HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 127

to cover the depreciated notes. There was nothing to do but seek out more friends and fam-
ily, and have them endorse more loans. Tormented with anxiety about the mounting financial
crises he faced, Jefferson developed a painful outbreak of boils in August. His hopes for relief
rested with selling his flour at high prices at the Richmond market.
But now, in September 1818, the other shoe dropped. In an ironic twist to the Tambora
tale, it was the return of good weather that doomed the U.S. economy in the post-volcanic
period. In 1817, the total value of U.S. grain exports had doubled in value, to $23 million,
while the following year Britain imported the greatest volume of grain in its history. Over half
a million barrels of American flour passed through the Liverpool docks. 47 But with the aerosol
dust from Tambora's eruption washed from the North Atlantic atmosphere by the summer of
1818, normal crop-growing conditions returned to the European continent, which enjoyed a
return of bumper harvests.
The poet Keats, whose brother George had recently joined the tide of British emigrants to
the American West, celebrated the return of sunny English harvesting in his famous ode “To
Autumn”:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run (ll. 1-4)
The sumptuous happiness of that poem speaks for the relief of an entire continent. But English
“mellow fruitfulness” turned sour on their American brothers across the pond, including
Keats's own, who returned penniless to London during the Panic (only to raid his tubercular
sibling's trust fund and bolt back to Kentucky). As a result of improved European crop yields,
the market for American commodities plummeted overnight. Philadelphia wheat went into
free fall from a high of $3.11 a bushel in 1817, bottoming out at 82 cents in 1821. A hun-
dredweight of Virginia flour, worth over $14 at the height of the boom, brought only $4 in
1820. 48 Meanwhile, cotton prices fell by two-thirds, devastating the economy of the Tenness-
ee Valley. When Jefferson's flour finally reached the Richmond market, it returned half the
price he expected. By September, he was describing to friends the total collapse of his health.
It's not difficult to see the agitating cause. “To owe what one cannot pay,” he wrote at the
time, “is a constant torment.” 49
By early 1819, the collapse of European demand for American cotton and grain, combined
with the national bank's contraction of credit, had generated a full-blown financial panic in
the United States. In February, with the price of flour fallen still further, Jefferson made what
must have been a heartbreaking decision: he would sell portions of his Monticello property to
pay his debts. Yet greater humiliation followed. In April, he was forced to admit to his agent
Gibson that his lands had little market value. The value of property had fallen to less than
a year's rent—and with no buyers to be had even at that price! This latest setback saw Jef-
ferson take on a further debt load totaling almost $11,000, consisting of five separate loans
from three banks. His “entanglements,” as Jefferson called them, were now beyond any ra-
tional scale. The former president, along with millions of his fellow citizens, was floating on
the rim of a giant bubble—reality fast receding beneath him: “All is confusion, uncertainty,
and panic.” 50