The Year Without Summer (22 page)

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…”

I
N THE
A
UGUST
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.

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.