Actually, neither the United States’s diplomatic affairs nor its relations with Native American tribes were quite as tranquil as Madison suggested. Two years after the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, relations between the United States and Britain were indeed improving rapidly. In London, negotiations between Lord Castlereagh and Ambassador Adams drew the two nations closer to agreements to demilitarize the Great Lakes—and effectively end American attempts to conquer southern Canada—and settle the boundary between the U.S. and Canada from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains.
Relations with Spain, however, had begun to deteriorate. The Spanish government under the recently restored Don Carlos lacked the military resources to secure its possessions in the Western Hemisphere, and Americans seized the opportunity to enrich themselves at Spain’s expense. During the War of 1812, Congress had snatched much of West Florida, and Jackson’s victory at New Orleans in January 1815 solidified the American title to Louisiana—indeed, its presence all along the Gulf Coast. While the Spanish government embarked upon a quixotic attempt to regain West Florida and Louisiana, many Americans in the Southern states cast a covetous eye at Spanish-controlled East Florida, especially since local authorities proved unable to prevent bands of Seminole Indians from venturing occasionally into Georgia to raid American farms and kill American settlers. In less than a year, the First Seminole War would be well under way, with both sides committing horrific barbarities.
Spanish officials also objected when American seamen took advantage of the disorder in the Gulf of Mexico to plunder Spanish ships, or to convey supplies to rebels in Mexico and Latin America. A brief war scare erupted in the fall of 1816 when American newspapers reported that Spanish vessels had fired upon and seized the USS Firebrand, a naval schooner ostensibly assigned to suppress piracy in the gulf. Andrew Jackson, then the commander of U.S. Army forces south of the Ohio River, insisted that this example of “Spanish insolence” required a forceful American response. “If it was an unauthorised attack by Spain, it should have been repelled by another unauthorised act by us,” Jackson wrote. “If authorised by the government of Spain, it was an act of war, and ought to be met as such.” Cooler heads prevailed, but a British observer could see that Spanish possessions in North America were living on borrowed time. “So long as any part of the Floridas belong to the Spanish Crown,” wrote a correspondent in The Times of London, “so long will there by no want of firebrands between that Monarchy and the United States.”
Reviewing the state of government finances, Madison predicted that his administration would close the year with a surplus. Federal tax revenues for 1816 were estimated at $47 million, against total payments of $38 million for all of the national government’s civil, military, and naval obligations. Madison suggested that the Treasury apply the $9 million surplus against the national debt of $110 million, largely the result of fighting the Revolution and the recently concluded war against Britain. Further, Madison predicted that the federal government would operate in the black again in 1817, thereby providing additional funds for “the effectual and early extinguishment of the public debt.”
Looking ahead, Madison renewed his suggestion that Congress establish a national university in the District of Columbia, and called for states to build more roads and canals to facilitate domestic commerce. He closed by congratulating the American people on forty years of liberty and independence, and thanked them for their support. “If I have not served my country with greater ability,” the president concluded, “I have served it with a sincere devotion.”
One day later, the electoral college met to cast their votes for president. To no one’s surprise, the Democratic-Republican ticket of James Monroe and Daniel Tompkins won an easy victory, carrying sixteen of nineteen states—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware remained in the Federalist column. (There was some question as to whether the recently admitted state of Indiana was qualified to cast electoral votes in this election, but Congress ultimately decided that it could.) Undismayed by his defeat, but perhaps stung by its magnitude, Rufus King explained that he had lost because Monroe “had the zealous support of nobody, and he was exempt from the hostility of Everybody.”
Most of the congressmen who arrived in Washington for the lame-duck session in December would not return when the fifteenth Congress convened in March. Popular outrage against the Compensation Act, exacerbated by anxieties about the distressing weather, poor harvests, and rising prices, cost 70 percent of incumbent congressmen their jobs—the highest rate of turnover in any congressional election in American history. Voters may not have blamed politicians directly for the frigid summer, but complaints about the “inauspicious season” and “precarious times” reflected a general mood of discontent that provoked a thorough purge of Congress. Not surprisingly, one of the first measures introduced in the December session was a resolution recommending repeal of the Compensation Act.
* * *
ON a pleasant morning in November, Ambassador John Quincy Adams went for a walk, leaving his house in West London and heading for Brentford. As he passed Gunnersbury, he saw a man lying facedown on the ground, apparently unconscious or dead. Enlisting the aid of a passerby, Adams revived the man and discovered that he was on his way to a hospital in Lambeth for treatment on his bad leg. “I asked him if he was in want,” Adams noted in his diary. “He said he had eaten nothing for two days.” Adams gave the stranger a shilling and suggested that he stop at a nearby pub for a hot meal. The encounter was not an isolated incident. “The number of these wretched objects that I meet in my daily walks is distressing,” Adams acknowledged. “Not a day passes but we have beggars come to the house, each with a different hideous tale of misery. The extremes of opulence and want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other that I ever saw.”
Occasionally the British populace’s patience wore thin despite Sir Francis Burdett’s assessment that “no other country in the world could exhibit a population, suffering under such accumulated distresses, where so much forebearance and temper were manifested.” On November 15, a crowd gathered at Lord Castlereagh’s home in St. James’s Square and threw stones at the windows, breaking a dozen panes of glass; the foreign secretary was not harmed. Several weeks later, radical leaders reconvened an assembly at Spa Fields. The previous gathering had dispatched Henry Hunt to present a petition for parliamentary reform to the Prince Regent. Twice Hunt attempted to meet with the prince; twice he was turned away.
As the crowd waited for Hunt to appear at Spa Fields, someone passed around a handbill that read, “A pot of beer for a penny and bread for two pence: HUNT REGENT and COBBETT KING: Go it, my boys!” Angered by the government’s disdain for their cause, and encouraged by an agent provocateur, a portion of the mob broke away and headed for the Tower of London, which they fancied the English equivalent of the Bastille. Along the way, they broke into a gunshop and stole some weapons. When they arrived at the Tower, several shots were fired and one member of the mob brandished a cutlass and called upon the Tower to surrender. It did not. Instead, a delegation of three magistrates and five constables arrested three of the leaders, whereupon the rest of the crowd dispersed.
It was precisely the type of incident Liverpool’s government had anticipated—“They sigh for a PLOT,” wrote Cobbett, “They are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot!”—and the Tories made the most of their good fortune. As Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s foreign minister, explained to the Duke of Wellington, “the effects of such violent crises always turn in favour of the good party.” Lord Sidmouth and his colleagues chose to interpret the Spa Fields debacle as the opening shot in an organized conspiracy designed to end, as a secret parliamentary committee explained, in the “total overthrow of all existing establishments, and in a division of the landed, and extinction of the funded property of the country.” By the time Parliament convened at the end of January, the government would have a full sla
te of repressive legislation primed for passage.
* * *
“THIS past summer and fall have been so cold and miserable that I have from despair kept no account of the weather,” wrote Adino Brackett in his diary in December. “It could have been nothing but a repeatation [sic] of frost and drought.” New England remained drier than normal throughout autumn, although a week of steady rain during the last week of October—the first prolonged period of precipitation since April—extinguished the forest fires across the region. A warm front arrived during the first week of November, sending temperatures briefly into the low 70s in Vermont and Massachusetts, followed by a storm that left a foot of snow in New Hampshire. The rest of November remained relatively warm, and December brought significantly milder weather than usual. “Warm month, very little frost,” noted an observer in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “Quite warm and pleasant,” agreed Reverend Samuel Robbins in East Windsor, Connecticut, on December 18. A sharp cold snap four days later persuaded Reverend Robbins that “the people appear to feel, in some measure, the frowns of heaven which lie upon them,” but milder weather soon returned and remained through the middle of January.
So long as the weather cooperated, the stream of emigrants from New England continued westward. Sometimes a group of farmers from the same town organized an emigration company, purchased land in Ohio or Indiana, and then traveled together. One caravan from Durham, Maine, consisted of 16 wagons and 120 people (including their minister), bound for a township they planned to buy in Indiana.
Families who traveled by themselves found the journey wearisome. “I have seen some families of eight or 9 children on the road,” wrote a young single farmer, “some with their horses tired others out of Money &c.” Samuel Goodrich, a bookseller in Hartford, Connecticut, recalled seeing “families on foot—the father and boys taking turns in dragging along an improvised hand-wagon, loaded with the wreck of the household goods—occasionally giving the mother and baby a ride. Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they reached the expected Canaan…” A popular route from Maine to the west ran through Easton, Pennsylvania; in the course of a single month, 511 wagons carrying 3,066 travelers passed through the town. One family of eight bound for Indiana arrived in Easton in late December after walking all the way from their farm in Maine, pulling a cart loaded with their youngest children and a few possessions.
Many families left New England with very little money, hoping to find temporary employment on farms along the way. Those fortunate enough to find work typically received payment in food, such as oats or buckwheat; by December, however, the demand for labor had largely disappeared, and the emigrants were left to rely on the kindness of strangers. Thomas Baldwin, a farmer in his mid-forties from the Kennebunk River in Maine who intended to settle in Tennessee, arrived in New York City “somewhat depressed by fatigue,” drawing behind him “a hand-cart containing all his effects, chattels and provisions, and two children of an age too feeble to travel; behind followed the elder children and the wife, bearing in her arms a robust infant seven months old.” The Baldwins had already covered four hundred miles; their destination lay another eight hundred miles ahead. As they labored past the corner of Pearl and Wall Streets, several bystanders took pity on the family and handed them ten- and twenty-dollar banknotes.
Those who stayed behind suffered through a season of hardship, but not famine. Grain prices in the United States rose rapidly in the last months of the year, especially as American merchants shipped increasing amounts of wheat to Europe. (The rising volume of exports led several state legislatures to pass resolutions requesting a nationwide embargo on shipments of grain to other countries. Congress demurred.) In New York and Boston, the price of a bushel of wheat ranged between $1.50 to $2.00 from 1814 through the autumn of 1816; by late December 1816, it was nearing $2.75. In the summer of 1816, corn had sold for $1.35 a bushel, but it approached $1.75 by the end of the year.
Prices in inland towns were even higher, since the deplorable roads hindered the movement of goods even in a mild winter. In some isolated Maine towns, corn reached $3 a bushel, and flour $16 per barrel. A band of Seneca Indians living in western New York State who typically harvested 7,000 bushels of corn a year and sold the surplus to importunate whites, lost more than 90 percent of their crop and had to rely on assistance from private charities and churches to survive the winter. The Massachusetts legislature assumed responsibility for approximately 600 Native Americans residing in Maine, and provided them with 300 bushels of corn.
Many farmers who had already sent their pigs to market lacked their usual supply of pork over the winter. Starving wolves picked off enough of the remaining sheep and chickens that several towns in Maine posted bounties of forty dollars for each dead wolf, a princely sum when a day laborer made only about three hundred dollars a year. Long accustomed to improvisation, New England farm families subsisted instead on the tops of potato plants, wild pigeons, boiled leeks, and an occasional hedgehog. Oats, a hardier grain which generally survived the frigid summer, replaced corn on dinner tables. “Thousands of people subsisted on oatmeal who had never tasted it before,” wrote one observer. “Then it was that people blessed the Scotch for having invented oatmeal.” Vermonters used maple syrup products as currency—it had been a good year for syrup—and traded them for fish caught along the Missisquoi River or shipped from the Atlantic, consuming so much seafood that 1817 became known in some parts of New England as the “mackerel year.”
11.
RELIEF
“This year, 1817, was on the whole a melancholy one…”
AS 1816 DREW to a close, American and European writers continued to search for an explanation for the year’s extraordinary weather. One thesis, advanced in the National Register and the Petersburg Intelligencer, attributed the frigid summer to two causes: a long-term cooling of the internal temperature of Earth, and a lack of circulation of the “electrical fluid” that was believed to move between the surface of Earth and the atmosphere. According to this theory, the internal heat of Earth—which the writer claimed had more influence upon the temperature of the air than any other factor—had been declining for the past thousand years. As evidence of a cooling trend, he cited the presence several centuries ago of human settlements in regions of Greenland and Iceland that were presently uninhabitable; alpine glaciers that were advancing across Switzerland and northern Italy; and significantly colder weather in Rome (snowstorms) and Lombardy (frozen lakes) than in the days of the Roman republic.
Nevertheless, the subnormal temperature of the summer of 1816 “appears to us to have been caused more by the absence of the usual circulation of the electrical fluid, than either a deficiency in the heat of the sun, or of that which we receive from the internal heat of the earth.” According to this theory, “whenever the electrical fluid circulates, heat is produced. [And] whenever there is an equilibrium of the fluid for any length of time between the surface of the earth, and the atmosphere, the temperature of the air is much lower than in its usual state.”
The electrical equilibrium allegedly existing in 1816 was attributed to a series of earthquakes that had occurred at various points around the world over the past three years—“more universal and terrible in their effects, than any which have been recorded for several centuries.” Earthquakes, the theory maintained, were the result of a disequilibrium of electrical fluid between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, and “have been always preceded by a long tract of warm weather.” Acting as a sort of electrical shock, the quakes restored the equilibrium and thereby ushered in a period of cold weather. The general absence of lightning and thunderstorms during the summer of 1816 seemed further proof of the insufficient circulation of electrical energy. “All nature seems to declare that electricity, the great agent of heat, when in a state of motion, is equally diffused at present through her system,” the writer concluded, “and that no part either possesses a superfluity, or labours from
a deficiency of this extraordinary & mysterious fluid. The earthquakes of the last years have produced this remarkable equilibrium; and we may calculate that several summers will yet pass away, before this equilibrium is destroyed, and the usual quantuum [sic] of heat necessary for vegetation will again be generated.”
Others agreed that the normal circulation of electrical energy had gone awry, but blamed the disturbance on lightning rods instead of earthquakes. According to one theory, lightning rods prevented Earth from releasing heat into the atmosphere, keeping the air much cooler than normal. Or perhaps the rods actually absorbed heat from the air when they attracted lightning, thereby depriving the atmosphere of warmth.
For their part, several British writers focused on the movement of glaciers and icebergs to explain “the causes of this wet and cold season.” Writing in the Gentleman’s Magazine, one amateur meteorologist suggested that “the removal of a considerable number of icy mountains, by tempestuous winds, from the neighbourhood of the Arctic Pole into more Southerly latitudes in the Atlantic might occasion it.” William Thomas Brande, a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain and secretary to the Royal Society of London, suggested that the culprit was the slow buildup of Arctic ice over decades and centuries. For several hundred years, Brande argued, “the Climate of England has undergone a very material change for the worse.” No one could doubt, he wrote, that “the Springs are now later and the Summers shorter; and that those seasons are colder and more humid than they were in the youthful days of many persons.”
In fact, Brande claimed, the mean annual temperature across much of the Northern Hemisphere was declining, while the accumulation of ice and snow in the mountainous regions of Europe continued to expand. The trend seemed even more pronounced in the northern reaches of the hemisphere. As evidence, Brande cited the fate of eastern Greenland, where Norwegian and Icelandic traders had established outposts in medieval times. Since the fifteenth century, however, the east coast of Greenland, “which once was perfectly accessible, has become blockaded by an immense collection of ice.” Brande blamed the “deterioration” of Britain’s climate on this rapid buildup of ice—much of which, he argued, recently had begun to drift southward in the form of immense ice islands through the North Atlantic. The “extreme chilliness” of 1816, Brande concluded, “may in great measure be referred to these visitors from the north.”
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 25
