interpret meteorological events in theological terms. Weather was a physical manifestation of the Divine Will in all its majesty and capriciousness, and as one historian has noted, storms represented “the very handwriting of God: whatever transpired in the heavens was a direct communication from on high, with a special significance for them and them alone.”
American farmers prayed for the weather they needed to prosper; if it failed to appear, they endeavored to reform to obtain it. Occasionally superstition overtook theology, as when ministers sometimes rang church bells during lightning storms to ward off evil demons. (No statistics exist on how many clerics were struck by lightning while engaged in this task.) But for the most part, American colonists kept their eyes on the heavens, and the popular belief in theological meteorology lingered long past the Revolution, despite the influence of Enlightenment thought and particularly Newtonian mechanics. Certainly many members of the revolutionary generation understood exactly what Thomas Prince spoke of in his 1749 sermon, “The Natural and Moral Government and Agency of God in Causing Droughts and Rains”: “When the Vapours rise and gather in thick Clouds, and the Lightning flashes with irresistible Power; let us lift up our believing Eyes and see God in them.”
On this matter, at least, Americans saw no conflict between science and faith. God worked through natural means to carry out His will. Providentialism incorporated the latest scientific knowledge and used it to explain how God worked in the world; a recent study of Chesapeake society has made it clear that Americans’ belief in the workings of natural laws “supplemented rather than replaced the idea that God sent natural calamities as a warning.”
In diaries, journals, and private correspondence, early-nineteenth-century Americans, regardless of region or socioeconomic status, demonstrated that they still believed that God controlled all aspects of the natural world. Providence was the working of God’s will in human affairs, and even religious skeptics accepted the presence of a providential power, albeit in a lower case. It was one means by which they made sense of the sometimes baffling world around them. As the editor of Harper’s suggested, Providence was “the most general, pervasive, ineradicable feeling in the hearts of our countrymen.”
“All things are known to God, & all that He does is right & we learn that not even a sparrow fallith [sic] to the ground without his notice, so I leave all in his hands,” wrote a Southerner emigrating to the west. “The Wheel of Providence is constantly moving,” agreed the wife of an Ohio farmer; “nothing impedes its progress.” Upon the birth of a child, a Massachusetts father exulted that “The King Providence has granted us a lovely daughter.” And a New York teenager took time to record in his diary that “the Lord in his goodness has spared me 16 years and has given me health and strength.”
Whatever happened, happened because God willed it. On a national level, Americans typically looked to the future with optimism and confidence, convinced that God had chosen the United States to regenerate the world. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” acknowledged the eminently rational John Adams, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” Yet the average American also displayed a clear sense of resignation about temporary setbacks or losses in the present and the immediate past. God’s inscrutable will worked itself out in the natural world, in Americans’ personal lives, and they had no choice but to accept whatever joys and tragedies came their way.
Americans saw God’s hand especially in unexpected events that affected an entire community, such as hurricanes, epidemics, earthquakes (“peculiar Tokens” of God’s anger), and famine. Destructive frosts and snowfalls in June came from God as well. One Vermont newspaper could even cite scripture from the Old Testament to explain the recent cold wave: “Perhaps we can assign no other cause than that the fiat of the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,” the editors wrote, “and the wisest philosophers will be ready to exclaim with Elihu, the friend of Jub, ‘By the breath of God frost is given, and the breadth of the waters is restrained.’” Or as a Connecticut farmer confided to his diary, “Great frost—we must learn to be humble.”
Learn to be humble, because the snow and the frost may have signified God’s displeasure. Repent and reform, as Anglican minister Joseph Bend instructed his Baltimore congregation when an epidemic of fever struck nearby Philadelphia in 1793: “By fasting, humiliation, & prayer to stay the hand, which afflicteth your brethren, & to avert from yourselves the calamity, under which they are mournfully groaning.” Perhaps Americans were growing too materialistic, too obsessed with the manufactured goods that became more readily available each year. As cities grew and civilization encroached upon the wilderness, more Americans lost contact with nature. Notions of civic virtue, of self-sacrifice for the good of the nation seemed to have become passé. Social extravagance, once the preserve of the wealthy, was filtering down into the middle class, widening divisions among citizens. Perhaps the virtuous, agrarian American republic was beginning to resemble the decadent nations of Europe.
Religious revivals—particularly along the frontier—had com
menced in the 1790s. Now, in the spring and summer of 1816, they gathered strength and spread into more settled areas, especially into western New York state. “The revivals in these years [1816–1817] were more numerous, and of greater extent, than in former years,” wrote a nineteenth-century historian of the region. Between 1812–1815, the Presbyterian churches in western New York gained about five hundred new members per year; in 1816, that number rose to more than a thousand; in 1817, to nearly two thousand. Congregations of various denominations in Buffalo, Binghamton, Ithaca, Auburn, Onondaga, Geneva, and Palmyra experienced substantial increases in membership. In the town of Norwich, where more than sixty new members joined the Congregational Church, “all classes were subjects of the work; the old, and the young; the rich, and the poor; the learned, and the ignorant; the lawyer, the farmer, and the mechanic.” And the movement had barely begun.
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PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, marked the southern limit of the June snowstorms in the United States. Western Pennsylvania received two to three inches of snow, though towns on the eastern side of the Appalachians escaped with only flurries. Frost and ice accounted for most of the damage to crops and commerce. In mid-June, a correspondent from Erie reported that “the season has been dry and frosty for weeks together. It appears as if we should have no crops in these parts—the corn has been all killed by the frost of the 9th, and until very lately lake Erie was not navigable for the ice.”
Pennsylvania in 1816 was at the apex of its “golden age” of agriculture, in the midst of the transition between subsistence and commercial farming. Farmers who formerly planted a variety of crops to keep their families fed now focused upon one primary product to sell at market. Wheat remained the most common crop in most parts of the state, although farmers on the western side of the Appalachians preferred to raise corn (up to twenty-five bushels per acre), since it could be distilled into whiskey and shipped far more cheaply in liquid form across the mountains to eastern markets. Corn also was grown for family consumption, of course, and to provide feed for livestock.