The Year Without Summer (20 page)

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.”

*   *   *

I
N
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.

*   *   *

B
EGINNING
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 that 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.