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

by William K. Klingaman

  In the summer of 1816, O’Connell’s practice was growing rapidly under the pressure of hard times. “I have had an immense number of cases,” he told his wife at the end of August. “The times are very distressing to the country and there is no prospect of alleviation.” As the price of bread and butter rose, the prices of other Irish goods fell, because demand kept declining as the depression deepened. “Between the fall of prices and the dreadful weather,” O’Connell declared on September 30, “there is nothing but rain and wretchedness.”

  As the summer drew to a close, emigration from Ireland to the United States increased substantially. In a single week, more than 700 Irish applied for permission to leave the country; fewer than 2,000 had left in the entire twelve months of 1815. Peel would have preferred the emigrants to have come from the southern counties, which he felt would benefit from a reduction in population, since the land clearly could not support the numbers already there. But the prospective emigrants came almost exclusively from Ulster, the northern counties, and most were Protestant. Peel was especially loath to see them go to the United States. “I think it still more unfortunate that not only Ireland should lose so many industrious and valuable inhabitants,” he told Lord Liverpool, “but that the United States of America should reap the advantage.” (Actually, the British government was partly responsible for the disparity in emigration figures between northern and southern Ireland. By levying higher duties on American shipping, the Liverpool administration raised the price of passage to the United States, placing it beyond the reach of most Irish Catholic peasants.)

  Sometimes the arrivals brought no advantage to their new homeland. In September, a ship arrived in Philadelphia carrying emigrants from Ireland. It had left Ireland with 300 passengers, but on the journey the provisions had nearly run out. About a hundred of the most famished passengers had been put ashore at Cape May, New Jersey, “in a most miserable plight,” according to one press report. “The remainder were landed at Philadelphia in a distressed situation.” Many of the newcomers were “so reduced to poverty and wretchedness,” continued the news story, “that they were actually dying in the streets.”

  9.

  HARVEST

  “Sleighs have been going quite brisk today…”

  SUMMER ENDED MUCH as it began in the Eastern United States. Frost struck the Mohawk Valley in central New York State in the middle of September, ruining nearly all the corn still standing in the fields. “The whole summer has also been so cold,” lamented the Albany Gazette, “that there will be no Indian corn in all this country.” More cold air swept into the region on September 26. At sunrise that day in Hanover, New Hampshire, the temperature dipped to 23 degrees. In Rochester, New York, ice formed a quarter of an inch thick. “No prospect of crops,” wrote Reverend William Fogg of Kittery, Maine, in his diary. “Crops cut short and a heavy load of taxes.”

  On September 27, a widespread “black” frost—which freezes the water in the tissues of plants—killed off virtually all the crops that remained north of Pennsylvania, two weeks ahead of the average date for the first killing frost. The next three days were equally cold, “the four greatest frosts known in New Hampshire at this season by the oldest man living.” In Sutton, New Hampshire, apples froze on the branches, and corn in the fields froze all the way through the cob. Plymouth, Massachusetts, experienced the coldest September day in the town’s record books.

  There would be no more harvest in New England in 1816. “These frosts have destroyed all the corn, and the potatoes are much cut off by the drought and frost,” reported the Dartmouth Gazette. “Frost killed almost all the corn in New England and not half of it fit to roast,” wrote Enoch Little of Boscawen, New Hampshire. “On frosty ground the orchards were barren, but on warm land there was a moderate crop of apples … The prospects as to fodder are most alarming.” In Montreal and Quebec, where stocks of grain were dwindling, the weather remained cold and very dry: “The ice on the ponds in this vicinity was sufficiently strong … to bear a man.”

  And the drought continued. “The oldest inhabitants say, that such a drowth [sic] has never been experienced here since their remembrance,” wrote William Young, a teacher in Plattsburgh, New York. “The ground has not been wetted two inches deep since the month of June.” The creeks were dry, wells failed, and there was no grass for cattle. Williamstown received only 1.1 inches of rain in September, less than a third of its normal precipitation. Every week, the water level in New England’s rivers and Lake Champlain sank lower.

  Forest fires raged out of control. Many had been set deliberately. Farmers in new settlements customarily burned woods and brush in the fall, relying upon the usual autumn rains to keep the flames under control. But the drought left the woods too dry, and the rains did not arrive to put out the flames. “The woods are every where on fire,” noted Young, “and the smoke is so thick, that whilst I now write at 5 in the afternoon, though there are no clouds, the sun is not to be seen.” At Williams College, Professor Dewey reported thick smoke in the atmosphere from September 24 through the 30. On some Vermont highways, travelers could see no more than ten yards in front of them. Turnpike fences burned to charcoal. Smoke carried to the coast and beyond, impairing the visibility of ships at sea. Outside of Boston, winds blew cinders onto vessels a considerable distance from shore, and the thick smoke reportedly caused several shipwrecks.

  In early October in New Hampshire, woods were burning in Alton, Gilmantown, Gildford, Farmington, Rochester, Plymouth, Barnstead, Rumney, Warren, and Wentworth. The flames burned houses, barns, and cattle. They consumed wood that farmers could have used as fuel in the winter, and endangered those foolish enough to travel through the region. “We have seen a gentleman who travelled the day before yesterday, in the vicinity of one of the fires in New Hampshire,” noted a Boston newspaper, “and who for several hours was near being suffocated with the smoke.” More fires burned in Maine: at Paris, Bethel, Hebron, and Albany, in Oxford County and Kennebec County, and from the Kennebec River to the New Hampshire border. Ferries on the Kennebec River needed compasses to find their way through the dense smoke. In some areas, desperate residents dug broad trenches in the earth to try to control the spread of flames.

  Observers worried that the fires and smoke would aggravate the dryness of the air, and send temperatures dropping even lower. “I fear that the smoke which they produce, accumulating in the atmosphere, must intercept the rays of the sun,” wrote William Young, “and deprive us of some of that genial heat of which the earth seems every where so much in want.” (Smoke, like volcanic ash, does indeed reflect sunlight. Lacking a volcano’s explosive power, however, the fires could send smoke only into the troposphere, where it would be removed by rain within weeks. Fires will only intensify drought if the burnt area is large enough to start the cycle of drier soils, reduced evaporation, and less rainfall.) In Britain, the Gentleman’s Magazine attempted to explain the magnitude of the conflagrations in the North American forests to its readers: “Europeans can have little idea of extensive districts being on fire, carrying destruction for 20 and 30 miles.”

  From Windsor, Vermont, the editor of the Vermont Journal proclaimed the summer an unmitigated disaster. “Never before in this vicinity [had the weather] appeared more gloomy and cheerless than at present,” he wrote. “It is extremely cold for the time of year, and the drougth [sic] was never before so severe. We have had several frosts in this county, and we believe in every county in the state, in every month during the last fourteen ones.”

  Contemporary records support the anecdotal evidence about the frigidity of the summer. Based on the most accurate measurements available, temperatures in New England generally ranged between two to seven degrees Fahrenheit below normal from May through September. More to the point, the sharpest declines from the norm occurred during the critical growing months of June and July.

  With its stocks of grain already depleted by the two preceding poor harvests, Quebec faced the most immediate crisis. S
eptember’s killing frost left the province with a minimal wheat harvest and an even smaller supply of oats. “Many parishes in Quebec must inevitably be in a state of famine before winter sets in,” predicted one report. Several inches of snow fell on Quebec City on October 5–6; Kamouraska, to the north, received nearly a foot of snow, accompanied by temperatures cold enough to freeze the water on roadways hard enough to bear the weight of a horse. It seemed a fitting conclusion to the worst summer in memory. “A fall of snow on the 8th of June, and another on the 6th of October,” declared a correspondent to the Daily National Intelligencer, “are incidents probably without example since the recollection of the oldest inhabitant of the Province.”

  Maine’s corn harvest was virtually nonexistent. For the state’s subsistence farmers, the dearth of corn was a disaster, both for their families and the livestock that depended on it for fodder; as one historian of Maine put it, “self-sufficiency and survival was a delicate balance between people & the plants and animals they raised.” With no new stores from the 1816 harvest, farmers faced painful decisions on whether to consume their remaining reserves of corn, or save it as seed for next year’s crop. Some towns were fortunate enough to have a few farmers who managed to harvest a small amount and shared it with (or sold it to) their neighbors. Others traveled to the nearest port to purchase a limited quantity—the price already had risen from the usual eighty or ninety cents per bushel to nearly $1.50 by the beginning of October. In Waterford, where seed corn had been scarce since the 1814 harvest and “people were in great straits for food,” one farmer went to Portland and bought a bushel of corn, bringing it back on horseback. But with many roads little more than rutted trails, isolated inland towns remained very much on their own.

  Vermont fared only slightly better. Much of the state’s farmland was on hillsides and rocky fields that barely provided sufficient returns in good years; hence even a minor shift in climate could have catastrophic effects. Between the late September frosts and the prolonged drought, every crop except wheat was a resounding failure in 1816. As in Maine, the shortage of corn portended calamity in the coming months. “It is not probable that enough will get ripe for seed for next year,” wrote the editor of the Journal. “There is not sufficient hay to winter the cattle upon, and nothing with which to fatten them this fall.” In some Vermont towns, including Newbury and Peacham, desperate farmers bid the price of corn up to two or three dollars a bushel in October. Even the moderate wheat harvest proved of dubious value, since the drought dried up the rivers that powered the state’s flour mills. “In short,” the Journal concluded, “we are something like the soldier, who had no allowance, and no kettle to cook it in.”

  New Hampshire shared Vermont’s plight. “Indian corn on which a large proportion of the poor depend is cut off,” remarked the New Hampshire Patriot on October 22. “It is believed that through New England scarcely a tenth part of the usual crop of sound corn will be gathered.” To the south, Connecticut officials estimated that farmers in their state harvested only about 25 percent of the corn they had sown, and half of their hay crop. To help alleviate the shortage, two enterprising merchants from Hartford imported thirteen hundred bushels of corn “of excellent quality” from Santo Domingo at a bargain price of seventy-five cents per bushel.

  In New York, a Columbia College professor of natural history declared that “there will not be half a crop of maize on Long Island, and in the southern district of this state. Further northward there will be less. The buckwheat is so scanty, that a few days ago I paid four dollars for a half bushel of the meal, for the use of my family.” Most of the fruit in that region, however, appeared to have prospered (except for peaches) from the cooler weather, and in New York City, the frigid summer blessed residents with fewer mosquitoes and fleas than usual. Local populations of wild birds, unfortunately, also had declined.

  As the magnitude of the harvest failure became clear, American newspapers called for farmers and merchants to display their patriotism—and make a tidy profit—by refraining from exporting any of their crops to Europe. “It would be well, in order to prevent distress here,” declared the National Register, “to suggest to the farmers and planters the propriety of retaining their grain for the consumption of their own countrymen, from whom it is probable they will be able to get as good a price as they can any where else, and at the same time, do a service to their country.” Perhaps, but American merchants already were busy selling flour to the French West Indies. By September, the failure of the harvest in France persuaded the French government—which had long reserved the grain market in its Caribbean colonies for its own exports—that it could not hope to supply the needs of Martinique or Guadeloupe, and so it opened up the trade to American shippers.

  Governor Jonas Galusha of Vermont tried a more direct approach. When the state legislature convened in Montpelier on October 10, Galusha proposed a statewide campaign to encourage conservation of the existing stores of grain. “The uncommon failure of some of the most important articles of produce, on which the sustenance of man and beast depends, is so alarming,” Galusha told the legislators, “that I take the liberty to recommend to you, and through you, to the people of this State, the most rigid economy in the early expenditure of those articles of provision most deficient, that by peculiar precaution we may avoid, as far as possible, the foreboded evil of this unparalleled season [i.e., famine].” Governor William Jones of Rhode Island preferred to rely on appeals for divine intervention. Citing the “coldness and dryness of the seasons, and … the alarming sickness with which many parts of our country have been afflicted,” Jones proclaimed “a day of public Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving” throughout the state.

  Like most of the state governors in 1816, New Jersey governor Mahlon Dickerson was a devout Jeffersonian who opposed direct government aid to individuals, and so he refused to recommend specific remedies to help his state’s farmers. Nevertheless, the recently reelected Dickerson did express his pious hope that the scarcity of crops would discourage local distillers from producing their usual “poison” from corn or grain that was “intended by the bounty of Heaven to man for his nourishment.” Dickerson was not the only proponent of temperance to use the shortage of grain to advance the cause. In October, a group of reform-minded citizens in Otsego County, New York, urged the state legislature to “cause such restrictions to be laid on the distilleries—as in their wisdom shall be calculated to prevent an undue monopoly of that valuable and necessary commodity.” At a time when the United States supported 15,000 distilleries, and the average American consumed the equivalent of 4.5 gallons of pure grain alcohol per year, even a slight decline in the production of liquor could have paid significant dividends.

  As grain prices rose, beef and pork prices dropped. During the summer, when beef prices typically spiked, farmers who foresaw shortages of fodder sent their livestock to market months ahead of their customary schedule. That pace quickened as the magnitude of the harvest disaster became clear, and more farmers realized they would never be able to feed their cattle through the winter. By October, the unusually plentiful supply sent the price of beef sharply lower, followed by a similar decline in pork prices.

  Some farmers did not stop with selling their livestock; they sold their entire farm and headed west. Pressures for emigration from New England had been building: a growing population in a region where all the fertile land already was under cultivation, and where generations of wasteful agricultural practices had stripped away or exhausted even the best soil; the loss of the timber trade as forests dwindled; vanishing wildlife, fish, and game that had carried farmers through the previous years of bad harvests; a series of epidemics that swept through New England in 1813 and 1814; the deleterious economic effects of the recent war and trade embargo; the lure of western territories with far more productive soil (and far fewer rocks); and several years of cooler weather and poor harvests leading up to 1816.

  They called it “Ohio fever,” and the unparalleled co
ldness of the summer of 1816 followed by the calamitous harvest convinced many New Englanders that nature was sending them an indisputable message. “Something, it seemed, had gone permanently wrong with the weather,” concluded Lewis Stilwell, “and when this cold season piled itself on top of all the preceding afflictions, a good many … were ready to quit.” Generous terms for the sale of public land, cheap and easy credit from banks in the Western states, and the removal of Native American tribes from the Ohio Valley following the War of 1812 made the decision easier. Promoters and land agents set up offices in towns such as Portsmouth, Maine, and Cornish, New Hampshire, selling orders for land in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and even western Pennsylvania. They promised luxuriant lands with rich loam soil and a “mild and salubrious” climate, “an earthly Paradise, where every thing which is considered a luxury, might be had almost without care, labour or exertion,” and boundless opportunities: Indiana had recently applied for statehood, but two-thirds of its land still lacked white settlers, as did nearly half of Ohio, and three-quarters of the Illinois territory.

  Loading all their possessions—a bed, a few quilts, some dishes, the family Bible, kettles and pots, a churn, a blanket chest—into a covered wagon (or an oxcart for the less prosperous), hundreds and then thousands of New England farm families set out for the Western lands. Given the perilous state of American roads, the journey west required stamina and patience. (Rumor had it that roads were so rough that a pail of cream would churn into butter on the way west.) Some pilgrims traveled through the Mohawk Valley, then headed west to Buffalo; from there they could take a boat to Ohio or hug the eastern shore of Lake Erie into northern Ohio. Others chose to cross Pennsylvania, climbing the Alleghenies before descending into Pittsburgh and crossing the river into Ohio. Observers described the roads over the mountains as “rude, steep, and dangerous”; one physician who made the trip recalled that “some of the more precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with the carcases [sic] of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which had made shipwreck in their perilous descent. The scenes on the road—of families gathered at night in miserable sheds, called taverns—mothers frying, children crying, fathers swearing—were a mingled comedy and tragedy of errors.”