The Year Without Summer Read Online Free PDF

June 18, 1815, British
     and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blucher dealt
     a crushing defeat to Napoléon’s army outside the Belgian town of Waterloo. The outcome
     had hung in the balance for most of the day; Wellington later acknowledged that the
     battle had been “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” It had been exactly
     a hundred days since Napoléon had entered Paris in triumph. This time, the Allied
     statesmen at Vienna gave the British government sole authority to choose the site
     of the Eagle’s exile—it selected the remote island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic—and
     sole responsibility for keeping him there. With Napoléon removed from the scene, it
     seemed unlikely that the United States would be drawn into European affairs anytime
     in the near future. “We are, happily, at peace with all the world,” exulted one Massachusetts
     congressman, “and there are no indications which threaten soon to disturb this tranquility.”
    Everything in the United States appeared to be expanding. Since 1789, the nation had
     added five new states and five territories. By European standards, the United States’s
     population was growing at an astonishing rate. In 1815, there were nearly 8.5 million
     Americans, twice as many as there had been only twenty-five years earlier. Immigration—primarily
     from northern and western Europe—contributed to this prolific growth, but most of
     the increase came from Americans who married young and had large families; on average,
     American women in the early nineteenth century had between seven and eight live births.
     It was also a very young population: 85 percent of the population was under the age
     of forty, including nearly all of the leaders of Congress.
    Slightly more than 80 percent of Americans were white, and in a nation where land
     was cheap but labor scarce, the vast majority of white adults—more than 80 percent—made
     their living as subsistence farmers. Most American farmers spent only a portion of
     their working hours tending their crops, however, doubling as coopers, or tanners,
     or blacksmiths, or shoemakers. Wives and children frequently carded wool or spun linen
     in the evenings after spending their days in the fields. Farm families produced enough
     goods for their own needs, and sold the rest. “Go into the interior of the country,”
     wrote Albert Gallatin, former secretary of the treasury, “and you will scarcely find
     a farmer who is not, in some degree, a trader. In a grazing part of the country, you
     will find them buying and selling cattle; in other parts you will find them distillers,
     tanners, or brick-makers.”
    Fewer than seven percent of Americans lived in cities, the largest of which were New
     York and Philadelphia, but neither even remotely approached the size of London or
     Manchester. Nearly all of the nation’s towns were located on the East Coast, relying
     on commerce for their prosperity. Most municipalities lacked any public sewer or water
     system, which meant that garbage, dead animals, and human waste routinely accumulated
     in the streets.
    Manufacturing remained relatively primitive. Beyond the products of farm families,
     most of the goods offered for sale were fashioned by mechanics working by hand, either
     in a small shop or at home. Transportation was even less advanced. Goods and passengers
     rarely traveled very far over land; American roads were notoriously poor, many no
     more than narrow, bumpy, overgrown trails that turned into quagmires when it rained.
     (Travelers told stories of horses actually drowning in the pits, and wagons sinking
     slowly out of sight.) It cost as much to send a ton of goods thirty miles from an
     ocean port inland as it did to ship it three thousand miles across the Atlantic. And
     progress was slow; a traveler who set out by carriage from Boston in April would not
     arrive in Charleston, South Carolina, until July. In