HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 125

produced bumper crops and sold their bounty at record prices. The volume of flour and grain
loaded on flatboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans in 1817 increased fourfold compared
to 1814. The following summer, 1818, the boom continued unabated. A steamboat traveler
heading north counted 643 flatboats bound for New Orleans in a brief few weeks' passage. 34
As the Atlantic states faced disastrous crop shortfalls, the new grain-producing regions of the
west loomed more than ever as a Promised Land.
Thanks to the blessed intercession of western agriculture, the famine Jefferson himself had
feared for Virginia and the Atlantic states in 1817-18 never eventuated, despite the general
misery and alarm. What Jefferson did not reckon upon, however—and never properly un-
derstood—was the full ripple effect of “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death” through the
transatlantic economy and the primary role it played in America's first great depression of
1819-22. 35 As a cash-poor plantation farmer, Jefferson himself stood at the frontline of that
impending economic collapse. Despite the impression of Olympian serenity he presented to
visitors, Jefferson experienced the Tambora-driven economic crisis of those post-1816 years
in a sickening spiral of indebtedness that culminated in the great personal humiliation of his
old age: the mortgaging of his beloved Monticello.
By the late summer of 1818, the directors of the national bank of the United States had
grown increasingly fearful of a credit bubble spurred by the extraordinary wave of migra-
tion and land speculation in the frontier West. A combination of 1816's disastrous weather
and the subsequent demand for western grain on both sides of the Atlantic had lured settlers
across the Appalachians in the tens of thousands. “So terrible was the year 1816,” one New
Hampshire diarist recorded, “that the people grew disheartened and many sold out and went
west.” 36
Land speculators advertised aggressively for new settlers, convincing many New England
farmers to sell up on the spot. Entire communities traveled together in wagon trains, looking
to establish new townships in Ohio or Indiana; the latter welcomed forty-two thousand new
inhabitants in 1816 alone. 37 “Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward,”
wrote the English promoter Morris Birkbeck in his best-selling Illinois travelogue of 1818.
One witness in Missouri rated the hordes of migrants on a scale of natural disasters, as a
“flood,” a “mountain torrent,” an “avalanche.” Jefferson himself called the migratory wave
out of Virginia in 1816-18 “beyond anything imaginable.” 38
The desperate poor were sometimes reduced to crossing the mountains on foot, including
a family of eight who trudged from Maine to Easton, Pennsylvania, arriving in the dead of
winter with their smallest child nearly frozen in a hand cart. 39 But the call of Westward Ho!
was heeded not only by impoverished refugees. According to influential travel writer Henry
Fearon, who toured the length and breadth of the United States in 1817-18, the migrant wave
also included “men of capital, of industry … who apprehended approaching evils” and were
concerned “to provide for the future support and prosperity of their offspring.”40 40
Western politicians took advantage of the economic distress in the East following the poor
harvests of 1816 and 1817 by painting the advantages of trans-Appalachian migration in the
gaudiest Jeffersonian colors: “There neither is, nor, in the nature of things can there ever be,
anything like poverty there. All is ease, tranquility, and comfort,” wrote one Missouri rep-
resentative. Economic refugees from Europe's disastrous 1816 joined the tide. Despite the ef-
forts of the British Parliament to limit the number of passengers aboard U.S.-bound vessels,
1817 witnessed the greatest number of British and European migrants yet to arrive on Amer-