Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (31 page)

Had the June frosts been a singular event, resilient farmers along the East Coast might have prevailed with their second or third crops, and 1816 not passed into legend as the disastrous Year without a Summer. Through an anxious June, northern farmers prayed for deliverance. “Great frost,” wrote Calvin Mansfield of Connecticut in his weather journal—“we must learn to be humble.” But a frigid weather system similar to the early June snowstorm returned again in the first week of July. In the wake of this second disaster, the
New Hampshire Patriot
reported “fears of a general famine.”
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Killing frosts returned again in late August, blasting farmers’ hopes a third time.

The year 1816 was not the coldest in the annals of the eastern United States in terms of average temperatures, but it is the only year to record frosts in each of the summer growing months, June, July, and August. Extreme dry conditions also prevailed. Newspapers reported the melancholy sight of “fields burned from drought.” This deadly combination of frost and drought ensured the summer of 1816’s notoriety as the shortest growing season in history—fewer than 70 days in New Haven, for example, as opposed to an average 126 days. Lack of hay meant feeding starving cattle with corn, reducing the overall supply. Adding to the misery, poor forest management since colonial times had resulted in dwindling reserves of first-growth timber throughout the Northeast and a shortage of firewood. Talk of an approaching famine intensified when a late September frost ended hopes of salvaging even a vestigial New England corn crop, while down south, planters in Georgia and South Carolina contemplated the loss of half their cotton harvest.
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For the retired third president of the United States, the disastrous summer of 1816 in the Atlantic states raised the specter of the drought of 1755, when scores of Virginians had died of outright starvation. In September, Jefferson reported to Albert Gallatin in Paris that “we have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America.”
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Sparked by acute drought conditions, forest fires raged up and down the Atlantic states. As a winter wheat farmer, Jefferson felt the impact of the cold, dry summer most acutely the following year. In August 1817 he reported that for a second successive season “a great part of my own crop has not yielded seed,” while his neighbors had taken to releasing their cattle onto the ruined wheat fields to make what they could of feeding on the stunted remains. Even three years later, the trend had not fully reversed. In 1820, Jefferson lamented to his steward that the successful planting of staple crops—wheat,
tobacco, oats, corn—“seems [to] become more and more difficult every year.”
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The cold summer of 1816, followed by the continuing poor harvest years of 1816–20, represented a personal crisis for Jefferson at many levels. In economic terms, he faced decisive ruin. His wheat crops withered in the frosts and drought, plunging him deeper into the longstanding debts from which he would never escape. At the moral and intellectual level, however, he faced perhaps an even greater crisis. If the weather in North America was actually getting
colder
as the years went by, and the climate less hospitable for agriculture, didn’t the entire Jeffersonian argument for an agrarian republic come crumbling to the ground, not to mention westward expansion? In an 1817 letter, he expressed open concern about the fate of his Monticello farm “if the seasons should, against the course of nature hitherto observed, continue constantly hostile to our agriculture.”
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Selling up Monticello would be more than a personal embarrassment or economic hardship; it would represent the collapse of his romantic, lifelong vision for agricultural America. Must he now, as an old man, acknowledge that the European climate pessimists had been right in the end? That the United States—despite the heroic efforts of its yeoman-citizens in clearing and plowing the land—must be classified among the irredeemable places of the Earth, in the words of celebrated French scientist the Comte de Buffon, “des terres ingrates, froides, et denuées”—an ungrateful land, cold and barren?
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COLD NEW WORLD …

In the opening of his landmark essay “Des époques de la nature” (1778), Buffon describes the creation of the world in the collision of a comet with the sun. From this fiery beginning, our immolated planet gradually cooled, and was cooling still. In fact, the gradual refrigeration of the earth would necessarily continue—an idea that returned to haunt the Shelleys as they toured the Alps in 1816—until the Earth was “colder than ice” and bereft of life.
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Until that long-distant date, however, the originary heat emanating from the Earth’s core provided the life-principle of the animate world by setting the temperature of its various regions. Climate, by Buffon’s formulation, equaled temperature. And temperature, in turn, determined the relative “energy” and fecundity of nature around the globe.

The great loser in this uneven thermal distribution, it turns out, was America. According to Buffon, “in such a situation is the continent of America placed, and so formed, that everything concurs to diminish the action of heat.” Buffon’s grand, multivolume
Histoire Naturelle
(1749–88) drew strong criticism from the French clergy for its scant references to
a divine plan in nature. In the fledgling republic of the United States, however, controversy raged over Buffon’s explicit anticolonial ecology, in particular the supposed “degeneration” of New World species under a relentlessly cold climate regime. From his study in the secluded village of Montbard—the headquarters of European natural science in the late eighteenth century—Buffon assessed the numbers, variety, and size of species collected from the distant Americas and concluded that in the New World “animated nature … is less active, less varied, and even less vigorous.” This affliction extended to the native human population, whose menfolk lacked virile strength and failed to assert themselves over the wilderness: “Nature has withheld from them the most precious spark of her torch.” Further proof of New World degeneration lay in the fact that animals transported from Europe to America failed to thrive there, becoming “shrivelled and diminished.”
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Buffon belonged to the first generation of European naturalists with access to substantial samples of global flora and fauna. For such ambitious men of science—eager to subsume nature’s bewildering variety within a single grand theory—climate supplied a most attractive explanatory power. For example, one needed only compare the mean temperatures of Quebec and Paris—located near the same line of latitude—to conclude that “in the new world there is much less heat and more moisture than in the old.” Temperature alone, Buffon argued, had made the Americas a “perfect desert,” where “the men are cold and the animals diminutive.”
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To promoters of the early republic, the most offensive implication of Buffon’s argument was that Anglo-Saxon settlers of North America were destined to “degenerate” in the supposed manner of the native flora and fauna. And all because of a bit of cold weather! This serious controversy also offered abundant material for humorists. In the opening pages of his
Sketch Book
(1819), Washington Irving gave as his reason for touring Europe in 1815 an “earnest desire … to visit this land of wonders … and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.”

Buffon’s theories of New World degeneration appeared as ridiculous to Americans of the early republic as they do to us now. But their impact on the educated European public—as a theoretical bedrock of
anticolonial opinion—was long-lasting. The image of North America as a cold and inhospitable continent, where nature could not thrive and Europeans ought not venture, became an
idée reçu
, to be rehearsed again and again in such texts as William Robertson’s much-reprinted
History of America
(1788), where he translated Buffon’s passages on American climate almost word for word. Buffon’s influence even shows up in the radical poetry of the teenage Percy Shelley.
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His first major poem,
Queen Mab
(1813), rehearses the Buffonian New World pessimism of the early 1760s, long settled as a mainstream European view:

Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

Lowers o’er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

Basks in the moonlight’s ineffectual glow,

Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,

Insensible to courage, truth, or love,

His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around.
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—and so on (in unedifying strains). In this passage from
Queen Mab
it is easy to see how the Enlightenment anthropology of climate developed its reputation as the insidious intellectual precursor to nineteenth-century theories of race. If a self-proclaimed radical and humanitarian such as Shelley could believe this nonsense, who would not believe it? Even Mary Shelley was reading Buffon in 1817. In
Frankenstein
, her Creature, a wretched “abortion of the earth,” naturally wishes to flee civilized Europe to the “degenerated” Americas.

The New World climate controversy is a mostly forgotten theme of early transatlantic relations.
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But for Americans in London or Paris—who could not attend a dinner party without hearing the same old jokes about freezing weather and degeneration—Buffonian climate pessimism stood as a serious affront to patriotic pride. There could be no touchier subject for an American than the weather, except perhaps
slavery. Opinion makers in Europe such as Buffon had tied the concept of climate so closely with culture that to complain of the American weather was to insult Americans themselves and to question the very viability of their infant republic.