10.
EMIGRATION
“I must also say that the discontented are in great force…”
JANE AUSTEN’S HEALTH grew worse in the autumn. Her back hurt nearly all the time, she tired easily, and she was too weak to walk even a short distance outside. Austen insisted to her relatives that she was not seriously ill, that she suffered from no more than rheumatism or bile. But the cold, damp weather at Chawton aggravated her illness. She spent much of her time collecting a decidedly mixed set of reviews on Emma, including one in which the reviewer admitted that he had read only the first and last chapters of the novel “because he had heard it was not interesting.”
Nearby in Bath, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin spent much of the autumn reading—he read Don Quixote aloud to Mary in the evenings, and she claimed to see a resemblance between Shelley and the knight—and writing. Apparently Mary’s manuscript of Frankenstein proceeded smoothly, except for a brief interruption when her half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide. The child of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American merchant (with whom Mary lived as a common-law wife before she met William Godwin), Fanny had been living with Godwin and his second wife in straitened financial circumstances, growing increasingly lonely and despondent, and bitter towards Mary, whom she felt had deserted her. On October 9, Fanny checked into the Mackworth Arms Inn in Swansea and drank half a bottle of laudanum. Perhaps she had been in love with Shelley; perhaps she had recently discovered the circumstances of her illegitimate birth. Since English law made suicide a crime, Fanny’s body was never officially identified, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. A remorseful Shelley wrote:
Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From whence it came; and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken,
Misery—O Misery,
This world is all too wide for thee.
* * *
FROM his vantage point in September and early October, Lord Liverpool saw no reason to panic. More than a hundred years before anyone heard the term gross national product, Liverpool and his cabinet chose to measure the health of the British economy by tracking tax returns, especially excise revenues, on a quarterly basis. If revenues increased, consumers presumably were purchasing more goods and the economy was growing. If they decreased, people either had less money, or were saving more and spending less; in either case, the economy seemed to be headed for a downturn. It was not a particularly sophisticated or reliable indicator of economic developments, but it provided Liverpool’s ministry with statistical support for its inaction.
Looking back over the summer months, Liverpool expressed confidence that Britain’s economic fundamentals were sound: “The Revenue looks better. The Excise (which is the most material Branch) good, the Customs still very low, but the great falling off is in the Port of London, which is a proof that it does not arise from Smuggling or diminished Consumption, but from want of Speculation growing out of Want of Confidence. We may trust therefore that this Evil will in a short Time be removed.” The extensive gold reserves building up in the Bank of England in the postwar period—Britain seemed by far the safest place for European investors to park their money—further encouraged Liverpool. Low interest rates and easy access to credit, along with rising grain prices, made British landowners happy. And when the landed interest was happy, Liverpool’s government was well content.
Liverpool and his ministers did not turn a blind eye to the distress wracking Britain in the autumn of 1816, but neither did they feel responsible for the hardship of the laboring classes. The lens through which they viewed “the condition of England” blended classical economic theory and the eighteenth-century tradition of limited government. Authorities firmly believed that they had neither the resources nor the duty to alter the course of the economic cycle; instead, they needed to allow market forces to work themselves out.
Whatever economic difficulties Britain faced in the autumn of 1816, Liverpool argued, stemmed primarily from the arduous transition from a lengthy war to peace, from a period of expansive government spending and frenetic production, to reductions in nearly every aspect of the economy. As an article (much admired by Liverpool) in the Quarterly Review of July 1816 explained, “a vacuum was inevitably produced by this sudden diminution, and the general dislocation which ensued may not unaptly be compared to the settling of the ice upon a wide sheet of water: explosions are made and convulsions are seen on all sides, in one place the ruptured ice is disloged and lifted up, in another it sinks … and thus the agitation continues for many hours till the whole has found its level, and nature resumes in silence its ordinary course.”
There simply was no magic bullet in the government’s limited arsenal of weapons to cure economic distress. “I see no immediate or adequate Remedy which Govt can apply,” insisted William Huskisson, a member of Liverpool’s ministry who subsequently earned a reputation as a fierce defender of free trade. “Their Game must be patience, temper and great discretion in all that is done or said.” Such a policy enjoyed David Ricardo’s wholehearted support. “I am sorry that the distresses still continue,” Ricardo wrote to James Mill on November 17. “The short crop this year was most unfortunate, it aggravated all our former ills.” Yet Ricardo insisted there was little the government could do to ameliorate the situation. “I am sorry to see a disposition to inflame the minds of the lower orders by persuading them that legislation can afford them any relief,” he continued. “The country has a right to insist, and I hope will insist, on the most rigid economy in every branch of the public expenditure, but when this is yielded nothing further can be done for us.”
Yet Liverpool and his ministers also recognized their responsibility to keep the British economy from falling off the cliff altogether. Clearly they could not permit widespread misery to accumulate until it exploded into a full-fledged revolution. So they issued reassuring statements to calm the public, and encouraged local communities to sponsor relief efforts through a limited program of public works and charitable contributions to feed the poor.
In an editorial on November 7, The Times of London explained this mind-set in detail. “In this country,” The Times argued, “it generally happens that public difficulty and distress are relieved by the good sense of the nation itself; for the Government on such occasions is rather accustomed to follow, than to take the lead.” Therefore “reliance must be placed on private liberality and wisdom to alleviate particular instances of hardship.” But while the propertied classes had a duty to preserve peace and alleviate the misery of the poor, the means of providing assistance mattered greatly. There would be no relief without work. “The best way to assist the poor,” The Times subsequently pointed out, “would be to maintain, together with their independent spirit, their industrious habits.” There should be “an economy of relief” that provided the poor “with the means of labour, and they will then feel that they are assisting themselves.” On another occasion, The Times charged, rather gratuitously, that workers who presently found themselves in desperate straits should have put more of their income into savings banks when they were employed, instead of spending it on “the gin-shop, the pawnbroker, and the lottery-offices.”
Typically, communities took up a subscription among the middle and upper classes, and used the proceeds to fund various projects to benefit the community. In the northeastern port town of Scarborough, for instance, 150 local men were put to work in November clearing away a large quantity of accumulated rubbish from the harbor. The city of Salisbury raised enough money to pay 140 people to dig and screen gravel, and then to carry it to streets in need of repair. In Hampstead, a number of “labouring poor” found work “altering and improving the highways and footpaths of the parish, and in other works of general utility.” The authorities at Frome, in Somerset, employed men to quarry stones and transport them to a depot; depending on how many loads they carried, the men earned from eight to ten shillings per week. A town meeting in Helston, Cornwall, elected to pay members of “the industrious poor” to enclose the Commons adjoining the town.
Seventy miles to the east, naval officials loaned shovels and wheelbarrows to Plymouth authorities so they could pay men to repair local roads. (The men were paid on a sliding scale—married men with families received the top pay of seven shillings and tuppence a week; “superannuated men”—i.e., the elderly—got only five shillings.) For counties in the London area, The Times suggested picking oakum (the laborious process of untwisting hemp rope) or making doormats. The most ambitious plan from the provinces came from Liverpool, where a meeting of “clergy, gentlemen, merchants” and other respectable citizens agreed to launch a fund-raising drive to employ up to 3,000 people during the winter on a project to expand and improve the docks.
Other communities, such as York, Newcastle, and Leeds, opened soup kitchens supported by private contributions. Rarely did they dispense any meals for free, except in extreme circumstances; most of these kitchens, such as the one in Limehouse, required the poor to pay a small fee for food—flour, potatoes, and beef—and for coals for fuel. Even so, the rapidly growing ranks of the needy threatened to overwhelm the limited charitable resources. A survey of Shropshire in early October revealed that one parish had “650 men, women, and children, totally destitute,” while another neighborhood counted between 2,000 and 3,000 laborers either out of work or only partially employed. Shropshire itself totaled an estimated 12,000 people whom a local official described as “in a state of utmost privation.”
Despite the reports of mediocre harvests, Liverpool’s government convinced itself the country could survive the winter without a serious threat of famine, and that conviction never wavered. In a letter to Peel on October 18, Lord Liverpool predicted that Britain would have an adequate supply of grain; two months later, Castlereagh assured John Quincy Adams that even though the harvest “had been partially bad, there would turn out to be enough for the consumption of the people.”
But reports of real and anticipated shortages drove grain prices higher in a very short time. In January 1816, wheat had sold for 52 shillings a quarter; by November, the price had nearly doubled, to 98s./9p. A few merchants initially supplemented domestic supplies with quantities of foreign grain illegally, in contravention of the Corn Laws. In October, smugglers along the Brittany coast sent shipments of French wheat clandestinely across the Channel, engaging in a brief skirmish with customs officials outside of Boulogne. In early November, however, the British government’s complex calculations determined that wheat prices had reached the tipping point specified by the Corn Laws, and so it opened British ports to foreign grain.
Yet to only limited effect.
Britain’s usual sources of supply on the Continent possessed little or no grain to sell except at exorbitant prices. Following the arrival of a few cargoes from the Netherlands—including grain that had been sent to England at considerably lower prices in 1815, only to be turned away when the Corn Laws went into effect—the Dutch government prohibited further shipments. British merchants who attempted to purchase wheat in Hamburg discovered that demand from other parts of Europe already had driven prices higher than their customers were willing to pay.
So the price of bread continued to rise in Britain, as did the price of milk—a direct result of the scarcity of fodder. A meeting of milkmen in Norwich declared that “through the Providence of God, the crops of corn and grain are almost all destroyed,” hence it would cost them more to feed their cows. Accordingly, they raised their prices by 25 percent, from eight pence to ten pence a quart.
Liverpool fully expected the rising price of necessities—accompanied by higher unemployment and stagnant trade—to generate increased disorder in the coming months. He warned Sidmouth on October 21 that Britain faced “a Stormy Winter” stemming in large measure from the unusually cold and sodden summer: “The evil of a high Price of Bread coming upon us before we have got rid of our Commercial & Agricultural Distresses.” Indeed the storm already had begun to break.
When the price of a quartern loaf (weighing about four pounds) of bread reached 1s. 2d. at the Surrey town of Guildford in the second week of October, an angry crowd of several hundred people gathered at the house of a baker whom they felt was charging excessive prices. Initially they expressed their outrage by banging on tin kettles and blowing horns; emboldened by reinforcements, the demonstrators soon graduated to violence, demolishing much of the building before the local authorities arrived and read the Riot Act. Two days later, the mayor warned the local bakers to keep price increases to a minimum.
Two weeks later, a mob assaulted farmers at a market at Sunderland in northern England and grabbed all the grain they could carry, dividing the spoil among themselves. At Walsall, eight miles outside of Birmingham, rioters broke the windows of several bakers, then marched to a grain mill about a mile outside of town and demolished it, too. The panic-stricken magistrates summoned detachments of cavalry from Wolverhampton and Handsworth, but by the time they arrived, most of the rioters had fled with their plunder.
Birmingham itself enjoyed a long tradition of amicable relations between employers and laborers, but at the end of October a crowd attacked the house and shop of a printer who had published a circular advising the poor to “quietly and peaceably wait till Providence shall please to restore to you prosperity,” adding that the penalty for violent riot would be death or exile. After demolishing the printer’s house, the mob turned on the police and the local prison keeper; only the arrival of cavalry and the usual reading of the Riot Act quelled the disturbance around midnight, but not until several rioters were ridden down by horses, and one of them killed.
South Wales witnessed worse disorders. In Glamorgan, ironworkers struck on October 18 when their employers—facing a loss of government orders in peacetime—cut their wages to one shilling per day. Supported by local miners, the ironworkers forced the closure of furnaces in Merthyr Tydfil, the center of the Welsh iron industry. Claiming that the miners had assumed “a most alarming appearance,” the high sheriff asked for troops from Swansea. Meanwhile, the strike spread to Monmouthshire and Newport. “I must also say that the discontented are in great force,” reported one eyewitness, “and determined to oppose every thing sent against them.” Several detachments of cavalry, including some troops who had fought at Waterloo a year earlier, eventually restored order. Thirty strikers were arrested and sent to Cardiff for trial. “I am much afraid,” a bystander predicted, “distress will be severely felt this winter.”
Spontaneous local disorders stemming from low wages and the high price of bread did not frighten Lord Liverpool and his cabinet unduly. What terrified them more than anything was the threat of mass action orchestrated by radical reformers whom the government believed were actually revolutionaries in disguise. With the French Terror less than twenty years behind them, Liverpool’s ministry equated popular meetings with mob rule; hence their apprehension when approximately 8,000 people gathered at Spa Fields, just north of London, on Friday, November 15, to hear Henry Hunt urge them to petition the Prince Regent for relief from their distress.
The arrival of sharply colder weather deepened the misery of the poor. On the morning of November 8, residents of London arose to a severe frost, with temperatures falling to 27 degrees. In York, the mercury slid all the way to 21 degrees, “a circumstance not remembered by the oldest inhabitant at this early period of the winter.” That evening the barometer dropped dramatically. On the morning of November 10, a powerful storm brought snow and sleet to the capital, followed by subfreezing temperatures that lasted until late the following day. This time, no one could blame sunspots for the frigid weather; as news reports pointed out, the spots had disappeared altogether from the face of the sun.
But Liverpool’s stormy winter was already under way. As Hunt spoke to the massive crowd from the open window of a tavern at the edge of Spa Fields, he focused on the evils of corrupt government that burdened the people with a heavy load of taxes: “Everything that concerned their subsistence or comfort was taxed. Was not their loaf taxed, was not beer taxed, were not their coats taxed, were not their shirts taxed, was not everything that they ate, drank, wore, and even said taxed?” All of this was quite unexceptionable, but the government doubtless noticed that Hunt was accompanied by two men, one carrying a tricolor flag of green, white, and red (“the colours of the future British Republic,” someone said recklessly) and the other a pike tipped with a cap of liberty. Nor did Liverpool and his colleagues welcome a reference to the nearby Coldbath Fields Prison as “the British Bastille, where so much tyranny had formerly been exercised.” The meeting ended peaceably, but later that evening a mob looted several bakers’ and butchers’ shops in the area.
Instead of summoning Parliament at the end of the year, as previously planned, Liverpool decided to wait until February. By that time, he felt sure, the radicals would have thrown off their disguise, and the nation could see them for the insurrectionaries they really were.
* * *
ON November 23, King George became the longest-reigning English monarch since the Norman Conquest: fifty-six years and twenty-nine days, surpassing the previous record-holder, Henry III. (Elizabeth I was in fourth place, just behind Edward III.) The occasion warranted few festivities; a month earlier, the royal family had celebrated the anniversary of the king’s accession to the throne with a private dinner party. King George himself remained in seclusion. His physicians continued to issue reports on the state of his health; on November 2, for instance, they declared that “His Majesty was rather less composed than usual during the former part of the last month, but His Majesty has since resumed his tranquility, and is in good bodily health.”
* * *
AT two o’clock on the afternoon of November 4, King Louis entered the Chamber of Deputies to the accompaniment of artillery salvos outside the assembly. A larger crowd than usual had gathered to hear the monarch open the new session of the legislature: Besides the diplomatic corps from other European nations, and the Peers of France (cloaked in their grand robes of state, bordered with ermine), there were numerous French and foreign dignitaries among the galleries, and two hundred ladies watching from the upper benches usually reserved for deputies.
“Tranquility reigns throughout the kingdom,” Louis began, curtly dismissing a recently quashed insurrection in Lyon as “a senseless enterprise” that only proved the loyalty of the army to his throne. France was at peace with all its neighbors; his government had made its reparations payments on time; and it continued to meet its treaty obligations. Only one unfortunate development cast a cloud over France’s tranquility. “The intemperance of the season has delayed the harvest,” the king acknowledged. “My people suffer, and I suffer more than they do,” he continued, with more ceremony than irony, “but I have the consolation of being able to inform you, that the evil is but temporary, and that the produce will be sufficient for the consumption.” Perhaps, but Louis admitted that the dismal harvest would require the government to make substantial additional expenditures to assist the nation’s poor. The king promised that the royal family would “make the same sacrifices this year as the last; and for the rest, I rely upon your attachment, and your zeal for the good of the State, and the honour of the French name.”
Four days later, an angry crowd gathered at a marketplace in the southern French city of Toulouse to protest the high price of bread, and to prevent shipments of grain from leaving their region. The farms in the countryside around Toulouse, in the department of Haute-Garonne, had enjoyed a reasonably normal harvest, but the extremely heavy demand in areas such as Provence and Bas-Languedoc, which had suffered far worse from the cold and rain, enticed local merchants to ship their grains to the neediest regions to obtain the highest price. Even in Toulouse, the price of grain had risen to thirty-two francs per hectolitre (100 litres), an increase of approximately 33 percent over the past twelve months. Fearing that grain shipments out of Haute-Garonne would create shortages in their own region over the winter and drive up the price of bread even further, the protestors on November 8 demanded that the grain remain in the city and that local authorities lower the cost to a “just” price of twenty-four francs per hectolitre.
Police attempted to disperse the crowd, but the mob roughed them up. The arrival of the mayor, accompanied by a detachment of soldiers, finally broke up the protest as authorities arrested nearly a dozen demonstrators. But three days later the mob reassembled and repeated its demand for bread at twenty-four francs. This time it took a company of mounted troops to dislodge the protestors, who headed towards the town’s granaries before the cavalry headed them off. The crowd responded by seizing three wagons loaded with grain and barricading themselves in the Faubourg Saint-Cyprien, relenting only when local officials summoned additional troops and a unit of the national guard from outside the city.
A similar incident occurred at the same time in the Vendée, on the west coast of France, where armed peasants stopped the shipment of wheat bound for Bayonne, and then stole what grain they could carry away. Peasants and townspeople in so many other departments followed suit, with merchants and soldiers battling mobs of men and women armed with pitchforks and sticks—sometimes aided by local authorities who wished to avoid shortages in their jurisdictions—that the minister of the interior issued instructions in mid-November to the nation’s prefects “strictly prohibiting all such obstructions or restrictions, as preventing the abundance of one district from supplying the deficiencies of another.” At the same time, the central government provided assurances that it would not allow French grain to be exported outside the nation’s boundaries. Meanwhile, officials in Paris wondered if Ultra-Royalists, bitter over their losses in the recent elections, were encouraging the popular discontent to embarrass the government.
In the midst of the protests, a snowstorm dropped “a great quantity of snow” on the town of Niort, just north of the Vendée, on the evening of November 10. The phenomenon was “the more surprising,” noted one newspaper, “as many years sometimes pass here without our seeing any snow; and when it does fall it falls in small quantities in the months of December and January.” Five days later, Parisians were equally surprised by the combination of snow and thunder. “This day, at one, during a very cold temperature, and while the snow fell abundantly,” reported the Gazette de France, “several claps of thunder were heard, preceded by lightning.”
* * *
AT noon on December 3, President Madison’s secretary presented Congress with a copy of his eighth and final annual message. For the first time in any formal presidential communication to Congress, the weather took center stage. “In reviewing the present state of our country,” Madison began, “our attention cannot be withheld from the effect produced by peculiar seasons which have very generally impaired the annual gifts of the earth and threatened scarcity in particular districts.” The president comforted Congress, however, with an assurance that the frigid summer and prolonged drought had not created a national crisis. The United States, Madison pointed out, encompassed such a diversity of climates, soils, and agricultural products that it could provide enough food to fulfill its own needs despite the scanty harvests in the East. And if the scarcity of foodstuffs required the American people to practice “an economy of consumption, more than usual,” they could still give thanks to Providence for “the remarkable health which has distinguished the present year.”
Madison proceeded to list the positive developments of the past twelve months: The United States was at peace with every other nation; American exports continued to expand, though the president decried his fellow countrymen’s tendency to purchase too many imported goods; and the frontier remained free of clashes with Indians, as the federal government continued its efforts to convert the natives into farmers and introduce them to “the arts and comforts of social life.”
Actually, neither the United States’s diplomatic affairs nor its relations with Native American tribes were quite as tranquil as Madison suggested. Two years after the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, relations between the United States and Britain were indeed improving rapidly. In London, negotiations between Lord Castlereagh and Ambassador Adams drew the two nations closer to agreements to demilitarize the Great Lakes—and effectively end American attempts to conquer southern Canada—and settle the boundary between the U.S. and Canada from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains.
Relations with Spain, however, had begun to deteriorate. The Spanish government under the recently restored Don Carlos lacked the military resources to secure its possessions in the Western Hemisphere, and Americans seized the opportunity to enrich themselves at Spain’s expense. During the War of 1812, Congress had snatched much of West Florida, and Jackson’s victory at New Orleans in January 1815 solidified the American title to Louisiana—indeed, its presence all along the Gulf Coast. While the Spanish government embarked upon a quixotic attempt to regain West Florida and Louisiana, many Americans in the Southern states cast a covetous eye at Spanish-controlled East Florida, especially since local authorities proved unable to prevent bands of Seminole Indians from venturing occasionally into Georgia to raid American farms and kill American settlers. In less than a year, the First Seminole War would be well under way, with both sides committing horrific barbarities.
Spanish officials also objected when American seamen took advantage of the disorder in the Gulf of Mexico to plunder Spanish ships, or to convey supplies to rebels in Mexico and Latin America. A brief war scare erupted in the fall of 1816 when American newspapers reported that Spanish vessels had fired upon and seized the USS Firebrand, a naval schooner ostensibly assigned to suppress piracy in the gulf. Andrew Jackson, then the commander of U.S. Army forces south of the Ohio River, insisted that this example of “Spanish insolence” required a forceful American response. “If it was an unauthorised attack by Spain, it should have been repelled by another unauthorised act by us,” Jackson wrote. “If authorised by the government of Spain, it was an act of war, and ought to be met as such.” Cooler heads prevailed, but a British observer could see that Spanish possessions in North America were living on borrowed time. “So long as any part of the Floridas belong to the Spanish Crown,” wrote a correspondent in The Times of London, “so long will there by no want of firebrands between that Monarchy and the United States.”
Reviewing the state of government finances, Madison predicted that his administration would close the year with a surplus. Federal tax revenues for 1816 were estimated at $47 million, against total payments of $38 million for all of the national government’s civil, military, and naval obligations. Madison suggested that the Treasury apply the $9 million surplus against the national debt of $110 million, largely the result of fighting the Revolution and the recently concluded war against Britain. Further, Madison predicted that the federal government would operate in the black again in 1817, thereby providing additional funds for “the effectual and early extinguishment of the public debt.”
Looking ahead, Madison renewed his suggestion that Congress establish a national university in the District of Columbia, and called for states to build more roads and canals to facilitate domestic commerce. He closed by congratulating the American people on forty years of liberty and independence, and thanked them for their support. “If I have not served my country with greater ability,” the president concluded, “I have served it with a sincere devotion.”
One day later, the electoral college met to cast their votes for president. To no one’s surprise, the Democratic-Republican ticket of James Monroe and Daniel Tompkins won an easy victory, carrying sixteen of nineteen states—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware remained in the Federalist column. (There was some question as to whether the recently admitted state of Indiana was qualified to cast electoral votes in this election, but Congress ultimately decided that it could.) Undismayed by his defeat, but perhaps stung by its magnitude, Rufus King explained that he had lost because Monroe “had the zealous support of nobody, and he was exempt from the hostility of Everybody.”
Most of the congressmen who arrived in Washington for the lame-duck session in December would not return when the fifteenth Congress convened in March. Popular outrage against the Compensation Act, exacerbated by anxieties about the distressing weather, poor harvests, and rising prices, cost 70 percent of incumbent congressmen their jobs—the highest rate of turnover in any congressional election in American history. Voters may not have blamed politicians directly for the frigid summer, but complaints about the “inauspicious season” and “precarious times” reflected a general mood of discontent that provoked a thorough purge of Congress. Not surprisingly, one of the first measures introduced in the December session was a resolution recommending repeal of the Compensation Act.
* * *
ON a pleasant morning in November, Ambassador John Quincy Adams went for a walk, leaving his house in West London and heading for Brentford. As he passed Gunnersbury, he saw a man lying facedown on the ground, apparently unconscious or dead. Enlisting the aid of a passerby, Adams revived the man and discovered that he was on his way to a hospital in Lambeth for treatment on his bad leg. “I asked him if he was in want,” Adams noted in his diary. “He said he had eaten nothing for two days.” Adams gave the stranger a shilling and suggested that he stop at a nearby pub for a hot meal. The encounter was not an isolated incident. “The number of these wretched objects that I meet in my daily walks is distressing,” Adams acknowledged. “Not a day passes but we have beggars come to the house, each with a different hideous tale of misery. The extremes of opulence and want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other that I ever saw.”
Occasionally the British populace’s patience wore thin despite Sir Francis Burdett’s assessment that “no other country in the world could exhibit a population, suffering under such accumulated distresses, where so much forebearance and temper were manifested.” On November 15, a crowd gathered at Lord Castlereagh’s home in St. James’s Square and threw stones at the windows, breaking a dozen panes of glass; the foreign secretary was not harmed. Several weeks later, radical leaders reconvened an assembly at Spa Fields. The previous gathering had dispatched Henry Hunt to present a petition for parliamentary reform to the Prince Regent. Twice Hunt attempted to meet with the prince; twice he was turned away.
As the crowd waited for Hunt to appear at Spa Fields, someone passed around a handbill that read, “A pot of beer for a penny and bread for two pence: HUNT REGENT and COBBETT KING: Go it, my boys!” Angered by the government’s disdain for their cause, and encouraged by an agent provocateur, a portion of the mob broke away and headed for the Tower of London, which they fancied the English equivalent of the Bastille. Along the way, they broke into a gunshop and stole some weapons. When they arrived at the Tower, several shots were fired and one member of the mob brandished a cutlass and called upon the Tower to surrender. It did not. Instead, a delegation of three magistrates and five constables arrested three of the leaders, whereupon the rest of the crowd dispersed.
It was precisely the type of incident Liverpool’s government had anticipated—“They sigh for a PLOT,” wrote Cobbett, “They are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot!”—and the Tories made the most of their good fortune. As Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s foreign minister, explained to the Duke of Wellington, “the effects of such violent crises always turn in favour of the good party.” Lord Sidmouth and his colleagues chose to interpret the Spa Fields debacle as the opening shot in an organized conspiracy designed to end, as a secret parliamentary committee explained, in the “total overthrow of all existing establishments, and in a division of the landed, and extinction of the funded property of the country.” By the time Parliament convened at the end of January, the government would have a full slate of repressive legislation primed for passage.
* * *
“THIS past summer and fall have been so cold and miserable that I have from despair kept no account of the weather,” wrote Adino Brackett in his diary in December. “It could have been nothing but a repeatation [sic] of frost and drought.” New England remained drier than normal throughout autumn, although a week of steady rain during the last week of October—the first prolonged period of precipitation since April—extinguished the forest fires across the region. A warm front arrived during the first week of November, sending temperatures briefly into the low 70s in Vermont and Massachusetts, followed by a storm that left a foot of snow in New Hampshire. The rest of November remained relatively warm, and December brought significantly milder weather than usual. “Warm month, very little frost,” noted an observer in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “Quite warm and pleasant,” agreed Reverend Samuel Robbins in East Windsor, Connecticut, on December 18. A sharp cold snap four days later persuaded Reverend Robbins that “the people appear to feel, in some measure, the frowns of heaven which lie upon them,” but milder weather soon returned and remained through the middle of January.
So long as the weather cooperated, the stream of emigrants from New England continued westward. Sometimes a group of farmers from the same town organized an emigration company, purchased land in Ohio or Indiana, and then traveled together. One caravan from Durham, Maine, consisted of 16 wagons and 120 people (including their minister), bound for a township they planned to buy in Indiana.
Families who traveled by themselves found the journey wearisome. “I have seen some families of eight or 9 children on the road,” wrote a young single farmer, “some with their horses tired others out of Money &c.” Samuel Goodrich, a bookseller in Hartford, Connecticut, recalled seeing “families on foot—the father and boys taking turns in dragging along an improvised hand-wagon, loaded with the wreck of the household goods—occasionally giving the mother and baby a ride. Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they reached the expected Canaan…” A popular route from Maine to the west ran through Easton, Pennsylvania; in the course of a single month, 511 wagons carrying 3,066 travelers passed through the town. One family of eight bound for Indiana arrived in Easton in late December after walking all the way from their farm in Maine, pulling a cart loaded with their youngest children and a few possessions.
Many families left New England with very little money, hoping to find temporary employment on farms along the way. Those fortunate enough to find work typically received payment in food, such as oats or buckwheat; by December, however, the demand for labor had largely disappeared, and the emigrants were left to rely on the kindness of strangers. Thomas Baldwin, a farmer in his mid-forties from the Kennebunk River in Maine who intended to settle in Tennessee, arrived in New York City “somewhat depressed by fatigue,” drawing behind him “a hand-cart containing all his effects, chattels and provisions, and two children of an age too feeble to travel; behind followed the elder children and the wife, bearing in her arms a robust infant seven months old.” The Baldwins had already covered four hundred miles; their destination lay another eight hundred miles ahead. As they labored past the corner of Pearl and Wall Streets, several bystanders took pity on the family and handed them ten- and twenty-dollar banknotes.
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.”