The Year Without Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

1802, Congress had authorized
     the construction of the National Road across the Appalachians, but fourteen years
     later the road had not yet crossed the Ohio River. Hence merchants and farmers continued
     to rely on river systems to move goods in the interior.
    Yet significant improvements lay close at hand. Steamboats, dismissed as “floating
     smokestacks” by skeptical observers when Samuel Fulton’s prototype made its debut
     on the Hudson River in 1807, were slowly gaining popularity, especially on the Western
     rivers. And Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York had begun to elicit legislative support
     for the construction of a canal (derided by his critics as “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or
     “the Governor’s Gutter”) that would stretch across the state for 340 miles from Albany
     to Buffalo, through thick forests and disease-ridden swamps, connecting the Hudson
     River with the Great Lakes.
    Manufacturing was poised to expand as well. When the recent war temporarily deprived
     American consumers of British goods, New England merchants and entrepreneurs provided
     financial backing for scores of small-scale domestic textile “manufactories” that
     produced a total of $24 million worth of cotton goods and provided employment to nearly
     a hundred thousand men, women, and children. Americans produced an additional $19
     million worth of woolen goods in 1815, and the Boston Manufacturing Company, headed
     by Frances Cabot Lowell, had recently completed the nation’s first integrated textile
     factory along the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts.
    In the aftermath of war, a new spirit of nationalism swept over the United States.
     For the past twenty-five years, the nation had been riven by deep divisions over domestic
     issues—primarily Alexander Hamilton’s economic proposals—and the war in Europe. The
     disagreements produced the first two political parties in the United States: the Federalists,
     led by Hamilton and John Adams, who were horrified at the disorder and excesses of
     the French Revolution; and the Democratic-Republicans, who shared Thomas Jefferson’s
     dislike of a strong central government, and Madison’s distrust of Great Britain.
    Lately, however, many Republicans had come to accept much of the Federalist domestic
     agenda; a powerful central government seemed less threatening if they controlled it,
     as they had since 1801. (Madison, however, had grown no more fond of Britain since
     the king’s troops burned the President’s Mansion in Washington; in early 1816 Madison
     was living in a private dwelling on the corner of New York Avenue and 18th Street
     known as the “Octagon House,” while workmen repaired and repainted the mansion, this
     time with white rather than gray paint.) Moderate Federalists who could recognize
     a lost cause were deserting to the opposition in increasing numbers. And a series
     of costly missteps by the dwindling band of hard-core Federalist stalwarts—including
     vocal opposition to the war effort and a thinly veiled threat by New England political
     leaders in December 1814 to secede—destroyed any hopes the Federalists may have entertained
     to regain power on the national level.
    Partisan rancor thus subsided, although it did not entirely disappear when the Fourteenth
     Congress concluded its regular session in the spring of 1816. Legislators spent much
     of their time debating economic issues. In early April, Congress approved the first
     protective tariff in the nation’s history. Several weeks later, legislators voted
     to establish a second Bank of the United States, to provide a uniform, stable currency
     and a source of credit for business ventures.
    Yet there remained many congressmen and voters, especially from rural areas, who distrusted
     the power of a central bank independent of popular control. These same critics demanded
     that the federal government cut taxes now that the war had ended. Since military expenditures
     during the