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

by William K. Klingaman

  Other writers provided evidence to support this theory of an increasingly icebound hemisphere. One pointed out that in Norway, popular opinion held that “for fifty years past, the summers have been colder than they were before in that country.” A French author cited the Scottish traveler Sir George Mackenzie’s observation that the sea of ice between Iceland and Europe “has extended its empire over the vast space of sea between that island and the continent.” Others pointed to the wrecks of two merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1803, lost when they reportedly collided with icebergs in the 40th degree of latitude—on the same line as Naples and Constantinople.

  A more fanciful explanation for the frigid summer came from a resident of Albany, New York, who noticed a correlation between the advent of colder weather in the Northern United States and the Madison administration’s failed attempt to invade Canada during the early stages of the recent war against Britain. “It seems very strange to me,” he informed the editor of the Columbian, “that ever since our late ‘just and necessary war,’ these Canadian winds have all blown so cold upon us! Others have noticed this as well as myself and say, that our N. winds have, of late, been much colder than formerly. At this rate,” he concluded, “it is very clear that Canada must be ours, or we must all migrate to the southward in a very few years.”

  Americans who still believed in malevolent magic ascribed the frigid summer to the machinations of witches, who were supposed to wield considerable power over the weather. More common were those who viewed the cold and drought as a warning from heaven: “That God has expressed His displeasure towards the inhabitants of the earth by withholding the ordinary rains and sunshine cannot be reasonably doubted,” proclaimed one magazine editor.

  Convictions of individual and collective sinfulness fueled the revival movement that was already well under way in New England, New York, and along the frontier. In late 1816, revivalism swept Vermont “from town to town in a manner very similar to an epidemic of disease,” wrote Lewis Stillwell. “As many as fifty persons succumbed to these onslaughts of emotionalism in a single town in a single day, and the total harvest of the churches ran into the thousands.” Over the next several years, the revival movement produced numerous agencies dedicated to disseminating the gospel and setting sinners on the road to salvation: the Vermont Religious Tract Society, the Vermont Juvenile Missionary Society, the first New England convention of the Sunday School movement, the Vermont Colonization Society, and the northwestern branch of the American Society for Educating Pious Youth for the Gospel Ministry.

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  IN the last week of January 1817, temperatures in the Northern United States suddenly plunged. Bitter cold gripped the region for the next month. On February 14, Dartmouth College recorded a low of 30 degrees below zero. “Fair, the coldest day has been for 40 years,” claimed one New Hampshire farmer. At Alexandria, Virginia, the ice on the Potomac River reportedly was twenty-five inches thick. At Cincinnati, the Ohio River froze—“a circumstance rarely, if ever, known before.”

  Four days later, a storm brought both snow and rising temperatures that nearly reached the freezing point, but when the town of Salem, Massachusetts, attempted to put hundreds of men to work breaking up the ice that filled its harbor, they met with little success. On February 24, a minister in Salem noted in his diary that “the Barometer [was] as low as I ever observed it. I could make no fire in my study after repeated attempts so furiously was the smoak [sic] forced back into the chimney.”

  As the cold lingered into springtime and food remained scarce, prices continued to climb. In Maine, the price of oats tripled and the cost of potatoes doubled; in parts of New Hampshire, hay rose to $180 a ton, six times its normal price. Farmers whose corn crops had been devastated by the August frosts desperately sought seed for the new season. Occasionally neighbors would share supplies they had preserved from the 1815 harvest. Others sold their stocks at inflated prices; Samuel Goodrich recalled one New Hampshire farmer who walked forty miles for a half bushel of corn, paying two dollars when he finally found some. In Portland, Maine, residents at a town meeting authorized “the Overseers of the Poor to furnish seed of various descriptions to those individuals who are unable to procure the same from his own resources—the advances to be paid for either in labor on the highway, or in kind at the harvesting of crops.”

  Still the weather remained cold. On May 15, some towns in Vermont had five inches of snow on the ground. A report in the Hallowell (Maine) American Advocate confirmed that hundreds of families in the area were in severe distress. “Many charge it to the late cold seasons,” the newspaper noted, “and are ready to sell their property for half what it cost, and migrate south.” New Englanders who had stubbornly refused to give up finally surrendered to the elements and their fears. “New England seemed to many to be worn out and done for,” wrote one historian of the exodus, “and the glacial age was returning to claim it again.”

  “We have had a great deal of moving this spring,” reported Reverend Samuel Robbins from East Windsor, Connecticut. “Our number rather diminishes.” June brought light snow and more frosts. By early summer, the river of emigrants swelled to a flood. “At last a kind of despair seized upon some of the people,” wrote Samuel Goodrich, following a visit to New Hampshire. “In the pressure of adversity, many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become part of the frigid zone.”

  “Hardly a family seemed untouched by it,” recounted historian Harlan Hatcher. “Younger sons determined to go west, daughters boldly marrying and setting out for the new land, neighbors loading their goods and youngest children into carts and wagons, fathers going along to prepare a place for their families—it was one of the largest and most homogeneous mass migrations in American history.”

  As the emigrants passed through western New York State, a correspondent for Niles’ Weekly Register counted 260 wagons heading westward through the Genesee Valley in the space of nine days, plus scores of travelers on horseback or on foot. The editor of a local New York newspaper claimed that “he himself met on the road to Hamilton a cavalcade of upwards of twenty waggons, containing one company of one hundred and sixteen persons, on their way to Indiana, and all from one town in the district of Maine.” In the town of Hamilton, New York, one writer estimated that “there are now in this village and its vicinity, three hundred families, besides single travellers, amounting in all to fifteen hundred souls, waiting for a rise of water to embark for ‘the promised land.’” From St. Clairsville, Ohio—along the National Road—came word that “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward.… Fourteen waggons yesterday, and thirteen today, have gone through this town. Myriads take their course down the Ohio. The waggons swarm with children.”

  One of the more conspicuous groups of emigrants was known as the Pilgrims, a band of religious zealots who left southern Canada in the spring of 1817 and came to rest at South Woodstock, Vermont, several months later. Numbering only about eight members when they arrived in Woodstock, the Pilgrims managed to attract thirty new adherents by the time they departed in late summer. They were led by Isaac Bullard, a red-bearded “prophet” known as “Elijah” to his followers and “Old Isaac” to others, who claimed to have received a revelation from God upon recovering from a lengthy illness. Bullard promised to lead his flock—who styled themselves after the lost tribe of Judah—to a Promised Land somewhere in the Western territories, where they would plant a new church of the Redeemer. Upon leaving Woodstock, the Pilgrims divided into two groups, one of which journeyed south through the Hudson River Valley and New Jersey before turning west, and the other walking westward across New York State and then south along the Ohio River. Along the way, they practiced a type of Christian communitarianism, under which they abjured material possessions and pooled all their resources—about $10,000—under Bullard’s control. They also reportedly practiced free love, held frequent conversations with invisib
le spirits, and adamantly refused to bathe. Having discovered no Biblical admonition to wash oneself, Bullard decided that bathing was a sin, and boasted that he had not changed his clothes in seven years. His followers, garbed in bearskins and long knit caps, followed suit. They continued to enlist new converts along the route, and by the time they arrived at a spot subsequently named Pilgrim Island, about thirty miles south of New Madrid, Missouri, the sect numbered several hundred members. Shortly after their arrival, however, fevers killed dozens of the zealots, and Bullard’s autocratic rule alienated so many others that the enterprise soon collapsed altogether.

  More typical was the experience of Gershom Flagg, a young unmarried farmer who left his home in Richmond, Vermont, in the fall of 1816, spent the winter in Springfield, Ohio, and then moved on to the town of Harmony, alongside the National Road. Although the journey took him longer than expected (“we found some of the worst hills to travel up and down that I have ever seen where there was a Road”), and the price of supplies inflated in Ohio (“there are many things which are worth but little in Vermont that cost considerable here”), Flagg informed his brother back home that “I find the Country as fertile as I expected. Corn grows with once hoeing and some time with out hoeing at all to 14 feet high and is well filled.… Hogs & Cattle run in the woods in summers and in the winter are fed on Corn & prairie hay. In this vicinity are some as handsome Cattle as ever I have seen.… I am fully of the opinion that a man may live by farming with much less labour here than in the Eastern States.” Moreover, “the weather is warm and pleasant now,” Flagg reported in January. “We have had no snow.”

  Aided by similar testimonials from hundreds of other settlers, Ohio’s population jumped from 230,760 in 1810 to slightly more than 400,000 in 1817. The increase in Indiana was even more spectacular, rising from 24,500 in 1810 to nearly 100,000 seven years later; in the year 1816 alone, Indiana gained 42,000 new settlers. And in the territory of Illinois, the population rose 160 percent between 1815 and 1818.

  While no precise numbers exist for the number of emigrants from any particular location, the best estimates for Maine alone put the loss of residents between ten to fifteen thousand from 1810 to 1820, with most departing in 1816–20. Numerous towns in Maine—including Freeport, Eliot, Kittery, and Durham—suffered substantial declines in population, leading local officials to fear that the “ruinous emigration of their young men” might leave towns wholly unpopulated. In Vermont, more than sixty townships lost population from 1810–20, and another fifty or sixty barely managed to break even. (The state’s population grew by only 8 percent between 1810 and 1820, compared to a 32 percent increase for the nation as a whole.) Hardest hit were the towns of northern Vermont. Worcester, just north of Montpelier, was reduced to one family; Granby, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, lost its legal existence altogether.

  Newspaper editors attempted to stem the tide by vigorously promoting the alleged advantages of New England over Ohio or Indiana: easy coastal shipping to the markets of New York and Boston; better schools; greater proximity to Europe; a more industrious and more cultured population; and a healthier climate, with no “tropical” diseases such as malaria and other fevers that afflicted recent arrivals in the Western territories. The Massachusetts state legislature joined the campaign by approving an early version of a homestead act which opened up new townships in Maine (including some on land previously reserved for Native Americans) and promised settlers one hundred acres for a payment of only five dollars (public land in Ohio was selling for approximately two dollars per acre), provided they built a house and barn on the land within a year and cleared ten acres for farmland within ten years.

  Still the exodus continued, despite reports that the Western territories were considerably less hospitable than the advertisements claimed. Settlers discovered that they were going into “a great loneliness,” a thinly settled region where farms were so isolated they might not see another family for several months at a time; where primitive cabins lacked furnishings or even chimneys; where cash was scarce, markets undeveloped, and prices for agricultural goods lower than in New England. “The bad things,” recounted Gershom Flagg from Ohio, “are Want of Stone, Want of timber for building, Bad water, which will not Wash, overflowing of all the streams which makes it very bad building Bridges especially where the materials are scarce as they are here, Bad Roads, ignorant people … plenty of Ague near the large streams [and] Bad situation as to Trade.… Swarms of locusts have lately made their appearance.” Material comforts remained few and far between. Household goods brought into the territories eventually broke or gave out—“glasses, cups, and hollow ware disappeared, iron pots were borrowed and broken”—and families had little money to purchase replacements, and few shops at which to buy them.

  New Englanders also encountered recently arrived Southern farmers, particularly from Virginia and the eastern parts of North Carolina, defeated by their own poor harvests due to the cold summer and severe drought. The encounter produced something akin to culture shock for the Northerners. Their Southern brethren, observed one Vermonter, “are the most ignorant people I ever saw.… I have asked many people what township they lived in & they could not tell.”

  Some settlers gave up and headed back to New England, but most decided that the benefits of life in the West outweighed the costs. After all, few prosperous farmers forsook their homes; most of the emigrants left behind farms that were only marginally profitable even in the best of times. Once they arrived in the new territories, “they spotted the mill sites, the town sites, and the best stands of timber,” as one local historian pointed out, “and bought them up while they were still cheap.” They chose the best land and cleared it and found the soil far more fertile than any in New England, and when the next wave of settlers arrived, they sold them the goods they needed. And as the population of the territories rose, so did the value of their lands.

  But at last the price of grain stalled and then began to decline. After wheat reached a peak of $3.11 a bushel and corn nearly $1.75 a bushel in Eastern cities in May, the prospect of substantially improved harvests in the autumn of 1817 sent prices sharply lower.

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  ON January 28, 1817, a crowd of nearly 20,000 people gathered outside of Westminster Hall in London for the opening of Parliament. Many had come to support the presentation of petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures—estimates ranged between 600,000 and 1,000,000—in favor of parliamentary reform. Others had gathered to gawk at the dignitaries who attended the ceremonies; and some were there to vent their anger and frustration with the government’s failure to alleviate the growing distress among the poor throughout Britain.

  By the time the Prince Regent—who had recently hosted a lavish dinner party at which thirty-six entrées were served—emerged after delivering his opening address, the mood of the crowd had turned quite dark; Sir Robert Peel noted that it was “amazingly increased both in numbers and violence.” As the Prince Regent rode back to St. James’s Palace, one or more bystanders threw large stones at his carriage, breaking at least one window. Perhaps someone in the crowd fired a couple of shots from an airgun; the government subsequently claimed that the left side of his carriage had been pierced by two small bullets, although John Quincy Adams reported that “no report was heard, no bullets [were] found in the carriage, and the opposite window, though up, was not broken.” The Prince Regent was unharmed, but the incident persuaded Peel, among others, that “the general spirit of the country is worse, I apprehend, than we understood it to be.”

  Liverpool’s government responded by submitting to Parliament a series of draconian measures to quash the revolution it had been expecting for months. Lacking any reliable information beyond the reports provided by the government (aided by a small army of spies and informants paid by the Home Office), Parliament had little choice but to approve the legislation. After establishing secret committees to investigate the state of the country, Parliament passed in less than two w
eeks a measure effectively suspending habeas corpus, a “gagging act” that allowed magistrates to silence any speech or publication they deemed “seditious or inflammatory,” and a Seditious Meetings Act that required any assembly of fifty people or more to obtain prior permission from the government.

  The government employed these new weapons enthusiastically. On March 10, a mass meeting in Manchester to publicize the plight of unemployed textile workers and protest the suspension of habeas corpus was broken up by a detachment of dragoons, and the leaders of the protest arrested. When a group of weavers decided to march from Manchester to London anyway, carrying blankets to indicate their profession (and keep them warm), they were attacked by cavalry before they reached the city; several demonstrators were wounded, and one killed.

  Government informers also infiltrated a group of prospective revolutionaries centered in Pentrich, a village in Derbyshire, an area hard-pressed by the combination of rising food prices and growing unemployment in both the iron and hosiery industries. Throughout the spring of 1817, a veteran radical named Thomas Bacon and Jeremiah Brandreth, an unemployed rib-stockinger from Nottingham, worked to recruit impoverished workers for a march on London to overthrow the government. While an order for 3,000 pike handles went out to a carpenter in Lincolnshire, a shipment of daggers arrived in neighboring Leicestershire. As Bacon and his lieutenants pondered the feasibility of appropriating a huge cannon from a local ironworks to accompany the rebels on their march, a government spy named William Richard, aka William Oliver, aka “Oliver the Spy,” enthusiastically encouraged the plot. Oliver, as he was known to the conspirators, promised them that seventy-thousand sympathizers would join the marchers when they reached London.