The Year Without Summer (33 page)

In the midst of the protests, a snowstorm dropped “a great quantity of snow” on the
town of Niort, just north of the Vendée, on the evening of November 10. The phenomenon
was “the more surprising,” noted one newspaper, “as many years sometimes pass here
without our seeing any snow; and when it does fall it falls in small quantities in
the months of December and January.” Five days later, Parisians were equally surprised
by the combination of snow and thunder. “This day, at one, during a very cold temperature,
and while the snow fell abundantly,” reported the
Gazette de France
, “several claps of thunder were heard, preceded by lightning.”

*   *   *

A
T
noon on December 3, President Madison’s secretary presented Congress with a copy
of his eighth and final annual message. For the first time in any formal presidential
communication to Congress, the weather took center stage. “In reviewing the present
state of our country,” Madison began, “our attention cannot be withheld from the effect
produced by peculiar seasons which have very generally impaired the annual gifts of
the earth and threatened scarcity in particular districts.” The president comforted
Congress, however, with an assurance that the frigid summer and prolonged drought
had not created a national crisis. The United States, Madison pointed out, encompassed
such a diversity of climates, soils, and agricultural products that it could provide
enough food to fulfill its own needs despite the scanty harvests in the East. And
if the scarcity of foodstuffs required the American people to practice “an economy
of consumption, more than usual,” they could still give thanks to Providence for “the
remarkable health which has distinguished the present year.”

Madison proceeded to list the positive developments of the past twelve months: The
United States was at peace with every other nation; American exports continued to
expand, though the president decried his fellow countrymen’s tendency to purchase
too many imported goods; and the frontier remained free of clashes with Indians, as
the federal government continued its efforts to convert the natives into farmers and
introduce them to “the arts and comforts of social life.”

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.

*   *   *

O
N
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
slate of repressive legislation primed for passage.

*   *   *

“T
HIS
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.