The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

by William K. Klingaman

  Whenever he sought a respite from writing, Byron found congenial company at the Château de Coppet, the salon of Madame Germaine de Staël. Madame de Staël was perhaps the only woman in the world who could match Byron for notoriety in 1816. The daughter of Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who achieved fame as Louis XVI’s finance minister, Anne Louise Germaine grew up in the same sort of freethinking intellectual atmosphere as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod (a former lover of Edward Gibbon), hosted the leading salon in pre-Revolutionary Paris, a gathering place for writers, artists, scientists, and diplomats. Anne Louise Germaine’s marriage at the age of twenty to the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron de Staël von Holstein, quickly deteriorated, and Madame de Staël spent the remainder of her life studying, writing, and hosting her own salon. Her vocal support for individual liberties and a constitutional monarchy earned her the enmity of both radicals and royalists in revolutionary France; she was banished from Paris in turn by the Committee for Public Safety in 1795, by the Directory the following year, and in 1803 by Napoléon, who subsequently exiled her altogether from France.

  After extensive travels through Europe—particularly Germany and Italy—Madame de Staël found refuge at her family estate at Coppet, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva. There she assembled a new coterie of scholars, politicians, and writers: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Greek. It was “the general headquarters of European thought,” wrote the French novelist Stendhal, “the Estates General of European opinion … Voltaire never saw anything like it. Six hundred of the most distinguished people would gather on the shores of the lake: wit, wealth, the most exalted ranks came there seeking pleasure in the salon of the celebrated lady.”

  Among those gathered at Coppet was Charles Victor de Bonstetten, a Swiss writer and philosopher who would subsequently publish an influential study of the effect of climate on human society—L’homme du midi et l’homme du nord: ou l’influence du climat, a topic that also interested Madame de Staël—and the economist Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi. Already famous for his multivolume history of the Italian republics, Sismondi was studying the deleterious effects of unpredictable disturbances (such as an exceptionally cold and wet summer) on the economy of Britain, increasingly vulnerable to such shocks due to its dependence on exports and the whims of international commerce.

  On a Saturday afternoon in July 1816, Byron arrived at Coppet for dinner. As soon as he entered the room, all eyes turned toward him, staring “as at some outlandish beast in a raree-show. One of the ladies fainted, and the rest looked as if his Satanic Majesty had been among them.” Madame de Staël, immune to scandal and quite unperturbed, gave Byron a warm and gracious welcome. Between their discussions of literature, she peppered him with detailed questions about his personal life, and particularly his troubled marriage. Byron, who was practicing his melancholy public persona while pretending to be devoted to his estranged wife, took no offense at her intrusive queries. “I believe Madame de Staël did her utmost to bring about a reconciliation between us,” he confided to a friend. “She was the best creature in the world.”

  Byron returned to Coppet frequently over the next several months. “She has made Coppet as agreeable as society and talent can make any place on earth,” he told his editor. The celebrated hostess “ventured to protect me when all London was crying out against me on the separation, and behaved courageously and kindly; indeed, Madame de S defended me when few dared to do so, and I have always remembered it.”

  In late July, Shelley and Mary Godwin invited Byron to accompany them on an expedition into the Alps: to Chamonix, Mont Blanc (the highest peak in western Europe), and the immense glacier known as the Mer de Glace. Byron declined, perhaps because Claire Clairmont—who had informed him she was pregnant with his child—was also going. The company set out on July 21, and as they approached the mountains Mary noticed that the Arve River, which would become the symbol of power in Shelley’s poem, “Mont Blanc,” was so swollen by recent rains that “the cornfields on each side are covered with the inundation.”

  They reached Chamonix two days later, Mary and Percy registering as man and wife when they checked into a hotel. But when they set out to get a better view of the mountains, the skies opened again. “The rain continued in torrents,” Mary noted in her journal, “—we were wetted to the skin so that when [we had] ascended more than half way we resolved to turn back—As we descended Shelley went before and tripping he fell upon his knee—this added to the weakness occasioned by a blow on his ascent” and he fainted. They did manage to view the Mer de Glace the following day. “This is the most desolate place in the world,” Mary concluded, and filed away the awe-inspiring sight to use in her “ghost” story. When the rains resumed, they decided to end their expedition prematurely.

  A week later, Lake Geneva was struck by a storm which Lady Caroline Capel described as “a Hurricane of Thunder, Lightning & Wind … that beat any thing I ever heard—The scene of desolation at Vevey was dreadfull, The Lower part of the Town was entirely inundated the Lake having risen with uncommon fury to an unusual height—Many Houses washed down & Trees torn up by the roots, the poor people running about in confusion wringing their hands & crying.” As the lake rose seven feet above its normal level, nervous residents could see dead animals floating downstream on the Rhone. Situated on a mountainside, Lady Capel’s château escaped the flood, “but felt the wind most frightfully—It tore up a large tree in the Garden & threatened to bring the House about our Ears.”

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  IN Virginia, the drought persisted through July and into August. In the absence of any reliable system of artificial irrigation, Jefferson feared that his corn crop would be ruined; the United States, he told a friend, was experiencing “seasons the most adverse to agriculture which had ever been known.” At Montpelier, where President Madison spent his days and often part of his evenings reviewing official correspondence, the corn and tobacco fields were stunted.

  But in New England, temperatures had moderated, reviving hopes for a bountiful harvest. After the frosts of early July, local newspapers carried stories of dangerously depleted stores of corn and grain. “On account of the extreme backwardness of the season, and severe drought, the prospects of the farmer are distressing almost beyond precedent,” claimed the Albany Argus on July 19. “The grass in many districts does not promise a quarter of a crop; corn is very poor, and it is fearful that but very little of it will come to maturity.… Some of the pastures are completely dried up, and present the appearance of a brown heath.” All in all, the Argus concluded, “the picture of distress is very much heightened by the gloomy forebodings of an increased and prolonged scarcity.” Not surprisingly, merchants responded with a bout of panic buying, forcing up the price of grain and flour.

  Several newspapers in New Hampshire and Maine recommended that farmers simply give up on their stunted hay crops and replant their fields, either with grains or new grass in hopes of a better harvest in the fall. “It is acknowledged on all hands,” proclaimed the Brattleboro Reporter, “that the first crop of grass has been very light; perhaps not more than half the usual quantity. To make up for this deficiency it is recommended to farmers to plow down as much ground as convenient as soon as possible and broadcast with oats and Indian corn,” which the editor hoped would be ready for harvest by the end of September—assuming the rest of the summer remained reasonably warm. In the meantime, livestock suffered from the scarcity of fodder, and cattle were turned loose in woods or even in towns to find their own forage. Farmers improvised as best they could, substituting the dried tops of potatoes, or even straw thatch off the roofs of outbuildings to feed their stock.

  By the first week of August, however, fears of a general famine had subsided. According to the optimistic forecast of the New Hampshire Patriot, “rye is said to be better than for some years past, [and] wheat and other early grains look well and are nearly ready for harvest.” While corn remained “more backward
than usual,” it had recovered so rapidly after several weeks of warm weather that the Patriot’s editor hoped “there may be great crops even of the latter.”

  Farmers found time to turn their attention to politics instead. By all accounts, the most controversial issue in the summer of 1816 was the size of the federal budget, and especially the Compensation Act—the pay raise that congressmen had voted themselves before adjourning in April. Now that the nation was once again at peace, critics complained that the Madison administration and Congress should have cut federal spending dramatically; instead, it remained at levels they considered extravagant and wasteful, especially for a Democratic-Republican administration ostensibly committed to a frugal government. “It would astonish the plain honest farmer to go to Washington and witness, with his own eyes, the extraordinary and unaccountable waste and profusion that prevails,” argued the editors of the pro-Federalist Maryland Gazette. “Unnumbered millions” of dollars had been wasted, claimed the Gazette, most of which had found its way into the pockets of “the inferior tribe of political pimps and panders [sic]” who infested the nation’s capital.

  At a time of economic troubles, when “commerce is languishing, manufactures are at a stand, the currency embarrassed, taxes heavy, and the people in difficulties,” fiscal conservatives were stunned that congressmen had voted to double their own pay; their new salary of $1,500 per year was more than twice that of a skilled worker who worked six days a week, albeit less than the wages of some government clerks. In one state after another, Federalist and Democratic-Republican voters alike vented their outrage toward their representatives. They held public meetings to denounce the Compensation Act; grand juries condemned it; state legislatures passed resolutions censuring Congress; and in Georgia, a crowd actually burned in effigy their representatives who had voted for the pay raise.

  “There has never been an instance before of so unanimous an opinion of the people, and that through every state in the Union,” concluded Thomas Jefferson. Veteran congressman Richard Johnson of Kentucky contended that the Compensation Bill had aroused more opposition than any other measure since George Washington first took office, including “the alien or sedition laws, the quasi war with France, the internal taxes of 1798, the embargo, the late war with Great Britain, the Treaty of Ghent, or any other one measure of the Government.” Critics issued dire warnings that the United States was headed down the same path of corruption and extravagance that had destroyed republican Rome. In a portent of things to come, early congressional elections held during the summer in New York State resulted in the defeat of nearly all the incumbents who ran for reelection.

  No one expected similar excitement in the presidential election campaign of 1816. Each party chose its presidential candidate through a caucus of its congressional representatives; although the caucus system was increasingly viewed as a relic of an age of gentleman politicians, the first national nominating convention lay eight years in the future. The Federalists, nearly extinct outside of their New England base, selected (without noticeable enthusiasm) Senator Rufus King of New York to carry their banner. King, who had served in the Constitutional Convention and filled a variety of political and diplomatic positions with distinction, had no desire to be president, and grudgingly agreed to run only after several weeks of soul-searching. The Democratic-Republican caucus turned into a more contentious affair, as supporters of Secretary of War William Harris Crawford of Georgia attempted to pry the nomination from the heir apparent of the Virginia dynasty, Secretary of State James Monroe. President Madison, as titular head of the party, refused to publicly endorse either candidate. Eventually Monroe triumphed by the unexpectedly narrow margin of eleven votes.

  James Monroe evoked a variety of reactions within his party, not all of them positive. He certainly looked the part of a president, especially compared to Madison. While Madison was short, slight, prim, and bald, Monroe was six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a rugged physique. Those who met him got the impression of great physical strength and endurance. Like Madison, Monroe was born along the Rappahannock in central Virginia; both were members of the Revolutionary generation; and both swore allegiance to Jeffersonian political principles. But even Madison’s opponents acknowledged the depth of the president’s intellect, while Monroe seemed “awkward and diffident; and without grace either in manner or appearance.”

  “A mind neither rapid nor rich,” wrote Virginia attorney William Wirt of Monroe (an interesting characterization, considering that Monroe would appoint Wirt attorney general in 1817). “Madison is quick, temperate and clear,” noted a prominent New York politician. “Monroe slow, passionate and dull. Madison’s word may always be relied on … I am sorry to say I cannot bear the same testimony to Monroe.” Aaron Burr, living in exile in Europe, dismissed Monroe as “stupid and illiterate … improper, hypocritical, and indecisive.” To some critics, Monroe seemed a complete nonentity. One contemptuous Federalist journal expressed amazement that the Democratic-Republican party would nominate “this ridiculous man of straw—this thing—this nothing, as a suitable candidate, by way of insult to their fellow citizens, as if such a compound of negatives in their hands could stand up [as] the future President of this country.”

  So the presidential campaign began.

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  BEGINNING in late July, clerics in English churches offered public prayers for a change in the weather. Clearly something had gone terribly wrong somewhere; the persistent rain and cold could not be explained by the normal pattern of weather variation. “A belief begins to prevail among the many in all countries that there is something more than natural in the present state of the weather,” noted the seventy-three-year-old British politician Lord Glenbervie during a tour of France in the first week of August.

  New spots had appeared on the sun, reviving speculation about their responsibility for the disastrous weather. A physician in Lyon claimed to have evidence that the sun was ill and the moon was dying. On the other hand, the London Chronicle argued that the sun’s influence was waning (as evidenced by the dark spots) while the moon’s was waxing; the confluence of these developments, the editors argued, “are the conceived cause of the backwardness of the season, from its accustomed heat and vegetation; as also of continued rains, with an unusual swelling of rivers.” A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that the sunspots were actually small objects hovering between the sun and Earth. Although these objects presumably would cast a shadow of “a kind of cone of a certain length, according to the diameter of the obstructing body, and its distance from the luminary [i.e., the sun],” he claimed that they had little effect on Earth’s temperature. Since the obstruction would simply radiate whatever heat it received, instead of absorbing or consuming it, “the heat beyond, that is, toward the earth, would [still] be as great as if there were no impediment.”

  Never one to miss an opportunity to mock conventional opinion, British satirist William Hone blamed Napoléon Bonaparte for the weather. In his poem, “Napoléon and the Spots in the Sun; or, The Regent’s Waltz…” Hone claimed that the former emperor had escaped from Saint Helena and invaded the sun; the spots were simply the different parts of his body. As revenge for his defeat at Waterloo, Napoléon “has occasion’d this change in the weather, / Stopp’d the sun-shine and drench’d us with rain, / And made hot and cold come together! / It is he that kept backward the Spring, / And turn’d Summer into November.” Hone proposed to thwart the plot by catapulting the Prince Regent sunward into space so he could defeat Napoléon in hand-to-hand combat.

  At the end of July, the price of wheat rose sharply on London markets. A British businessmen who toured the counties of Devon and Somerset to ascertain the state of the crops reported that “the wheat crop has suffered a little from the late frosts,” but he felt confident it would recover, given good weather for the remainder of the summer. “The hay crop,” on the other hand, “has certainly been greatly injured by the rain, not only that which has been cut, but tha
t which is growing also.” Merchants and speculators, he concluded, were driving up the price of wheat by buying all the high-quality grain—both domestic and foreign—they could obtain, in expectation of an inferior harvest.

  “Have you been apprehensive of a second Flood?” Lady Noel, Byron’s mother-in-law, asked her daughter, Annabella, in a letter on July 21. “Hay spoilt, Corn laid, and all the cc & cs of farming distresses.” Several days later, another severe storm lashed crops in Norfolk. “The rain descended in such torrents, accompanied by large hailstones, after a few peals of thunder, as to prostrate the heavy crops of wheat and barley in many places of this county,” reported one observer. “In some villages the ditches and lanes were so full of water, that boats might have been rowed in them.” Elsewhere in northern Britain, thunderstorms and hail produced landslides and floods that washed away more crops—at least one worker was reported killed trying to protect his hay—and left water four feet deep in the streets.

  Britons who traveled to the Continent found conditions even worse there. “I thought I was to leave all grumbling behind me in England,” noted a British tourist in Amsterdam, “but here the good folks are ten times worse, for nobody is pleased: it is quite shocking—poverty prevailing, and the country drowning: rains have been dreadful; in short, we have not had one day without rain since our arrival.” In Burgundy, the rain and cold had left the vineyards “in such a state, that the vintage is expected to be wholly unproductive.” In the wine-making region of northwest Switzerland, Lake Bienne overflowed its banks, inundating a vast tract of countryside. Much of the Bernese Oberland remained under snow, forcing cattle to remain in their stables (at considerable expense to the farmers) instead of grazing in the pastures. The Rems River in southwestern Germany flooded on more than a dozen separate occasions, ruining the crops of grain and hay in the surrounding fields.