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

by William K. Klingaman

  In late July, a procession of eighty young women paraded through the streets of Paris, holding lighted candles and praying to St. Genevieve—the patron saint of the city—for drier weather, but the rain did not stop. By the end of the month, the rainfall totals for July for most of France, parts of Belgium, Holland, and western Germany, southern Ireland, and southwestern England were more than three times normal.

  Incessant rain and gloomy skies confined Parisians to their homes and indoor amusements. Their mood darkened further with the flocks of British visitors who swarmed into the city that summer. It was the first summer in nearly a decade that Britain and France had not been at war, and English sightseers took full advantage of the opportunity to cross the Channel; one journalist estimated there were twenty-nine thousand Englishmen in Paris in midsummer. Even though their French hosts appreciated the British willingness to spend considerable sums during their stay, a national resentment over the presence of Allied occupation troops occasionally surfaced as insults or attacks on British tourists. Parisians did enjoy an opportunity to participate in the festivities surrounding the marriage of the king’s nephew, the Duc de Berry, to Princess Caroline of Naples and Sicily, a direct descendant of Philip V of Spain, the grandson of Louis XIV. Unfortunately for the princess, married life did little to domesticate the duke, who was notorious for both his philandering and his hot temper.

  King Louis XVIII spent much of the summer deciding what to do about the intractable Ultra-Royalist legislature—the Chambre introuvable—which had not met since the end of April. Allied representatives in Paris, notably the Duke of Wellington, favored a dissolution of the chamber followed by new elections, and hopefully a more moderate assembly. The Allies suspected that the current deputies would never vote enough new taxes to pay France’s war indemnities to their governments, the first installment of which was due in November 1816. They also feared that the continued heavy-handed repression of antimonarchist elements would invite a popular backlash and lead to a new round of civil strife. Louis’ minister of police, Élie Decazes, a moderate royalist, joined the Allies’ campaign to persuade the king to dismiss the legislature, in part because he felt a more conciliatory chamber would convince the Allies to end their occupation earlier. Since the restoration, Louis had grown quite dependent upon Decazes (whom he referred to as “my dear boy”) both to handle the daily administrative details of domestic policy and to keep him entertained with salacious gossip about well-known figures in Paris, which Decazes obtained through an extensive network of spies and informers. By the middle of August, Wellington and Decazes had worn down the king’s resistance, and Louis agreed to dissolve the chamber.

  That solved only one of the French government’s problems. The nation’s finances remained in a desperate state. Like the rest of Europe, the French economy remained primarily agricultural, and by the end of July 1816 it seemed clear that the coming harvest would be a disaster. That meant Louis’ government would be hard-pressed to collect its normal tax revenues, much less impose new taxes, and that spending on emergency relief measures would almost certainly soar. Since the national budget already was badly out of balance, the government could meet its obligations only by assuming a new foreign loan.

  And the price of bread continued to climb. In late July, textile workers in the town of Castres, in southern France, rioted to demand cheaper bread. The mayor called out the national guard to suppress the demonstrations, but when many members of the guard decided to support the rioters, the authorities had no choice but to grant the workers’ demands. To prevent further outbursts of violence, King Louis issued an ordinance stating that “grain, meal of every kind, bread, and sea biscuit, may be imported free of duty, either by sea or land, till otherwise ordered.”

  More than a year after Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo, the French economy was still struggling to recover from the lengthy wars. Nearly two decades of conflict had disarranged commerce, increased taxation, and consumed vast amounts of manpower. Resources that might have been used in productive enterprises had vanished on battlefields from Spain to Moscow. Nor could the French economy transform itself overnight from a wartime footing to peacetime production; the transition would need time, as businesses reallocated capital to the manufacture of civilian goods. “And the necessary consequence,” noted one contemporary observer, “is that many of the labourers, to whom these capitals had given employment [during wartime], are thrown out of work, and wander idle in our streets, because no man hath hired them.”

  French ports that had been crippled by the British blockade sank into depression. French manufactures—which had flourished during the war in the absence of British competition—could not survive the flood of cheap British imports once peace returned. The French linen industry, a major supplement to the income of farm families who spun the flax and wove the fabric in their homes, collapsed under a wave of inexpensive Irish linens and British cotton goods. (In 1810, Napoléon reportedly had offered a reward of a million francs to anyone who could invent a mechanical loom to produce linen, but no one did.)

  Belgium, the German states, Switzerland, and the Netherlands faced similar difficulties. Both the Belgian cotton industry, based in Ghent, and its Swiss counterpart succumbed to British textile imports woven on machines that reduced production costs far below those of their continental competitors. As European textile firms laid off workers, demand for manufactured goods declined further. The rising price of bread added to the distress, especially among working families who spent half their income on bread in normal times. No wonder a crowd of Belgian workingmen made a public display of burning a mountain of English textiles, particularly shawls and handkerchiefs, at the corn market in Ghent in late July.

  Even though the importation of inexpensive British goods exacerbated the unemployment problem on the Continent, the British economy was suffering its own travails in the summer of 1816. The resumption of trade between Britain and the Continent in 1815 led British manufacturers to produce more than European consumers—impoverished by war and taxation—could purchase, and so a glut of British goods sat on the docks for months. They were sold only at a substantial loss; so while they undercut continental manufactures, and forced layoffs in the French and German textile industries, they brought no profit to British firms and led those employers, too, to reduce their workforce.

  In short, Britain had too many workers and not enough work. “Instead of crowding our ports with ships and goods, and filling our streets with the bustle of trade,” noted one perceptive observer, peace had produced “a calm, a stillness, as to trade, truly gloomy.” The Bank of England’s decision to sharply contract the amount of money in circulation only deepened the slump in trade. By the summer of 1816, employment on the London docks had fallen from 1,500 men to a mere 500 as commerce slowed to a trickle. On one particularly quiet day, the Customs House recorded no entry for either import or export, “a circumstance without parallel in the annals of that extensive establishment.”

  Iron prices plunged by more than half; artisans sold their tools to buy bread. Up to 10,000 servants reportedly lacked employment. For months, members of the opposition had been complaining in Parliament about the numbers of beggars tramping throughout Britain—over 30,000 in London alone. “Scarcely a day passes without bringing one, and generally more, beggars to my door,” declared William Cobbett, a leading advocate of parliamentary reform. “They swarm over the country like vermin upon their own bodies; and are produced by causes nearly similar.”

  Small wonder that investors displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm to buy British government securities, but The Times of London feared “something peculiar” was at work in the financial markets. “When no other sufficient cause can be assigned for low spirits in individuals,” The Times noted, “it is generally thought to be unpleasant weather that produces them: but … we apprehend it is the low spirits of the nation that occasion the depressed state of the funds.” Or perhaps the unpleasant weather played upon the spirits o
f investors, as well.

  Aside from a few minor disturbances in the Midlands and northern England, workers still hesitated to engage in violent protest. But the ruling class could see trouble ahead. On July 29, a distinguished company gathered at the City of London Tavern for a public meeting to revive the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, a society originally founded in 1812 by a group of philanthropists including William Wilberforce, the evangelical politician best known for his campaign to end Britain’s participation in the international slave trade. The July 29 meeting was chaired by the Duke of York, the king’s fourth son and commander in chief of the British army; others present included two of York’s younger brothers, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Cambridge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London.

  The purpose of the association was to encourage “conservative philanthropy”—private donations to alleviate the plight of the poor while rejecting any government responsibility for their condition. The organizers planned to spend the evening in a dignified discussion of “the present distressed state of the lower classes, and the most effectual means of extending relief to them,” but almost as soon as the meeting commenced, radicals among the audience (led by Lord Cochrane, a famous British admiral and vocal proponent of parliamentary reform) began calling for stronger measures by the government. York could not maintain order long enough to conclude a rational discussion of the issues, and the meeting soon deteriorated into disorganized squabbling. “No newspaper can describe the meeting at the City of London Tavern last Monday,” wrote reformer Francis Place to a friend. “Many years have passed since I witnessed anything so exhilirating.” As York slipped out of the tavern under a shower of catcalls, the group concluded its business by proclaiming that while “it be impossible for any Association to attempt the general relief of such difficulties”—nor would the government attempt to do so—it expected that “those who are able to afford the means of relief will contribute their utmost endeavours to alleviate these sufferings.”

  It would be a daunting task, especially as the cold, wet weather threw more agricultural laborers out of work. In the town of Barnet, just north of London, scores of unemployed haymakers gathered day after day in the marketplace. “It is impossible to conceive the distress in which these poor people (a majority of them itinerant strangers) have been reduced by the late incessant rains,” wrote one witness; many of them were “literally starving.” When a passing gentleman saw about 140 of the desperate men standing together, he ordered them all to be supplied with bread, and told them to come back tomorrow for more. The next day, more than three hundred appeared, all of whom he fed. The third day there were nearly eight hundred; they, too, received bread, and a quarter pound of cheese from the parish.

  Londoners who assembled outside St. James’s Palace on the evening of July 23 received cake instead. In the season’s second royal wedding, William Frederick, the Duke of Gloucester, a nephew of the king, married his cousin Princess Mary, one of the king’s daughters. (Contemporaries noted that it seemed a suitable union, since both parties had been born in the same year—1776.) King George did not attend his daughter’s wedding, of course, although Queen Charlotte appeared near the end of the festivities. The ceremony featured an altar adorned with a spectacular display of gold plate, including chalices made of solid gold. After the bride and groom rode away in a carriage, the crowd—according to custom—was treated to pieces of wedding cake.

  The wedding may have cheered Englishmen still saddened by the death on July 7 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the greatest playwright of his age. While still in his twenties, Sheridan authored two brilliant comedies, The Rivals and The School for Scandal, and then wrote very little for the rest of his life, perhaps fearful he could not replicate his early success. He served in Parliament as a leading member of the Whig Party, earning a reputation as a remarkably persuasive speaker and an incorruptible politician (although his private moral standards were not as strict). Sheridan also managed and owned London’s most famous playhouse, the Drury Lane Theatre, until it was destroyed in 1809 by fire, despite a curtain made of iron and a large reservoir of water on the roof for just such emergencies. Sheridan, who calmly watched his theater burn (“A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside,” he reportedly remarked to a bystander), never recovered from the financial loss. He subsequently quarreled with his patron and longtime crony, the Prince Regent, began drinking heavily, and died deeply in debt.

  Wrote Byron:

  A mighty Spirit is eclipsed—a Power

  Hath pass’d from day to darkness—to whose hour

  Of light no likeness is bequeath’d—no name,

  Focus at once of all the rays of Fame!

  The flash of Wit—the bright Intelligence,

  The beam of Song,—the blaze of Eloquence,

  Set with their Sun—but still have left behind

  The enduring produce of immortal Mind …

  7.

  POVERTY AND MISERY

  “These are bad times for getting on…”

  IN THE AUGUST 10 issue of Niles’ Weekly Register, editor Hezekiah Niles, a highly respected journalist, surveyed the state of agriculture in the Eastern United States and decided that prospects for a plentiful harvest of grains remained surprisingly encouraging. Due to nearly four weeks of steady warm weather, “the crops of wheat and rye are reported to be as good as usual” in many states, although there remained problem areas. Western Pennsylvania, for instance, promised “very little grain and very little fruit.” Even in eastern Pennsylvania, “we understand that the crops are thin.” Hay was a disaster just about everywhere, and corn—well, corn could still go either way. As far as apples and peaches were concerned, “we believe there is little fruit to the northward of Pennsylvania.”

  But Niles’ concern in August 1816 stretched beyond a single season’s harvest. In a lengthy front-page article in his Register, the first weekly news magazine in America, Niles argued that the United States’ climate was changing, and not for the better. “It has been observed by the most careless observer, that since 1812, the seasons have been very unlike what they had formerly been,” he wrote. The present summer, Niles continued, “has hitherto been extremely cold, with the exception of a very few days that were extremely warm.” He believed that the cooler temperatures were responsible for the drought, since “the chillness … has retarded nature’s great process of evaporation, and depressed the range of the clouds.”

  After providing his readers with a summary of the unusual weather events of June and July, Niles skirted the issue of causation. He briefly considered the sunspot theory, but found little evidence to support it. Instead, Niles suspected that the series of earthquakes earlier in the decade might bear at least part of the responsibility for the altered climate.

  Niles was more concerned with the effects of climate change on public health. As American weather grew colder and increasingly damp, Niles claimed to detect a rise in cases of what he called “typhus mitior,” or “the low nervous fever,” or simply “typhus fever.” This disease, which Niles claimed was virtually unknown previously in the United States, allegedly attacked the nervous and vascular systems, causing chills, headaches, nausea, and depression. Niles believed that it first appeared in New England, “in the course of a long period of unusually cold damp weather,” then extended itself through New York State, and finally pervaded all of North America. It had become so common by the summer of 1816, according to Niles, that “almost every disease is now liable to assume a typhus cast—a depression of pulse and prostration of power often taking place in cases that had never heretofore been thought liable to such symptoms.” Niles optimistically predicted that Americans’ bodies eventually would adjust to the changes in climate, just as vegetables did when transplanted to unfamiliar environments.

  New England farmers remained optimistic as well. On sunny days in early August, they continued to
plant new crops in sheltered areas, hopeful that the growing season—so slow to get started—might compensate by extending a bit beyond the usual first frost in October. Newspapers reminded them to replant fodder crops to keep their animals fed through the winter. When morning temperatures in Maine dipped into the 30s at the end of the first week of August, farmers wrapped old shawls or rags around the seedlings for protection.

  Throughout the month, winds remained unusually steady from the north and west, keeping the air drier than normal. The first hint of disaster occurred on August 13, as a cold wave passing through northern New England brought frost that damaged corn in the fields north of Concord, New Hampshire. Temperatures dipped below freezing again the following evening, causing frost damage in western Massachusetts, then rose and remained warm for nearly a week. On August 18, Middlebury, Connecticut, recorded a high of 92 degrees, and a local pastor led a special prayer for rain to end the troubling drought.

  Around noon on August 20, “a very violent storm of rain and wind” struck Amherst, New Hampshire. “It came up very suddenly and was of short duration,” reported a local newspaper, “but it rained and blew tremendously accompanied by heavy thunder.” The storm signaled the arrival of a powerful cold front. Temperatures plunged 30 degrees in the next few hours. Residents of Keene, New Hampshire, claimed that they had never witnessed such a sharp change in temperature; in the town of Warren, a hundred miles to the north, some residents observed snow on a nearby mountaintop. New Hampshire’s governor, William Plumer, was riding from Concord to Hanover that day, and as he neared Hanover, he noticed that the combination of drought and cold had essentially ruined the crop of Indian corn.

  In Albany, the storm arrived late in the morning. After a warm dawn, “all of a sudden, the fine flying clouds which were driven by the S. wind, were suddenly driven back by a strong, cold blast from the N. and the temperature changed very rapidly,” wrote a local resident. “A cold wind from the N.W. set in, & blew with great violence for about 24 hours.” That evening, frost was reported all the way from East Windsor, Connecticut, to Portland, Maine.