The Year Without Summer (25 page)

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A
MERICANS
could not generate any enthusiasm about the presidential election campaign of 1816.
The election of James Monroe seemed a foregone conclusion—not because of any overwhelming
groundswell of support for his candidacy, although most voters had no serious objection
to him, save for a parochial objection to yet another president (four out of five)
from Virginia. Rather, it resulted partly from the Federalist Party’s inability to
nominate a slate of electors in nearly half of the eighteen states, and partly from
the almost total indifference of the Federalist nominee. “So certain is the result,”
wrote Rufus King of his own impending defeat, “that no pains are taken to excite the
community on the subject.” Ten states allowed voters to choose presidential electors
directly; the others still allowed state legislatures to select electors. And each
state chose its own election day, so voting was staggered throughout the summer and
autumn.

Elections on the state level were more hotly contested. As Virginia’s acerbic congressman
John Randolph pointed out, “There was no election for Burgesses to the General Assembly
which had not caused ten times the excitement that had been caused by the election
of the President of the United States.” Incumbent congressmen continued to suffer
unremitting abuse for their support of the Compensation Bill. In one state after another,
they went down to defeat; in New York, only one-fourth of the incumbent congressional
representatives won reelection.

On the first Monday in September, Maine held a special election to vote on its separation
from Massachusetts. A referendum in March had produced a slight majority in favor
of statehood, but Massachusetts law required a majority of more than 60 percent before
Maine could obtain its independence. Agitation for separation came primarily from
the interior, from small farmers who wanted more equitable taxation and lower government
expenses. Merchants and businessmen in coastal areas generally were content to remain
safely and profitably within Boston’s commercial orbit. In September, the Massachusetts
General Court dropped the statehood requirement to a five-ninths majority, but again
the advocates of separation fell slightly short of victory.

Temperatures in early September recovered to slightly above normal levels over most
of the Eastern United States, but the drought dragged on. In Philadelphia, the Schuylkill
River fell to a lower level than anyone could remember—“it may be crossed on foot
at the Falls, without wetting the feet,” claimed the
Farmer’s Cabinet
—endangering the crops in the surrounding counties.

The
Richmond Enquirer
warned that “never has there been in America, especially in Virginia, so gloomy a
prospect. It appears, that it is more than probable that there will be very short
crops of Corn, on account of which, people in general are very much alarmed.” The
newspaper urged its readers to keep their grain and flour within the state, rather
than selling to merchants who might send it out of Virginia. “Although it is true,
that if any were like to starve, and we could assist them, we ought to do so,” reasoned
the
Enquirer
, “but to use a scripture phrase, ‘he that provides not for his own, especially those
of his own household, hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’” A letter
writer to the
Enquirer
who signed himself “A Starving People” suggested that Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas
ask the General Assembly to reduce taxes until the crisis abated.

Relief arrived in Virginia on September 6 in the form of a heavy rainstorm—possibly
the residue of a hurricane—that traveled slowly up the coast, reaching Philadelphia
and New York on September 8, and Boston shortly thereafter. Farmers did not rejoice
for long. Accompanied by high winds that wrought considerable damage to shipping in
coastal areas, the rain continued for a week, drenching fields in low-lying areas,
particularly in the South. Petersburg, Virginia, reported that “every part of the
town and the adjacent country was under water,” with streams overflowing their banks
to create a scene “grand, awful and devastating.”

While the storm battered coastal areas, it left inland areas of New England virtually
untouched. Much of Vermont received no rain at all; indeed, in some areas of the state
there had been no measurable precipitation other than snow for more than three months.
“A failure of the crops generally was therefore certain,” concluded the
American Advocate
. At Brunswick, Maine, an observer measured less than half an inch of rain for all
of September. Not surprisingly, a number of forest fires ravaged the parched woodlands
of northern New England, blackening the skies with thick acrid smoke.

Then a cold wave struck on the evening of September 10, bringing frost followed by
snow that covered mountaintops in northern Vermont. Farmers hurried to harvest whatever
potatoes survived, even if they had not yet ripened. In Sutton, New Hampshire, “corn
froze to the centre of the cob, and apples froze upon the trees.” The same cold front
brought frost to Concord, New Hampshire, and left two to three inches of snow on the
ground at Springfield, Massachusetts. “It is believed,” reported one Boston newspaper,
“that no person can recollect a summer so inconsistant [sic] and fluctuating.”

Across the border, Quebec inched closer to famine. Hard-pressed by a short growing
season in the best of times, Canadian farmers found their last hopes for a decent
harvest—crops planted belatedly after the June snows—shattered by sharp frosts in
September. Some cut their wheat before it was ripe, to save it from freezing. Others
gambled that the warmer temperatures of late July and August would persist, and lost.
Between two-thirds and four-fifths of the hay crop was ruined; “the corn is said to
be cut off; and the wheat to be much injured, even in that most Southern district
of the two Canadian provinces.” Farmers sold their milch cows to buy bread; instead
of their usual summertime diet of bread and milk, some reportedly subsisted on wild
herbs.

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“J
ULY
of 1816 was a particularly unusual month concerning both rainfall and temperature,”
wrote José Manuel da Silva Tedim, a lawyer and priest in Braga, Portugal. “I am 78
years old and I have never seen so much rain and cold, not even in winter months.”
August in Portugal was only slightly warmer and drier. In Barcelona, the Baron of
Malda decided that summer seemed more like spring. On August 18, he noted in his diary
that the cool air reminded him of May; but then August 22 turned even colder, resembling
the weather of April. (The baron ascribed the drop in temperature in Barcelona to
a recent snowfall—it may actually have been a hailstorm—in central Spain.)

Conditions on the Iberian peninsula that season varied little from those in France,
Germany, or Britain. While the decade of 1811–1820 as a whole was wet and cool in
Spain and Portugal, the summer of 1816—notably July and August—was especially cold,
with an average temperature two to three degrees Celsius below normal. Precipitation
totals for July and August 1816 also were considerably higher than usual. In fact,
summer rain typically is so scant in both countries that several successive rainy
days in August 1816 struck observers as quite remarkable.

Perhaps not as remarkable, though, as a monarchy without a monarch. Portugal’s royal
family had fled the country when Napoléon invaded in 1807, and spent the rest of the
war years in Brazil. Like Britain, its close ally, Portugal was officially ruled by
a regent in 1816; Queen Maria had been declared incurably mad in 1799—she was, in
fact, treated by Dr. Francis Willis, one of the physicians who had attended King George
III during his episode of madness in 1788–89—and her son, John, ruled in her stead.
Upon learning of Napoléon’s surrender in 1814, John had made plans to return to Portugal,
but he reconsidered when he heard that Napoléon had returned from Elba. Even after
Maria died on March 20, 1816, and the regent was crowned as King John VI, he decided
to remain comfortably ensconced in Brazil. In his absence, British officials carried
out much of the day-to-day administration of Portugal.

That arrangement provided Portugal with a considerably more competent government than
Spain, where King Fernando VII held sway. In the words of one historian, Fernando
was “in many ways the basest king in Spanish history”; among other traits, he appeared
“cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful.” In 1808, Napoléon replaced
Fernando on the Spanish throne with the emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, disdainfully
nicknamed “Pepe Botellas”—“Joe Bottles”—by Spaniards for his fondness for drink. For
the next five years, Fernando remained under guard in a French château while British
soldiers and Spanish irregulars battled Napoléon’s troops in a savage cycle of guerilla
attacks and reprisals.

Meanwhile, the Bonapartist government launched a series of legal and administrative
reforms of Spanish society, including the abolition of monasteries and distribution
of their property. Recognizing that the fluid political situation provided them with
an opportunity to carry out even more radical reforms, Spanish liberals convened a
legislative assembly in the southern port of Cadiz, under the protection of the British
Navy, and drafted a new constitution in 1812 that stripped the monarchy of most of
its powers and finally brought a formal end to the Inquisition. The new regime did
not last long. Upon his return to Spain in 1814, Don Fernando supported an army coup
that rescinded the new constitution, thereby turning back the clock to 1808 and leaving
Spain deeply divided into hostile political camps.

A decade of political turbulence and military conflict, exacerbated by the incompetence
and corruption of Don Fernando’s government, severely dislocated the Spanish economy.
Ongoing rebellions in Spain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere—Argentina was the
latest to declare its independence, in July 1816—aggravated the difficulties by depriving
Spain of vital markets and materials. The last thing Spaniards needed in the summer
of 1816 was a widespread failure of the harvest.

Reliable evidence of weather phenomena in the summer of 1816 is scarcer for Spain
and Portugal than for other countries in Western Europe. Nevertheless, military and
medical personnel recently had started to gather and publish data, for much the same
reason as their counterparts in other European nations and the United States. In December
1815, a Portuguese scientist, politician, and naval officer named Marino Miguel Franzini
began to regularly record meteorological observations from his station at Lisbon,
initially to provide a local doctor with data to evaluate the relationship between
changes in the weather and the state of public health. In Madrid, a group of scientists
and medical officials maintained similar records, taking three temperature readings
per day; additional observations (albeit on a less consistent basis) were made at
the Observatory of the Spanish Navy in Cadiz, and at Barcelona. Private individuals
such as da Silva Tedim, of course, supplemented these records with their own informal
evidence.

No one disagreed that the summer of 1816 brought exceptionally cold, wet weather that
damaged crops across the Iberian peninsula. Tedim noted that “July had only three
clear days,” and the highest temperature in Braga that month was only 77 degrees—eight
degrees lower than the high temperature in July 1814. August provided only ten clear
days, with the mercury never advancing beyond 79 degrees.

Frigid temperatures killed some fruit on the trees and ruined much of the rest. In
central Portugal, “the unusual cool weather in summer had evil consequences on fruit,
that was unpleasant to taste,” noted Senhor Franzini. “Grapes have suffered for the
same reason and never got ripe and as a consequence the wine was of inferior quality.”
In Spanish vineyards, too, only a small percentage of grapes ever matured, producing
a scant and unpalatable harvest. Olive trees, always sensitive to cold, lacked the
heat to produce quality fruit.

In the wheat fields of Spain, the harvest commenced much later than usual. “I note
here as something strange and worthy of comment that throughout the months of June
and July it was not at all hot,” noted one resident of Arenys de Mar, just outside
of Barcelona. “If anything it was cold, because of the excessively cool sea air caused
by the hail that fell in Mallorca and other places. This delayed the wheat harvest …
which meant that threshing was also late, because there was no sun and it was misty
all day and clear all night, quite the opposite of what was needed.” Workers painstakingly
separated ripe, dry grain from immature green seeds, a process that required significantly
more labor and drove up the price of bread.

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F
ROM
a meteorological diary in Paris, August 31: At five o’clock in the morning, cloudy
with rain; at noon, rain; at three o’clock in the afternoon, rain with thunder. “A
cold and humid temperature has succeeded the too few days we have had of fine weather,”
reported a French correspondent in the first week of September. “The thermometer has
fallen from 16 and 20 degrees [Celsius] to 8 and 9; and it is said that one of these
nights there was frost in the country.”

As the temperature declined, concerns for the harvest rose along with the price of
bread. A loaf that cost sixteen sous in the springtime cost thirty or thirty-two sous
in August. Fruit of any kind grew scarce. In the Norman town of Dieppe, the poor already
were in such distress that the police requisitioned bread to distribute among them.
And still the rain continued to pour down, especially in the northern departments.
“The state of the weather is now almost as interesting a political topic as can well
occur,” remarked
The Times
of London, “considering the effect which it must have upon the contentment and tranquility
of States for a year to come.”