Corn suffering from drought in Arkansas, 1935. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
This summer, Lapham’s Quarterly is marking the season with readings on the subject or set during its reign. Check in every Friday until Labor Day to read the latest.
In July 1776 Thomas Jefferson had just finished the final draft of the Declaration of Independence and took on a new project: keeping track of the weather, a habit he continued until the month before his death on July 4, 1826. Decades of observation led him to write in 1809 that “the change which has taken place in our climate is one of those facts which all men of years are sensible of, and yet none can prove by regular evidence.” (Benjamin Franklin had wondered if deforestation was to blame.) In 1816 an extreme and abrupt change in the American climate occurred when infamously cold temperatures—now believed to have been caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year—plagued the globe. Observers would later dub the period “A Year Without a Summer.”
Gillen D’Arcy Wood wrote about the volcano’s effect on North America in his 2014 book Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World:
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.
Jefferson spent his 1816 summer complaining to friends about how the frigid temperatures were dooming his agricultural prospects, while being far more upbeat about other potential changes to the country’s future. As Jefferson had explained to the lawyer Samuel Kercheval in July:
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them, like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions…But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind…We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
On September 7, 1816, Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, his former secretary of the Treasury, about the climate and deifying founding documents. His letter ends by noting that Virginia’s citizens—at that point suffrage was limited to white male landowners, some of whom, like Jefferson, were slaveholders—were eager to amend their constitution, which they did in 1830.
We have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America. In June, instead of three and three-fourths inches, our average of rain for that month, we had only a third of an inch. In August instead of nine and one-sixth inches, our average, we had only eight-tenths of an inch. And it still continues. The summer too has been as cold as a moderate winter. In every state north of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June and July. But those of August killed much corn over the mountains. The crop of corn through the Atlantic states will probably be less than a third of an ordinary one, and of mean quality. The crop of wheat was middling in quantity, but excellent in quality. But every species of bread grain taken together will not be sufficient for the subsistence of the inhabitants; and the exportation of flour, already begun by the indebted and the improvident, to whatsoever degree it may be carried, will be exactly so much taken from the mouths of our own citizens. My anxieties on this subject are the greater, because I remember the deaths which the drought of 1755 in Virginia produced from the want of food.
There will not be the smallest opposition to the election of Monroe and Tompkins; the Republicans being undivided and the Federalists desperate. The Hartford convention, and peace of Ghent, have nearly annihilated them.
Our state is becoming clamorous for a convention and amendment of their constitution, and I believe will obtain it. It was the first constitution formed in the U.S., and of course the most imperfect. The other states improved in theirs in proportion as new precedents were added, and most of them have since amended. We have entered on a liberal plan of internal improvements, and the universal approbation of it will encourage and ensure its prosecution. I recollect nothing else domestic worth noting to you, and therefore place here my respectful and affectionate salutations.
Read the other entries in this series: Charles Dudley Warner, I.A.R. Wylie, Jennie Carter, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Willa Cather, Fridtjof Nansen, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Izumi Shikibu, Hilda Worthington Smith, Mark Twain, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William James.