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

by William K. Klingaman

  In an editorial on November 7, The Times of London explained this mind-set in detail. “In this country,” The Times argued, “it generally happens that public difficulty and distress are relieved by the good sense of the nation itself; for the Government on such occasions is rather accustomed to follow, than to take the lead.” Therefore “reliance must be placed on private liberality and wisdom to alleviate particular instances of hardship.” But while the propertied classes had a duty to preserve peace and alleviate the misery of the poor, the means of providing assistance mattered greatly. There would be no relief without work. “The best way to assist the poor,” The Times subsequently pointed out, “would be to maintain, together with their independent spirit, their industrious habits.” There should be “an economy of relief” that provided the poor “with the means of labour, and they will then feel that they are assisting themselves.” On another occasion, The Times charged, rather gratuitously, that workers who presently found themselves in desperate straits should have put more of their income into savings banks when they were employed, instead of spending it on “the gin-shop, the pawnbroker, and the lottery-offices.”

  Typically, communities took up a subscription among the middle and upper classes, and used the proceeds to fund various projects to benefit the community. In the northeastern port town of Scarborough, for instance, 150 local men were put to work in November clearing away a large quantity of accumulated rubbish from the harbor. The city of Salisbury raised enough money to pay 140 people to dig and screen gravel, and then to carry it to streets in need of repair. In Hampstead, a number of “labouring poor” found work “altering and improving the highways and footpaths of the parish, and in other works of general utility.” The authorities at Frome, in Somerset, employed men to quarry stones and transport them to a depot; depending on how many loads they carried, the men earned from eight to ten shillings per week. A town meeting in Helston, Cornwall, elected to pay members of “the industrious poor” to enclose the Commons adjoining the town.

  Seventy miles to the east, naval officials loaned shovels and wheelbarrows to Plymouth authorities so they could pay men to repair local roads. (The men were paid on a sliding scale—married men with families received the top pay of seven shillings and tuppence a week; “superannuated men”—i.e., the elderly—got only five shillings.) For counties in the London area, The Times suggested picking oakum (the laborious process of untwisting hemp rope) or making doormats. The most ambitious plan from the provinces came from Liverpool, where a meeting of “clergy, gentlemen, merchants” and other respectable citizens agreed to launch a fund-raising drive to employ up to 3,000 people during the winter on a project to expand and improve the docks.

  Other communities, such as York, Newcastle, and Leeds, opened soup kitchens supported by private contributions. Rarely did they dispense any meals for free, except in extreme circumstances; most of these kitchens, such as the one in Limehouse, required the poor to pay a small fee for food—flour, potatoes, and beef—and for coals for fuel. Even so, the rapidly growing ranks of the needy threatened to overwhelm the limited charitable resources. A survey of Shropshire in early October revealed that one parish had “650 men, women, and children, totally destitute,” while another neighborhood counted between 2,000 and 3,000 laborers either out of work or only partially employed. Shropshire itself totaled an estimated 12,000 people whom a local official described as “in a state of utmost privation.”

  Despite the reports of mediocre harvests, Liverpool’s government convinced itself the country could survive the winter without a serious threat of famine, and that conviction never wavered. In a letter to Peel on October 18, Lord Liverpool predicted that Britain would have an adequate supply of grain; two months later, Castlereagh assured John Quincy Adams that even though the harvest “had been partially bad, there would turn out to be enough for the consumption of the people.”

  But reports of real and anticipated shortages drove grain prices higher in a very short time. In January 1816, wheat had sold for 52 shillings a quarter; by November, the price had nearly doubled, to 98s./9p. A few merchants initially supplemented domestic supplies with quantities of foreign grain illegally, in contravention of the Corn Laws. In October, smugglers along the Brittany coast sent shipments of French wheat clandestinely across the Channel, engaging in a brief skirmish with customs officials outside of Boulogne. In early November, however, the British government’s complex calculations determined that wheat prices had reached the tipping point specified by the Corn Laws, and so it opened British ports to foreign grain.

  Yet to only limited effect.

  Britain’s usual sources of supply on the Continent possessed little or no grain to sell except at exorbitant prices. Following the arrival of a few cargoes from the Netherlands—including grain that had been sent to England at considerably lower prices in 1815, only to be turned away when the Corn Laws went into effect—the Dutch government prohibited further shipments. British merchants who attempted to purchase wheat in Hamburg discovered that demand from other parts of Europe already had driven prices higher than their customers were willing to pay.

  So the price of bread continued to rise in Britain, as did the price of milk—a direct result of the scarcity of fodder. A meeting of milkmen in Norwich declared that “through the Providence of God, the crops of corn and grain are almost all destroyed,” hence it would cost them more to feed their cows. Accordingly, they raised their prices by 25 percent, from eight pence to ten pence a quart.

  Liverpool fully expected the rising price of necessities—accompanied by higher unemployment and stagnant trade—to generate increased disorder in the coming months. He warned Sidmouth on October 21 that Britain faced “a Stormy Winter” stemming in large measure from the unusually cold and sodden summer: “The evil of a high Price of Bread coming upon us before we have got rid of our Commercial & Agricultural Distresses.” Indeed the storm already had begun to break.

  When the price of a quartern loaf (weighing about four pounds) of bread reached 1s. 2d. at the Surrey town of Guildford in the second week of October, an angry crowd of several hundred people gathered at the house of a baker whom they felt was charging excessive prices. Initially they expressed their outrage by banging on tin kettles and blowing horns; emboldened by reinforcements, the demonstrators soon graduated to violence, demolishing much of the building before the local authorities arrived and read the Riot Act. Two days later, the mayor warned the local bakers to keep price increases to a minimum.

  Two weeks later, a mob assaulted farmers at a market at Sunderland in northern England and grabbed all the grain they could carry, dividing the spoil among themselves. At Walsall, eight miles outside of Birmingham, rioters broke the windows of several bakers, then marched to a grain mill about a mile outside of town and demolished it, too. The panic-stricken magistrates summoned detachments of cavalry from Wolverhampton and Handsworth, but by the time they arrived, most of the rioters had fled with their plunder.

  Birmingham itself enjoyed a long tradition of amicable relations between employers and laborers, but at the end of October a crowd attacked the house and shop of a printer who had published a circular advising the poor to “quietly and peaceably wait till Providence shall please to restore to you prosperity,” adding that the penalty for violent riot would be death or exile. After demolishing the printer’s house, the mob turned on the police and the local prison keeper; only the arrival of cavalry and the usual reading of the Riot Act quelled the disturbance around midnight, but not until several rioters were ridden down by horses, and one of them killed.

  South Wales witnessed worse disorders. In Glamorgan, ironworkers struck on October 18 when their employers—facing a loss of government orders in peacetime—cut their wages to one shilling per day. Supported by local miners, the ironworkers forced the closure of furnaces in Merthyr Tydfil, the center of the Welsh iron industry. Claiming that the miners had assumed “a most alarming appearance,” the high sheriff asked for
troops from Swansea. Meanwhile, the strike spread to Monmouthshire and Newport. “I must also say that the discontented are in great force,” reported one eyewitness, “and determined to oppose every thing sent against them.” Several detachments of cavalry, including some troops who had fought at Waterloo a year earlier, eventually restored order. Thirty strikers were arrested and sent to Cardiff for trial. “I am much afraid,” a bystander predicted, “distress will be severely felt this winter.”

  Spontaneous local disorders stemming from low wages and the high price of bread did not frighten Lord Liverpool and his cabinet unduly. What terrified them more than anything was the threat of mass action orchestrated by radical reformers whom the government believed were actually revolutionaries in disguise. With the French Terror less than twenty years behind them, Liverpool’s ministry equated popular meetings with mob rule; hence their apprehension when approximately 8,000 people gathered at Spa Fields, just north of London, on Friday, November 15, to hear Henry Hunt urge them to petition the Prince Regent for relief from their distress.

  The arrival of sharply colder weather deepened the misery of the poor. On the morning of November 8, residents of London arose to a severe frost, with temperatures falling to 27 degrees. In York, the mercury slid all the way to 21 degrees, “a circumstance not remembered by the oldest inhabitant at this early period of the winter.” That evening the barometer dropped dramatically. On the morning of November 10, a powerful storm brought snow and sleet to the capital, followed by subfreezing temperatures that lasted until late the following day. This time, no one could blame sunspots for the frigid weather; as news reports pointed out, the spots had disappeared altogether from the face of the sun.

  But Liverpool’s stormy winter was already under way. As Hunt spoke to the massive crowd from the open window of a tavern at the edge of Spa Fields, he focused on the evils of corrupt government that burdened the people with a heavy load of taxes: “Everything that concerned their subsistence or comfort was taxed. Was not their loaf taxed, was not beer taxed, were not their coats taxed, were not their shirts taxed, was not everything that they ate, drank, wore, and even said taxed?” All of this was quite unexceptionable, but the government doubtless noticed that Hunt was accompanied by two men, one carrying a tricolor flag of green, white, and red (“the colours of the future British Republic,” someone said recklessly) and the other a pike tipped with a cap of liberty. Nor did Liverpool and his colleagues welcome a reference to the nearby Coldbath Fields Prison as “the British Bastille, where so much tyranny had formerly been exercised.” The meeting ended peaceably, but later that evening a mob looted several bakers’ and butchers’ shops in the area.

  Instead of summoning Parliament at the end of the year, as previously planned, Liverpool decided to wait until February. By that time, he felt sure, the radicals would have thrown off their disguise, and the nation could see them for the insurrectionaries they really were.

  * * *

  ON November 23, King George became the longest-reigning English monarch since the Norman Conquest: fifty-six years and twenty-nine days, surpassing the previous record-holder, Henry III. (Elizabeth I was in fourth place, just behind Edward III.) The occasion warranted few festivities; a month earlier, the royal family had celebrated the anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne with a private dinner party. King George himself remained in seclusion. His physicians continued to issue reports on the state of his health; on November 2, for instance, they declared that “His Majesty was rather less composed than usual during the former part of the last month, but His Majesty has since resumed his tranquility, and is in good bodily health.”

  * * *

  AT two o’clock on the afternoon of November 4, King Louis entered the Chamber of Deputies to the accompaniment of artillery salvos outside the assembly. A larger crowd than usual had gathered to hear the monarch open the new session of the legislature: Besides the diplomatic corps from other European nations, and the Peers of France (cloaked in their grand robes of state, bordered with ermine), there were numerous French and foreign dignitaries among the galleries, and two hundred ladies watching from the upper benches usually reserved for deputies.

  “Tranquility reigns throughout the kingdom,” Louis began, curtly dismissing a recently quashed insurrection in Lyon as “a senseless enterprise” that only proved the loyalty of the army to his throne. France was at peace with all its neighbors; his government had made its reparations payments on time; and it continued to meet its treaty obligations. Only one unfortunate development cast a cloud over France’s tranquility. “The intemperance of the season has delayed the harvest,” the king acknowledged. “My people suffer, and I suffer more than they do,” he continued, with more ceremony than irony, “but I have the consolation of being able to inform you, that the evil is but temporary, and that the produce will be sufficient for the consumption.” Perhaps, but Louis admitted that the dismal harvest would require the government to make substantial additional expenditures to assist the nation’s poor. The king promised that the royal family would “make the same sacrifices this year as the last; and for the rest, I rely upon your attachment, and your zeal for the good of the State, and the honour of the French name.”

  Four days later, an angry crowd gathered at a marketplace in the southern French city of Toulouse to protest the high price of bread, and to prevent shipments of grain from leaving their region. The farms in the countryside around Toulouse, in the department of Haute-Garonne, had enjoyed a reasonably normal harvest, but the extremely heavy demand in areas such as Provence and Bas-Languedoc, which had suffered far worse from the cold and rain, enticed local merchants to ship their grains to the neediest regions to obtain the highest price. Even in Toulouse, the price of grain had risen to thirty-two francs per hectolitre (100 litres), an increase of approximately 33 percent over the past twelve months. Fearing that grain shipments out of Haute-Garonne would create shortages in their own region over the winter and drive up the price of bread even further, the protestors on November 8 demanded that the grain remain in the city and that local authorities lower the cost to a “just” price of twenty-four francs per hectolitre.

  Police attempted to disperse the crowd, but the mob roughed them up. The arrival of the mayor, accompanied by a detachment of soldiers, finally broke up the protest as authorities arrested nearly a dozen demonstrators. But three days later the mob reassembled and repeated its demand for bread at twenty-four francs. This time it took a company of mounted troops to dislodge the protestors, who headed towards the town’s granaries before the cavalry headed them off. The crowd responded by seizing three wagons loaded with grain and barricading themselves in the Faubourg Saint-Cyprien, relenting only when local officials summoned additional troops and a unit of the national guard from outside the city.

  A similar incident occurred at the same time in the Vendée, on the west coast of France, where armed peasants stopped the shipment of wheat bound for Bayonne, and then stole what grain they could carry away. Peasants and townspeople in so many other departments followed suit, with merchants and soldiers battling mobs of men and women armed with pitchforks and sticks—sometimes aided by local authorities who wished to avoid shortages in their jurisdictions—that the minister of the interior issued instructions in mid-November to the nation’s prefects “strictly prohibiting all such obstructions or restrictions, as preventing the abundance of one district from supplying the deficiencies of another.” At the same time, the central government provided assurances that it would not allow French grain to be exported outside the nation’s boundaries. Meanwhile, officials in Paris wondered if Ultra-Royalists, bitter over their losses in the recent elections, were encouraging the popular discontent to embarrass the government.

  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 p
ass 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.”

  * * *

  AT 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.”