The Year Without Summer (4 page)

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A
MERICANS
greeted the year 1816 with confidence and optimism. They had recently concluded two
and a half years of war with Great Britain, arguably the strongest and certainly the
wealthiest nation in the world, and the conflict had ended essentially in a draw.
Admittedly the British had captured and partially burned the nation’s capital, forcing
President Madison and his wife, Dolley, to flee for their lives, accompanied by several
wagons full of White House valuables and Cabinet papers stuffed into trunks. But American
troops led by General Andrew Jackson had ended the fighting on such a positive note
with their overwhelming victory over a numerically superior force of British regulars
at New Orleans in January 1815, that many Americans believed they had actually won
the War of 1812.

European events since that time offered hope that the United States could look forward
to a long period of peace, undisturbed by events abroad. On June 18, 1815, British
and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blucher dealt
a crushing defeat to Napoléon’s army outside the Belgian town of Waterloo. The outcome
had hung in the balance for most of the day; Wellington later acknowledged that the
battle had been “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” It had been exactly
a hundred days since Napoléon had entered Paris in triumph. This time, the Allied
statesmen at Vienna gave the British government sole authority to choose the site
of the Eagle’s exile—it selected the remote island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic—and
sole responsibility for keeping him there. With Napoléon removed from the scene, it
seemed unlikely that the United States would be drawn into European affairs anytime
in the near future. “We are, happily, at peace with all the world,” exulted one Massachusetts
congressman, “and there are no indications which threaten soon to disturb this tranquility.”

Everything in the United States appeared to be expanding. Since 1789, the nation had
added five new states and five territories. By European standards, the United States’s
population was growing at an astonishing rate. In 1815, there were nearly 8.5 million
Americans, twice as many as there had been only twenty-five years earlier. Immigration—primarily
from northern and western Europe—contributed to this prolific growth, but most of
the increase came from Americans who married young and had large families; on average,
American women in the early nineteenth century had between seven and eight live births.
It was also a very young population: 85 percent of the population was under the age
of forty, including nearly all of the leaders of Congress.

Slightly more than 80 percent of Americans were white, and in a nation where land
was cheap but labor scarce, the vast majority of white adults—more than 80 percent—made
their living as subsistence farmers. Most American farmers spent only a portion of
their working hours tending their crops, however, doubling as coopers, or tanners,
or blacksmiths, or shoemakers. Wives and children frequently carded wool or spun linen
in the evenings after spending their days in the fields. Farm families produced enough
goods for their own needs, and sold the rest. “Go into the interior of the country,”
wrote Albert Gallatin, former secretary of the treasury, “and you will scarcely find
a farmer who is not, in some degree, a trader. In a grazing part of the country, you
will find them buying and selling cattle; in other parts you will find them distillers,
tanners, or brick-makers.”

Fewer than seven percent of Americans lived in cities, the largest of which were New
York and Philadelphia, but neither even remotely approached the size of London or
Manchester. Nearly all of the nation’s towns were located on the East Coast, relying
on commerce for their prosperity. Most municipalities lacked any public sewer or water
system, which meant that garbage, dead animals, and human waste routinely accumulated
in the streets.

Manufacturing remained relatively primitive. Beyond the products of farm families,
most of the goods offered for sale were fashioned by mechanics working by hand, either
in a small shop or at home. Transportation was even less advanced. Goods and passengers
rarely traveled very far over land; American roads were notoriously poor, many no
more than narrow, bumpy, overgrown trails that turned into quagmires when it rained.
(Travelers told stories of horses actually drowning in the pits, and wagons sinking
slowly out of sight.) It cost as much to send a ton of goods thirty miles from an
ocean port inland as it did to ship it three thousand miles across the Atlantic. And
progress was slow; a traveler who set out by carriage from Boston in April would not
arrive in Charleston, South Carolina, until July. In 1802, Congress had authorized
the construction of the National Road across the Appalachians, but fourteen years
later the road had not yet crossed the Ohio River. Hence merchants and farmers continued
to rely on river systems to move goods in the interior.

Yet significant improvements lay close at hand. Steamboats, dismissed as “floating
smokestacks” by skeptical observers when Samuel Fulton’s prototype made its debut
on the Hudson River in 1807, were slowly gaining popularity, especially on the Western
rivers. And Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York had begun to elicit legislative support
for the construction of a canal (derided by his critics as “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or
“the Governor’s Gutter”) that would stretch across the state for 340 miles from Albany
to Buffalo, through thick forests and disease-ridden swamps, connecting the Hudson
River with the Great Lakes.

Manufacturing was poised to expand as well. When the recent war temporarily deprived
American consumers of British goods, New England merchants and entrepreneurs provided
financial backing for scores of small-scale domestic textile “manufactories” that
produced a total of $24 million worth of cotton goods and provided employment to nearly
a hundred thousand men, women, and children. Americans produced an additional $19
million worth of woolen goods in 1815, and the Boston Manufacturing Company, headed
by Frances Cabot Lowell, had recently completed the nation’s first integrated textile
factory along the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In the aftermath of war, a new spirit of nationalism swept over the United States.
For the past twenty-five years, the nation had been riven by deep divisions over domestic
issues—primarily Alexander Hamilton’s economic proposals—and the war in Europe. The
disagreements produced the first two political parties in the United States: the Federalists,
led by Hamilton and John Adams, who were horrified at the disorder and excesses of
the French Revolution; and the Democratic-Republicans, who shared Thomas Jefferson’s
dislike of a strong central government, and Madison’s distrust of Great Britain.

Lately, however, many Republicans had come to accept much of the Federalist domestic
agenda; a powerful central government seemed less threatening if they controlled it,
as they had since 1801. (Madison, however, had grown no more fond of Britain since
the king’s troops burned the President’s Mansion in Washington; in early 1816 Madison
was living in a private dwelling on the corner of New York Avenue and 18th Street
known as the “Octagon House,” while workmen repaired and repainted the mansion, this
time with white rather than gray paint.) Moderate Federalists who could recognize
a lost cause were deserting to the opposition in increasing numbers. And a series
of costly missteps by the dwindling band of hard-core Federalist stalwarts—including
vocal opposition to the war effort and a thinly veiled threat by New England political
leaders in December 1814 to secede—destroyed any hopes the Federalists may have entertained
to regain power on the national level.

Partisan rancor thus subsided, although it did not entirely disappear when the Fourteenth
Congress concluded its regular session in the spring of 1816. Legislators spent much
of their time debating economic issues. In early April, Congress approved the first
protective tariff in the nation’s history. Several weeks later, legislators voted
to establish a second Bank of the United States, to provide a uniform, stable currency
and a source of credit for business ventures.

Yet there remained many congressmen and voters, especially from rural areas, who distrusted
the power of a central bank independent of popular control. These same critics demanded
that the federal government cut taxes now that the war had ended. Since military expenditures
during the war had sent the federal debt soaring to nearly $124 million, Congress
hesitated to slash taxes and decrease revenue too rapidly. It did repeal all duties
on domestic manufactures, but it retained several other minor taxes, including those
on carriages and postage. Administration officials estimated that the new, higher
tariff rates would bring in at least $25 million per year, which they claimed would
be sufficient to pay the government’s routine civil and military expenses, fund annual
increases in the size of the navy (which had proven woefully inadequate during the
recent hostilities), and pay off the remaining debt in about twelve years.

Before Congress adjourned, it also voted itself a pay raise. Since the first Congress
convened in 1790, legislators had received six dollars per diem in lieu of a regular
salary. Although the cost of living had increased by at least 75 percent over the
past twenty-six years, their remuneration had not changed. Hence congressmen felt
justified in approving the Compensation Act, which granted them an annual salary of
$1,500. Few realized at that time that this measure would destroy many members’ political
careers.

As lawmakers departed Washington at the end of April, they congratulated themselves
on accomplishing their tasks in an unusual display of good feelings. “Among the most
auspicious appearances of the times, is the obliteration of party spirit,” declared
a Southern representative. “No question at the present session of congress has been
discussed or determined on the ground of party.… Let us then cherish these feelings;
let us emulate each other only in serving our country with the more zeal, and the
more fidelity.”

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O
N
April 29, Americans noticed a large, irregular spot on the surface of the sun when
they glanced skyward. One observer compared it to “a spider, having parts extending
from the main body,” while another claimed that “its general appearance is not unlike
that of a cluster of islands … surrounded by a belt of rocks.” A representative of
the National Mathematical Academy in Philadelphia estimated the length of the spot
at just under 40,000 miles, with a breadth of nearly 3,000 miles. It lay just north
of the center of the sun’s surface, and its stationary nature over the course of a
week led a group of American astronomers to dismiss their initial hypothesis that
it might simply have been the planet Mercury moving across the face of the sun. Instead,
they decided it was probably a wandering comet pulled in by the sun’s gravitational
force.

In its May 1816 issue, the
North American Review
cited the theories of Sir Frederick William Herschel, a British astronomer, who argued
that the spots were “chasms in the [sun’s] atmosphere, occasioned by ascending currents
of gaseous fuel.” Since there appeared to be “a variable emission of light and heat,
intimately connected with the appearance and disappearance of spots,” Herschel theorized
that “seasons of uncommon heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness, so far as they
depend upon the supply of heat, are to be traced not so much to accidental causes
near at hand, as to the inconstancy of the fountain.” (Herschel, a legendary figure
in the history of astronomy, made numerous important discoveries, including Uranus
and its two moons, but also believed the sun was inhabited, along with all the other
planets and stars. He speculated that the sun’s surface was actually cool enough to
support life; only the outer solar atmosphere was hot.)

Others suggested that the sunspots were volcanoes on the surface of the sun, or “burning
mountains of immense size; so that when the eruption is nearly ended and the smoke
dissipated, the fierce flames are exposed, and appear as luminous spots.” Yet another
explanation proposed the spots to be “a kind of excavation of the luminous fluid supposed
to envelope [sic] the opake [sic] and solid body of the sun.” Even those who supported
this concept found it difficult to imagine how any gap within a liquid could remain
unfilled; one contributor to the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in Britain likened it to “no less a miracle than the passage of the Israelites through
the Red Sea.” Perhaps, suggested a writer in the
Baltimore American
, “the Sun has cast forth several immense bodies, and … there is a danger of one of
them coming in contact with our little tiney [sic] globe, when, in the horrible crash,
we may experience another deluge, or suffer a terrible conflagration!”

No one in 1816 understood that sunspots are formed by variations in the strength of
the magnetic field that surrounds the sun. Occasionally, a portion of the magnetic
field grows strong enough that the field coils back on itself and punctures the surface
of the sun, a process which inhibits the fusion reactions that produce solar energy.
This in turn reduces the temperature of the sun’s surface at the point of the puncture.
Since the brightness of the sun’s surface is proportional to its temperature, the
sunspots appear darker than the rest of the sun.

Scientists in Europe and the United States had regularly recorded sunspot activity
with telescopes since the early seventeenth century, when several astronomers, including
Galileo, first observed them. Most of the earliest sunspot observations were taken
during the period now known as the Maunder Minimum—named for the English scientist
Edward Maunder—that extended from 1645–1717, when sunspot activity was at an unusually
low level. The near disappearance of sunspots in the 1650s puzzled astronomers, as
did their sudden reemergence in the second decade of the eighteenth century.