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

by William K. Klingaman

  Freezing temperatures returned on August 21, striking a far wider area, extending as far south as Kentucky and west to Ohio. The frost killed or damaged crops—particularly corn—throughout Maine and New Hampshire, reaching into Massachusetts from Stockbridge to Boston, and in low-lying areas in upstate New York. “Indeed we have the air of October rather than that of August,” claimed one New Yorker whose plants looked dry and stiffened, “as we see them late in autumn.” At this point, some New England farmers abandoned all hopes of a profitable crop of corn and cut the stalks for fodder, but it spoiled nonetheless.

  Towns in central Pennsylvania experienced severe frost, and “a temperature, such as is generally experienced in the latter end of October, making thin clothes uncomfortably cool.” Cincinnati also suffered heavy frosts, and the town of Washington, Kentucky, reported “frost so severe, as in some instances to kill vines in exposed situations.” Snow covered mountaintops across Vermont. In Hanover, Governor Plumer witnessed “a hard frost, that in many places of vast extent killed Indian corn (particularly in pine lands), potatoe [sic] vines, pumpkins, cucumbers, etc. We shall have but a small crop of corn—that which is not killed is chilled.”

  Plumer already had enough problems on his hands. The state of New Hampshire was nearly insolvent, at least in the short run. Upon taking office in March, Plumer—a former United States senator who also had previously served one term as governor, in 1812–13—learned that the state treasury had less than a hundred dollars in cash, and a daunting stack of unpaid bills. The governor asked every bank in Portsmouth for a loan until tax payments arrived in the autumn, but they all turned him down. Plumer then persuaded the state legislature to reduce the salaries of a number of state officials (including himself), but those savings were a mere drop in the bucket. Only the federal government’s generosity in advancing funds due New Hampshire for the use of its militia during the recent war kept the state afloat. (Despite the state’s financial embarrassment, the legislature approved the construction of a new statehouse in Concord. Plumer managed to curtail costs, however, by using inmates from the nearby state prison to cut and shape blocks of granite for the capitol.)

  A more vexing problem—and the main reason Plumer was in Hanover in August—stemmed from the controversy surrounding Dartmouth College and the conflict between the college’s president and its board of trustees. Dartmouth originally grew out of an Indian mission school known as Moor’s Charity School, founded by Eleazar Wheelock in 1754 in Lebanon, Connecticut. In 1769, Wheelock moved his school to Hanover, in southwestern New Hampshire, and obtained a royal charter to turn it into a college “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land—and also of English Youth and any others.”

  Wheelock served as president of Dartmouth College until his death in 1779, whereupon his son, John, assumed the presidency. By 1816, John Wheelock and the trustees of the college were locked in a struggle over the future direction of the school. A majority of the board of trustees—a self-perpetuating body—were staunch Federalists who supported strict, orthodox Calvinist doctrine and the Congregationalist Church, which still received state tax funds as New Hampshire’s established church. Wheelock took a slightly more liberal theological stance than the trustees, but the minor doctrinal differences between himself and the board were exacerbated by a multitude of personal and, to an outsider, frankly trivial disagreements. In 1815, the disputatious Wheelock turned the simmering dispute into a full-fledged political controversy by inviting the state legislature to investigate conditions at Dartmouth. The equally stubborn trustees responded by firing Wheelock, who then appealed to the public for support against the board. He framed the issue in terms of freedom of conscience, arguing that the trustees “had perverted the college into an agency … to establish a politico-religious hierarchy in New England.”

  A longtime defender of religious tolerance, Plumer took up Wheelock’s cause and persuaded the state legislature—now solidly Democratic-Republican—to pass a measure at the end of June 1816 permitting the governor to appoint nine additional trustees to the board, and to establish a board of overseers (also appointed by the governor) with veto power over the trustees. The bill also renamed the school as Dartmouth University, and provided for freedom of religious opinion for its students and officers.

  Coverage of the Dartmouth controversy dominated state newspapers during the summer of 1816. To the extent that they followed state political affairs—and interest was increasing, although fewer than twenty percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 1816 gubernatorial election—New Hampshire voters supported Plumer and the legislature in the Dartmouth College controversy. So did Thomas Jefferson, in a well-publicized congratulatory letter to the governor. The long-standing tradition of deference to established social and religious authority—a legacy of the colonial era—was disintegrating, and both the Federalist Party and the special privileges of the Congregational Church would expire in the next few years.

  A sizable percentage of New Hampshire residents undoubtedly had more pressing concerns that summer than the quarrel over Dartmouth’s future. The arduous life of a farmer in the rugged interior of New Hampshire was about to get even harder. Over 80 percent of the state’s 70,000 residents lived and worked in rural areas, nearly all engaged in subsistence agriculture. The Merrimack and Connecticut river valleys provided fertile soil for the production of corn and grain (wheat, barley, and rye), but it was a challenge to survive on barely marginal lands in the hill country. To supplement their income, New Hampshire farmers increasingly were raising cattle, which meant they needed to grow more hay, corn, and grain for fodder. Daughters also contributed by doing piecework for the nascent textile industry.

  But the state’s economy offered few opportunities to diversify. Transportation remained primitive; it took a week to go overland from New York City to New Hampshire. Communication and news of current events lagged: Newspapers and books were rare, and there were no free public libraries anywhere in the state. While textile manufacturing had gained a foothold, the power looms and shoe factories that would provide thousands of jobs lay in the future. And Dartmouth was the only institution of higher education in New Hampshire, which did not bode well for the state’s store of human capital.

  On August 28, Dartmouth College celebrated Commencement Day. The conflict had grown even more complicated over the past two months. The new state-appointed board of trustees dismissed all five of Dartmouth’s faculty members; undaunted, the faculty retired to private homes to conduct their classes, and most of the school’s students (approximately 160 young men) followed them. With an eye to the grand gesture, the college’s pre-Plumer board of trustees chose Commencement Day to announce its defiance of the state legislature’s reform bill.

  While Dartmouth’s graduates celebrated their commencement, another cold front passed through New England. In much of New Hampshire, whatever remained of the corn crop—the staple upon which the state’s farmers depended most of all—perished. Entire fields were cut up and used for fodder. As Plumer rode back to Concord, he confirmed that New Hampshire’s corn harvest had perished, although he still held out hope for the grains.

  Maine suffered worse damage. “August proved to be the worst month of all,” noted one diarist. Farmers saved less than half the crop of hay, and less than 10 percent of the corn—and even that was inferior quality. Like New Hampshire, Maine’s economy centered around subsistence farming, with corn the most critical crop. In years of normal weather, some farmers sold hay and timber to Boston merchants, while others provided food—wheat, barley, rye, or buckwheat—to workers in the local lumber industry. But there would be no surplus in 1816. A recent study of Maine agriculture by a team of scientists led by David C. Smith revealed that in the century from 1785–1885, there were nine years in which Maine suffered severe frosts in June, and four years with severe frosts in August. Yet only one year appeared on both lists: 1816.

  In Vermont, farmers gathered what l
ittle hay they had saved and burned it in a desperate attempt to keep their corn from freezing. Some farmers in eastern Massachusetts tried a different strategy by cutting up their cornstalks by the roots and placing them upright, where they purportedly continued to ripen. But most New Englanders agreed with the Connecticut Courant’s verdict that “August was more cheerless, if possible, than the Summer months already past.”

  From below the Mason-Dixon line came reports of heavy frost in South Carolina on August 29. A correspondent in Danville, North Carolina, noted that his meadow “was white with frost” on the same day, and again on August 30. With a touch of grim humor, he added that the frost “killed nothing, as all was dead before” from the continuing drought. He had recently returned from Mecklenburg, and reported that “in the country thro’ which I past [sic], and as far southward as the Savannah river, there will be the greatest scarcity of provisions ever known in my traveling.” The combination of drought and cold had left fields “that would not make one grain of corn.… What the inhabitants are to do for support time must discover.”

  “The crops will be extremely short in all the upper districts of South Carolina—they are said to be worse than they have ever been known to be,” observed another traveler. “The people seem to be alarmed about their situation, and considerable emigration is likely to take place.” The frost on the morning of August 29 in that state was sufficiently severe “as to singe pumpkin and potato leaves; and I was informed by a respectable gentleman, that he saw the dew collected on a blade of corn, congealed into ice.”

  Frost also struck fields around Petersburg, Virginia, “a circumstance unparalleled in this part of the country,” claimed one observer, “and what is equally extraordinary, we have had frost every month during the year.” The Richmond area, too, sustained frost, leading the Richmond Enquirer to sound the now-familiar refrain that “the oldest inhabitants have no recollection of such a prodigy.”

  Thomas Jefferson confirmed that the same late-August cold wave “killed much corn over the mountains,” in western Virginia. “We have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America,” Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, his Swiss-born former secretary of the treasury. In August, the meticulously observant Jefferson measured only 0.8 inches of rain at Monticello, as opposed to the monthly average of 9.2 inches. And still the drought continued. “The summer, too, has been as cold as a moderate winter,” Jefferson informed his friend. “The crop of corn through the Atlantic States will probably be less than one-third of an ordinary one, that of tobacco still less, and of mean quality.” Wheat was “middling in quantity, but excellent in quality.” Most of all, Jefferson feared the specter of famine in Virginia, especially since he could recall the deaths that followed the devastating drought of 1755. “Every species of bread grain taken together will not be sufficient for the subsistence of the inhabitants,” he warned, “and the exportation of flour, already begun by the indebted and the improvident, to whatsoever degree it may be carried, will be exactly so much taken from the mouths of our own citizens.”

  * * *

  “OH! It rains again; it beats against the window,” wrote Jane Austen at her home in Chawton, about eighty miles east of Bath in southwestern England. “Such weather,” she told her nephew, Edward, “gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad, & has been for a long time, much worse than anybody can bear, & I begin to think it will never be fine again.”

  Austen spent the summer of 1816 finishing a novel tentatively titled The Elliots, which she had been writing for the past year. She initially thought she had completed the manuscript on July 18; dissatisfied with the ending, she rewrote the final two chapters and finally brought the novel to a close on August 6. Along the way, Austen changed the title as well, to Persuasion.

  Her previous novel, Emma, had been published in December 1815 and gathered respectable reviews. “Whoever is fond of an amusing, inoffensive, and well-principled novel, will be well pleased with the perusal of Emma,” concluded the British Critic in a typical reaction. Austen’s publisher sent a specially bound copy to the Prince Regent several days prior to publication, and His Royal Highness had kind if uninspired words for the novel. There was, he wrote, “so much nature … and excellent description of character.” His librarian invited Austen to the Prince Regent’s residence, Carlton House, and informed her that she had permission to dedicate her next novel to the prince.

  Sales of Emma disappointed Austen’s hopes—unfortunately, because her family could have used the money. In March, Jane’s brother Henry was forced to declare bankruptcy when his bank failed, a misfortune that also wiped out the investments of several other family members. The collapse was precipitated in part by the failure of one of Henry’s partners, a merchant whose trade suffered when the government slashed its orders for food, uniforms, and other supplies once peace returned. Another brother, Frank, a naval officer, was forced to live on half pay since the end of the war. A third brother, Charles, also a ship’s captain, lost his command and his fortune when his ship was wrecked in the Mediterranean in February 1816; he returned to England impoverished. Austen had invested the royalties from her previous novels (about 600 pounds sterling) in Navy stock, but the 5 percent interest she received on that sum provided only minimal support for her family. As Admiral Croft declared in Persuasion, “These are bad times for getting on.”

  An acquaintance suggested Austen might sell more books if she wrote historical romances instead, but she refused. “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem,” Austen admitted. “And if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way, though I may never succeed again in that. I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

  With money scarce, Austen rarely ventured far from Chawton. She shared her cottage with her mother (who was chronically ill), and various nephews and nieces, whom she babysat for weeks at a time. One of her favorite charges was Frank’s nine-year-old daughter Mary Jane, who spent much of July 1816 at Chawton. Fortunately, Mary Jane proved good company, because the soggy weather kept them indoors most of the time. One day they set off in a donkey carriage to see a farmer, Mr. Woolls, in a nearby town who wanted to show off the improvements to his property. They did not get far. “We were obliged to turn back before we got there,” wrote Austen, “but not soon enough to avoid a Pelter all the way home.” When Austen finally sat down with Woolls, she talked of “it’s being bad weather for the Hay—& he returned me the comfort of it’s being much worse for the Wheat.”

  Austen had an ulterior motive in discussing the weather in her correspondence: “I have often observed that if one writes about the weather, it is generally completely changed before the Letter is read.” She yearned for a change from the cold and the damp, because she had been suffering back pains since early in the year. Perhaps it was rheumatism; perhaps she spent too much time bent over her writing desk; perhaps it was a natural part of middle age, since Austen had turned forty the previous December. Her sister, Cassandra, had taken Jane to the spa town of Cheltenham in the spring, but the treatments did not help. The pains grew worse.

  At the end of the summer, Jane received a note from a friend who had recently returned from a visit to the Continent. “She speaks of France as a scene of general Poverty & Misery,” Austen told Cassandra. “No money, no Trade—nothing to be got but by the Innkeepers.” And at Chawton, “likewise more rain again, by the look & sound of things.… We hear now there is to be no Honey this year.”

  * * *

  NEARLY three hundred miles away, Britain’s most famous landscape artist was in the midst of a working tour of Yorkshire and the surrounding area, sketching subjects for a proposed history of the county of York. “Weather miserably wet,” complained Joseph Mallord William Turner from Richmond. “I shall be web-footed like
a drake … but I must proceed northwards.”

  Forty-one years old in the summer of 1816, William Turner had been elected a full member of the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-six; five years later, the academy named him Professor of Perspective. Equally proficient in the use of watercolors and oils, Turner had built his reputation on a remarkable ability to move beyond the literal reproduction of a landscape and portray its essence—one admirer claimed that his dark and threatening 1796 painting of Fishermen at Sea was “a summary of all that had been said about the sea by the artists of the eighteenth century.”

  Although the incessant rains of July and August 1816 hindered Turner’s progress as he and a close friend, Walter Fawkes, traveled through northern England, he was amply compensated for his discomfort. Turner’s fee for providing 120 watercolors for the history of York reportedly was the princely sum of 3,150 pounds sterling (the equivalent of approximately 150,000 pounds in 2011), the highest fee ever paid to a British artist at the time.

  In the rare intervals between storms and showers, Turner managed to complete a series of pencil sketches of numerous landscapes, castles, and local inhabitants in Yorkshire and Lancashire that he would subsequently turn into accomplished watercolor paintings. Few of these works, however, reveal the unique weather conditions of the summer of 1816; as one biographer has pointed out, Turner wished the finished works to “reflect the form and essence of the North of England as it had been for centuries,” rather than to serve “as a diary of 1816.”

  One startling scene proved the exception. In Lancaster Sands, a portrayal of horsemen and a carriage crossing Morecambe Bay at low tide between Arnside and Kents Bank, Turner eloquently conveyed the misery of that summer. The crossing itself was notoriously dangerous—hundreds of unwary travelers had perished when they lost their way in the darkness or mists, or when the rising tide cut off the passage. In Turner’s vision, the small band bunches together for safety under a driving rain, hastening across the sands with red-tinged clouds reflected in the low-lying water, heading toward a distant goal that remains indistinct under an angry sky. There was no assurance of a safe arrival.