The Year Without Summer (35 page)

One of the more conspicuous groups of emigrants was known as the Pilgrims, a band
of religious zealots who left southern Canada in the spring of 1817 and came to rest
at South Woodstock, Vermont, several months later. Numbering only about eight members
when they arrived in Woodstock, the Pilgrims managed to attract thirty new adherents
by the time they departed in late summer. They were led by Isaac Bullard, a red-bearded
“prophet” known as “Elijah” to his followers and “Old Isaac” to others, who claimed
to have received a revelation from God upon recovering from a lengthy illness. Bullard
promised to lead his flock—who styled themselves after the lost tribe of Judah—to
a Promised Land somewhere in the Western territories, where they would plant a new
church of the Redeemer. Upon leaving Woodstock, the Pilgrims divided into two groups,
one of which journeyed south through the Hudson River Valley and New Jersey before
turning west, and the other walking westward across New York State and then south
along the Ohio River. Along the way, they practiced a type of Christian communitarianism,
under which they abjured material possessions and pooled all their resources—about
$10,000—under Bullard’s control. They also reportedly practiced free love, held frequent
conversations with invisible spirits, and adamantly refused to bathe. Having discovered
no Biblical admonition to wash oneself, Bullard decided that bathing was a sin, and
boasted that he had not changed his clothes in seven years. His followers, garbed
in bearskins and long knit caps, followed suit. They continued to enlist new converts
along the route, and by the time they arrived at a spot subsequently named Pilgrim
Island, about thirty miles south of New Madrid, Missouri, the sect numbered several
hundred members. Shortly after their arrival, however, fevers killed dozens of the
zealots, and Bullard’s autocratic rule alienated so many others that the enterprise
soon collapsed altogether.

More typical was the experience of Gershom Flagg, a young unmarried farmer who left
his home in Richmond, Vermont, in the fall of 1816, spent the winter in Springfield,
Ohio, and then moved on to the town of Harmony, alongside the National Road. Although
the journey took him longer than expected (“we found some of the worst hills to travel
up and down that I have ever seen where there was a Road”), and the price of supplies
inflated in Ohio (“there are many things which are worth but little in Vermont that
cost considerable here”), Flagg informed his brother back home that “I find the Country
as fertile as I expected. Corn grows with once hoeing and some time with out hoeing
at all to 14 feet high and is well filled.… Hogs & Cattle run in the woods in summers
and in the winter are fed on Corn & prairie hay. In this vicinity are some as handsome
Cattle as ever I have seen.… I am fully of the opinion that a man may live by farming
with much less labour here than in the Eastern States.” Moreover, “the weather is
warm and pleasant now,” Flagg reported in January. “We have had no snow.”

Aided by similar testimonials from hundreds of other settlers, Ohio’s population jumped
from 230,760 in 1810 to slightly more than 400,000 in 1817. The increase in Indiana
was even more spectacular, rising from 24,500 in 1810 to nearly 100,000 seven years
later; in the year 1816 alone, Indiana gained 42,000 new settlers. And in the territory
of Illinois, the population rose 160 percent between 1815 and 1818.

While no precise numbers exist for the number of emigrants from any particular location,
the best estimates for Maine alone put the loss of residents between ten to fifteen
thousand from 1810 to 1820, with most departing in 1816–20. Numerous towns in Maine—including
Freeport, Eliot, Kittery, and Durham—suffered substantial declines in population,
leading local officials to fear that the “ruinous emigration of their young men” might
leave towns wholly unpopulated. In Vermont, more than sixty townships lost population
from 1810–20, and another fifty or sixty barely managed to break even. (The state’s
population grew by only 8 percent between 1810 and 1820, compared to a 32 percent
increase for the nation as a whole.) Hardest hit were the towns of northern Vermont.
Worcester, just north of Montpelier, was reduced to one family; Granby, in Vermont’s
Northeast Kingdom, lost its legal existence altogether.

Newspaper editors attempted to stem the tide by vigorously promoting the alleged advantages
of New England over Ohio or Indiana: easy coastal shipping to the markets of New York
and Boston; better schools; greater proximity to Europe; a more industrious and more
cultured population; and a healthier climate, with no “tropical” diseases such as
malaria and other fevers that afflicted recent arrivals in the Western territories.
The Massachusetts state legislature joined the campaign by approving an early version
of a homestead act which opened up new townships in Maine (including some on land
previously reserved for Native Americans) and promised settlers one hundred acres
for a payment of only five dollars (public land in Ohio was selling for approximately
two dollars per acre), provided they built a house and barn on the land within a year
and cleared ten acres for farmland within ten years.

Still the exodus continued, despite reports that the Western territories were considerably
less hospitable than the advertisements claimed. Settlers discovered that they were
going into “a great loneliness,” a thinly settled region where farms were so isolated
they might not see another family for several months at a time; where primitive cabins
lacked furnishings or even chimneys; where cash was scarce, markets undeveloped, and
prices for agricultural goods lower than in New England. “The bad things,” recounted
Gershom Flagg from Ohio, “are Want of Stone, Want of timber for building, Bad water,
which will not Wash, overflowing of all the streams which makes it very bad building
Bridges especially where the materials are scarce as they are here, Bad Roads, ignorant
people … plenty of Ague near the large streams [and] Bad situation as to Trade.… Swarms
of locusts have lately made their appearance.” Material comforts remained few and
far between. Household goods brought into the territories eventually broke or gave
out—“glasses, cups, and hollow ware disappeared, iron pots were borrowed and broken”—and
families had little money to purchase replacements, and few shops at which to buy
them.

New Englanders also encountered recently arrived Southern farmers, particularly from
Virginia and the eastern parts of North Carolina, defeated by their own poor harvests
due to the cold summer and severe drought. The encounter produced something akin to
culture shock for the Northerners. Their Southern brethren, observed one Vermonter,
“are the most ignorant people I ever saw.… I have asked many people what township
they lived in & they could not tell.”

Some settlers gave up and headed back to New England, but most decided that the benefits
of life in the West outweighed the costs. After all, few prosperous farmers forsook
their homes; most of the emigrants left behind farms that were only marginally profitable
even in the best of times. Once they arrived in the new territories, “they spotted
the mill sites, the town sites, and the best stands of timber,” as one local historian
pointed out, “and bought them up while they were still cheap.” They chose the best
land and cleared it and found the soil far more fertile than any in New England, and
when the next wave of settlers arrived, they sold them the goods they needed. And
as the population of the territories rose, so did the value of their lands.

But at last the price of grain stalled and then began to decline. After wheat reached
a peak of $3.11 a bushel and corn nearly $1.75 a bushel in Eastern cities in May,
the prospect of substantially improved harvests in the autumn of 1817 sent prices
sharply lower.

*   *   *

O
N
January 28, 1817, a crowd of nearly 20,000 people gathered outside of Westminster
Hall in London for the opening of Parliament. Many had come to support the presentation
of petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures—estimates ranged between 600,000
and 1,000,000—in favor of parliamentary reform. Others had gathered to gawk at the
dignitaries who attended the ceremonies; and some were there to vent their anger and
frustration with the government’s failure to alleviate the growing distress among
the poor throughout Britain.

By the time the Prince Regent—who had recently hosted a lavish dinner party at which
thirty-six entrées were served—emerged after delivering his opening address, the mood
of the crowd had turned quite dark; Sir Robert Peel noted that it was “amazingly increased
both in numbers and violence.” As the Prince Regent rode back to St. James’s Palace,
one or more bystanders threw large stones at his carriage, breaking at least one window.
Perhaps someone in the crowd fired a couple of shots from an airgun; the government
subsequently claimed that the left side of his carriage had been pierced by two small
bullets, although John Quincy Adams reported that “no report was heard, no bullets
[were] found in the carriage, and the opposite window, though up, was not broken.”
The Prince Regent was unharmed, but the incident persuaded Peel, among others, that
“the general spirit of the country is worse, I apprehend, than we understood it to
be.”

Liverpool’s government responded by submitting to Parliament a series of draconian
measures to quash the revolution it had been expecting for months. Lacking any reliable
information beyond the reports provided by the government (aided by a small army of
spies and informants paid by the Home Office), Parliament had little choice but to
approve the legislation. After establishing secret committees to investigate the state
of the country, Parliament passed in less than two weeks a measure effectively suspending
habeas corpus, a “gagging act” that allowed magistrates to silence any speech or publication
they deemed “seditious or inflammatory,” and a Seditious Meetings Act that required
any assembly of fifty people or more to obtain prior permission from the government.

The government employed these new weapons enthusiastically. On March 10, a mass meeting
in Manchester to publicize the plight of unemployed textile workers and protest the
suspension of habeas corpus was broken up by a detachment of dragoons, and the leaders
of the protest arrested. When a group of weavers decided to march from Manchester
to London anyway, carrying blankets to indicate their profession (and keep them warm),
they were attacked by cavalry before they reached the city; several demonstrators
were wounded, and one killed.

Government informers also infiltrated a group of prospective revolutionaries centered
in Pentrich, a village in Derbyshire, an area hard-pressed by the combination of rising
food prices and growing unemployment in both the iron and hosiery industries. Throughout
the spring of 1817, a veteran radical named Thomas Bacon and Jeremiah Brandreth, an
unemployed rib-stockinger from Nottingham, worked to recruit impoverished workers
for a march on London to overthrow the government. While an order for 3,000 pike handles
went out to a carpenter in Lincolnshire, a shipment of daggers arrived in neighboring
Leicestershire. As Bacon and his lieutenants pondered the feasibility of appropriating
a huge cannon from a local ironworks to accompany the rebels on their march, a government
spy named William Richard, aka William Oliver, aka “Oliver the Spy,” enthusiastically
encouraged the plot. Oliver, as he was known to the conspirators, promised them that
seventy-thousand sympathizers would join the marchers when they reached London.

On the evening of June 9, between 250–300 men—many of them reluctant converts pressed
into service by Brandreth at gunpoint—left Pentrich in the pouring rain, armed with
scythes, pikes, and a small number of guns. En route to Nottingham, where they expected
sixteen thousand reinforcements to join them, they met a detachment of Light Dragoons,
dispatched by the government in response to Oliver’s reports. The marchers panicked
and fled. Authorities tracked down and arrested more than eighty of them; in October,
thirty-five were tried on charges of attempting “by force of arms to subvert and destroy
the Government and Constitution.” Twenty-three were found guilty: fourteen—including
Bacon—were transported to Australia, six were imprisoned, and three (one of whom was
Brandreth) were hanged and beheaded for treason. It was a pitiable end to a wretched
enterprise that has been termed “England’s last attempted revolution.”

By that time, Parliament had begun to investigate alternatives to the traditional
system of poor laws and parish relief. Alarmed by the rising cost of providing assistance
to the poor in the early months of 1817, the House of Commons appointed a select committee
to investigate the effects of the poor laws and recommend improvements. In July, the
select committee delivered its conclusion that “unless some efficacious check be interposed,
there is every reason to think that the amount of the [poor rate] will continue as
it has done, to increase, till … it shall have absorbed the profits of the property
on which the rate may have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect and ruin of
the land.”

In the meantime, Parliament approved the Poor Employment Act of 1817, which empowered
the British government to make loans for up to three years to individuals or corporations
who could demonstrate that the funds would be used to employ large numbers of workers.
Initially, the total amount available for loans was capped at 1.75 million pounds
sterling; within two months, the government had received applications for projects—generally
for public works such as roads, canals, or draining marshlands—totalling more than
a million pounds. The swift response proved the depth of the distress that still afflicted
Britain in the summer of 1817. Although Parliament clearly intended the measure as
a temporary expedient, it was renewed repeatedly. The act represented “a significant
new departure,” as M. W. Flinn has pointed out, since it “implicitly acknowledged
the obligation of governments to do something more about depression than they had
formerly considered adequate.” Instead of limiting assistance solely to financial
institutions or established commercial firms, it provided funds that would be used
directly for the relief of unemployment and poverty, and in that sense provided critical
momentum to the notion that the government bore a responsibility to improve the life
of the ordinary British citizen.