The Year Without Summer (34 page)

Those who stayed behind suffered through a season of hardship, but not famine. Grain
prices in the United States rose rapidly in the last months of the year, especially
as American merchants shipped increasing amounts of wheat to Europe. (The rising volume
of exports led several state legislatures to pass resolutions requesting a nationwide
embargo on shipments of grain to other countries. Congress demurred.) In New York
and Boston, the price of a bushel of wheat ranged between $1.50 to $2.00 from 1814
through the autumn of 1816; by late December 1816, it was nearing $2.75. In the summer
of 1816, corn had sold for $1.35 a bushel, but it approached $1.75 by the end of the
year.

Prices in inland towns were even higher, since the deplorable roads hindered the movement
of goods even in a mild winter. In some isolated Maine towns, corn reached $3 a bushel,
and flour $16 per barrel. A band of Seneca Indians living in western New York State
who typically harvested 7,000 bushels of corn a year and sold the surplus to importunate
whites, lost more than 90 percent of their crop and had to rely on assistance from
private charities and churches to survive the winter. The Massachusetts legislature
assumed responsibility for approximately 600 Native Americans residing in Maine, and
provided them with 300 bushels of corn.

Many farmers who had already sent their pigs to market lacked their usual supply of
pork over the winter. Starving wolves picked off enough of the remaining sheep and
chickens that several towns in Maine posted bounties of forty dollars for each dead
wolf, a princely sum when a day laborer made only about three hundred dollars a year.
Long accustomed to improvisation, New England farm families subsisted instead on the
tops of potato plants, wild pigeons, boiled leeks, and an occasional hedgehog. Oats,
a hardier grain which generally survived the frigid summer, replaced corn on dinner
tables. “Thousands of people subsisted on oatmeal who had never tasted it before,”
wrote one observer. “Then it was that people blessed the Scotch for having invented
oatmeal.” Vermonters used maple syrup products as currency—it had been a good year
for syrup—and traded them for fish caught along the Missisquoi River or shipped from
the Atlantic, consuming so much seafood that 1817 became known in some parts of New
England as the “mackerel year.”

11.

RELIEF

“This year, 1817, was on the whole a melancholy one…”

A
S 1816 DREW
to a close, American and European writers continued to search for an explanation
for the year’s extraordinary weather. One thesis, advanced in the
National Register
and the
Petersburg Intelligencer
, attributed the frigid summer to two causes: a long-term cooling of the internal
temperature of Earth, and a lack of circulation of the “electrical fluid” that was
believed to move between the surface of Earth and the atmosphere. According to this
theory, the internal heat of Earth—which the writer claimed had more influence upon
the temperature of the air than any other factor—had been declining for the past thousand
years. As evidence of a cooling trend, he cited the presence several centuries ago
of human settlements in regions of Greenland and Iceland that were presently uninhabitable;
alpine glaciers that were advancing across Switzerland and northern Italy; and significantly
colder weather in Rome (snowstorms) and Lombardy (frozen lakes) than in the days of
the Roman republic.

Nevertheless, the subnormal temperature of the summer of 1816 “appears to us to have
been caused more by the absence of the usual circulation of the electrical fluid,
than either a deficiency in the heat of the sun, or of that which we receive from
the internal heat of the earth.” According to this theory, “whenever the electrical
fluid circulates, heat is produced. [And] whenever there is an equilibrium of the
fluid for any length of time between the surface of the earth, and the atmosphere,
the temperature of the air is much lower than in its usual state.”

The electrical equilibrium allegedly existing in 1816 was attributed to a series of
earthquakes that had occurred at various points around the world over the past three
years—“more universal and terrible in their effects, than any which have been recorded
for several centuries.” Earthquakes, the theory maintained, were the result of a disequilibrium
of electrical fluid between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, and “have been always
preceded by a long tract of warm weather.” Acting as a sort of electrical shock, the
quakes restored the equilibrium and thereby ushered in a period of cold weather. The
general absence of lightning and thunderstorms during the summer of 1816 seemed further
proof of the insufficient circulation of electrical energy. “All nature seems to declare
that electricity, the great agent of heat, when in a state of motion, is equally diffused
at present through her system,” the writer concluded, “and that no part either possesses
a superfluity, or labours from a deficiency of this extraordinary & mysterious fluid.
The earthquakes of the last years have produced this remarkable equilibrium; and we
may calculate that several summers will yet pass away, before this equilibrium is
destroyed, and the usual quantuum [sic] of heat necessary for vegetation will again
be generated.”

Others agreed that the normal circulation of electrical energy had gone awry, but
blamed the disturbance on lightning rods instead of earthquakes. According to one
theory, lightning rods prevented Earth from releasing heat into the atmosphere, keeping
the air much cooler than normal. Or perhaps the rods actually absorbed heat from the
air when they attracted lightning, thereby depriving the atmosphere of warmth.

For their part, several British writers focused on the movement of glaciers and icebergs
to explain “the causes of this wet and cold season.” Writing in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, one amateur meteorologist suggested that “the removal of a considerable number of
icy mountains, by tempestuous winds, from the neighbourhood of the Arctic Pole into
more Southerly latitudes in the Atlantic might occasion it.” William Thomas Brande,
a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain and secretary to
the Royal Society of London, suggested that the culprit was the slow buildup of Arctic
ice over decades and centuries. For several hundred years, Brande argued, “the Climate
of England has undergone a very material change for the worse.” No one could doubt,
he wrote, that “the Springs are now later and the Summers shorter; and that those
seasons are colder and more humid than they were in the youthful days of many persons.”

In fact, Brande claimed, the mean annual temperature across much of the Northern Hemisphere
was declining, while the accumulation of ice and snow in the mountainous regions of
Europe continued to expand. The trend seemed even more pronounced in the northern
reaches of the hemisphere. As evidence, Brande cited the fate of eastern Greenland,
where Norwegian and Icelandic traders had established outposts in medieval times.
Since the fifteenth century, however, the east coast of Greenland, “which once was
perfectly accessible, has become blockaded by an immense collection of ice.” Brande
blamed the “deterioration” of Britain’s climate on this rapid buildup of ice—much
of which, he argued, recently had begun to drift southward in the form of immense
ice islands through the North Atlantic. The “extreme chilliness” of 1816, Brande concluded,
“may in great measure be referred to these visitors from the north.”

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.

*   *   *

I
N
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.”