Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (32 page)

Inevitably the founding fathers, especially those based for periods in Europe, found themselves enlisted as New World champions in the drawn-out battle over American climate. None took up the cudgels more aggressively than Thomas Jefferson, who, among his many distinctions, has been called the premier meteorologist of the early republic. In the early 1780s, Jefferson found himself the American ambassador to France. His official duties were light, so he occupied himself in reading all available literature on American geography and natural science, while circulating his celebrated
Notes on the State of Virginia
(first published in a French edition in 1785). A primary object of that book—a landmark in American geography—was to launch a full-fronted attack on Buffon’s anti-American climate pessimism.

First, to demolish Buffon’s argument for the physical diminution of New World animals, Jefferson pointed to the growing archaeological record: “It is well known that on the Ohio, and many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude, are found in great numbers.” To lend empirical weight to Jefferson’s arguments,
Notes
is studded with statistical tables comparing the size and weight of European animals with their New World equivalents, showing how American quadrupeds—including horses, bears, beavers, and flying squirrels—enjoyed a healthy superiority. As the coup de grâce, Jefferson offered his prime exhibit: the recently unearthed skeleton of a mammoth “six times the cubic volume of the elephant.”
¹⁹
Because species extinction, to Jefferson’s old-fashioned way of thinking, was impossible, living examples of this woolly giant would surely be found as Americans explored farther into the vast unknown territories of the West.

But it is in response to Buffon’s argument that New World climate has presided over a degenerated
human
species that Jefferson becomes most passionate and oratorical. In a celebrated passage from
Notes on the State of Virginia
, the planter-politician rises to the defense of the
embattled American Indian, whom Buffon had called “cold” and feeble. The influence of the icy climate, according to Buffon, extended even to the smallness of native genitals. Not so! Jefferson proclaims. The American native is physically powerful and “brave.” His “friendships are strong and faithful” and his “ardor for the female” perfectly normal. Moreover, the climate has had no dulling effect on American intellect: the native “sensibility is keen … his vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours.”
²⁰
The modern reader cannot help but be struck by the irony that a future president whose policy of Western expansion ensured the destruction of American Indian communities en masse should be so animated in their defense, albeit as “noble savages.” But in championing the native American against Buffon, Jefferson was also defending his own Anglo-Saxon settler race against Buffon’s remorseless climatic logic, which foretold “degeneration” for all migrants to the New World.

American climate optimism does not originate with Thomas Jefferson, of course. From Drayton’s tribute to her “delicious land” in his “Ode to the Virginian Voyage” (1606) to St. John Crèvecoeur’s popular
Letters from an American Farmer
(1782), Jefferson had a rich tradition of Arcadian imagery to call upon in evoking the hospitability of the American environment to human settlement. Virginia itself, in his own estimation, rated as the “Eden of the U.S.,” while his wide reading in American travel literature taught him to think of the western United States—to the Mississippi and beyond—as a veritable cornucopia: “Here is health and joy, peace and plenty … the soil [is] excellent, the climate healthy and agreeable, and the winters moderate and short … no country in this quarter, if any in the world, is capable of larger or richer improvement than this.”
²¹
Jefferson implicitly trusted such accounts because they underwrote his fondest hopes for a greater agrarian-based republic. The prosperity of the new nation and its unique personal freedoms depended, in Jefferson’s imperial vision, on a near-infinite availability of sun-blessed fertile land to the West.

With Jefferson’s attack on Buffon in
Notes on the State of Virginia
, the two contrary branches of colonial-era European writing on the Americas—one evoking Eden, the other a frozen tundra—converged in open conflict. When
Notes
appeared in print in 1785, Jefferson immediately
sent a signed copy to the Comte de Buffon and arranged to visit his aged adversary at his provincial manor in Montbard to take up the debate in person. How fitting that these great armchair naturalists of the late eighteenth century should meet over dinner in a formal baroque dining room, eating off the finest imported chinaware, surrounded by leather-bound volumes of the Count’s collected works. Undistracted by the real world, the two gentleman scientists were free to expound on their pet theories: that the Earth was made of glass (Buffon) or that gigantic mammoths and sloths roamed the American West under the loom of erupting volcanoes (Jefferson). But when it came to the matter of the undeclared war between them—on American climate and fauna—the septuagenarian Buffon proved an elusive opponent.

Jefferson had arrived at the Count’s door carrying a large American panther skin, which Buffon once “had confounded with a cougar.” Buffon instantly promised to correct his mistake in a new edition. This aristocratic concession with regard to detail merely laid the ground, however, for Buffon’s denial of Jefferson on principle. He listened politely as his guest enumerated the pro-American arguments of
Notes on the State of Virginia
and made his passionate case for a benevolent New World climate. But Buffon did not deign to debate the young American ambassador. Instead, he merely reached for the latest hefty volume of his
Histoire Naturelle
and said, smilingly, “When Mr. Jefferson shall have read this, he will be perfectly satisfied that I am right.”
²²
For Buffon, the question of who had the larger genitals was never far from the surface.

No detailed account exists of the ensuing conversation, and Buffon died before their fascinating dialogue could be resumed. But we can well imagine their resorting to the usual tactic of ambitious men with sharply differing opinions who meet under conditions of politeness: they sought out subjects on which they could agree. Here, one strand of Buffonian climate theory overlapped appealingly with Jefferson’s own: namely, that by transforming the natural landscape through agriculture, American settlers possessed the God-given power to radically improve their climate. In the utopian promise of climate engineering thus lay an “escape clause” for American patriots in the age of Buffon. One might respectfully disagree with one’s continental friends on the
natural advantages of the New World environment as it was “discovered” by Europeans because, once
settled
, the success of the American experiment lay in the hands of the colonists themselves. By deforesting and draining the land, by planting wheat and running cattle, American farmers were capable of transforming their “desert” land into “the most fruitful, healthy, and opulent in the world.”
²³

Global cooling—slow but inexorable—remains the apocalyptic truth at the heart of Buffonian earth science.
²⁴
Until the twentieth-century discovery of radioactivity, logic dictated as much. Emitting heat from its core since the hour of its molten creation, the Earth must eventually freeze. But Buffon, though a great controversialist, appears to have been uncomfortable with the mantle of prophet of doom. His theories should be more hopeful and offer something for everyone: hence his assurances that “Man is able to modify the influence of the climate that he inhabits—to fix, you might say, the temperature most convenient to him.”
²⁵

The centrality of climate engineering to Buffon’s most famous text explains how Jefferson could depart Montbard in 1785 expressing nothing but admiration for his host’s “extraordinary powers” and “singularly agreeable” nature.
²⁶
On the basis of the climate control argument that concludes “Des
époques de la nature
,” Buffon was able to render a blueprint for agricultural imperialism utterly congenial to the Jeffersonian vision of America. The promise of climate salvation, like republican democracy itself, lay in agricultural expansion: “As the hallmark of his own civilization … Man changes the face of the earth, converts deserts into pastures, and wild heaths into fields of grain … and everywhere he produces abundance, there follows a great wave of migration; millions of men may inhabit the space formerly occupied by two or three hundred savages.”
²⁷
Europe had already enjoyed such a transformation. Now, the United States stood at the cusp of epochal environmental change and a similar population explosion. A bucolic western landscape, populated by waves of settler farmers, prosperous and free … just such a vision filled Jefferson’s imagination two decades later when, in his dealings with another eminent Frenchman, he concluded the Louisiana Purchase.

Call it the Great Climate Compromise. One could complain about the weather in the new American republic, but all must agree it was changing for the better. The notion of an improving climate had been an article of faith in the American colonies since the days of Cotton Mather. A century later, climate boosterism still ruled the day. Constantin François Volney, a brilliant geographer and friend of Jefferson’s who traveled the United States in the early 1800s, grew accustomed to hearing the gospel of benevolent climate change preached wherever he went:

I have collected similar testimonies in the whole course of my journies [
sic
]…. On the Ohio, at Gallipolis, Washington (Kentucky), Frankfort, Lexington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Niagara, Albany, everywhere the same changes have been mentioned and insisted on. Longer summers, later autumns, shorter winters, lighter and less lasting snows, and colds less violent were talked of by everybody; and these changes have always been described, in the newly settled districts not as gradual and slow, but as quick and sudden, in proportion to the extent of cultivation.
²⁸

Enlarging on this patriotic theme, the eminent New England naturalist Samuel Williams—who modeled his
Natural and Civil History of Vermont
(1794) on Jefferson’s
Notes
—narrated in glowing detail the ameliorative powers of agriculture:

When the settlers move into a new township their first business is to cut down the trees, clear up the lands, and sow them with grain. The earth is no sooner laid open to the influence of the sun and winds, than the effects of cultivation begin to appear. The surface of the earth becomes more warm and dry. As the settlements increase, these effects become more general and extensive: the cold decreases, the earth and air become more warm; and the whole temperature of the climate becomes more equal, uniform, and moderate … a remarkable change of this kind has been observed in all the settled parts of North America.
²⁹

Williams’s arguments are not for marginal changes in weather but for
wholesale transformation
of the American climate regime brought about
by European settlement. He estimates that agriculture has already warmed the inhabited parts of the country by 10°F (!) and that the benign, seaborne easterly winds, which formerly intruded no more than “thirty or forty miles,” were now blowing merrily hundreds of miles inland to the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains.

In reading excited statements such as these—from the most respected scientific figures of the early republic—it seems impossible to overstate the giddy rush of climate optimism felt by educated Americans in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was not to last. Ironically, a new, enlarged edition of Williams’s
History of Vermont
appeared in 1809—the year the “Great Unknown” tropical eruption would usher in the coldest decade since European settlement. Temperature readings in New Haven, Connecticut, showed the years 1812–18 to be consistently 3–4°F below average.
³⁰
Through the 1810s, the full-throated promotion of a warming climate by the American scientific elite met the chill reality of a national climate deterioration in which year after year posted a decline in average daytime temperatures and a sharp uptick in extreme weather events.

The impact of the volcanic decade of the 1810s was felt most keenly in New England. Williams’s beloved Vermont, for example, suffered a dramatic population decline from which it did not recover for generations. This decade-long era of climate insecurity reached a chaotic climax in the Tamboran summer of 1816. Faced by that demoralizing natural disaster, the voices of the nationalist climate boosters fell conspicuously silent, while legions of ordinary folk sold up and went West—the first American climate change refugees. As one Connecticut resident remembered the crisis of 1816, “thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become a part of the frigid zone.”
³¹
The Buffonian nightmare was coming true.

TAMBORA AND THE PANIC OF 1819

For all the trauma of 1816’s extreme weather, however, the twin pillars of Jefferson’s worldview emerged from that meteorological disaster
essentially intact. First, his climate optimism stood vindicated by the fact of the weather emergency’s being temporary, however drastic. Normal temperature and precipitation patterns had resumed by the decade’s end. Second, the salvific potential of the West shone brightly through the crisis. The frontier west of the Appalachians—“another Canaan” in Jefferson’s eyes—was largely spared the monster cold fronts that repeatedly swept down from Canada across the Atlantic seaboard in the summer months of 1816.
³²
Tree-ring studies that show “marked cooling” over western Europe and the eastern United States in 1816 and 1817 indicate no such arboreal stress in the West.
³³
Such is the mix of cards dealt by climate change: the frontier, for the time being at least, profited wildly from the transatlantic subsistence crisis. Farming territories from the Ohio Valley to Illinois produced bumper crops and sold their bounty at record prices. The volume of flour and grain loaded on flatboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans in 1817 increased fourfold compared to 1814. The following summer, 1818, the boom continued unabated. A steamboat traveler heading north counted 643 flatboats bound for New Orleans in a brief few weeks’ passage.
³⁴
As the Atlantic states faced disastrous crop shortfalls, the new grain-producing regions of the west loomed more than ever as a Promised Land.