HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 128

Location 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820

United States 100 124 154 127 86 59

Britain 100 117 146 131 114 102

France 100 145 185 126 94 98

Switzerland 100 162 235 121 81 75

Austria (Vienna) 100 188 183 52 30 40

Bavaria (Munich) 100 190 301 131 n.a. 46

Unweighted averages 100 154 201 115 81 70

Figure 9.5. Index of wholesale grain prices for western Europe and the United States, 1815-20, which
shows the dramatic surge in transatlantic grain prices owing to the ruined harvests of 1816 and 1817,
followed by their equally stunning collapse in 1819-20. Index numbers for the United States, Britain,
France, and Switzerland represent wheat prices, and Austria (Vienna) and Bavaria (Munich) rye prices.
Adapted from John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1977), 37.

Thomas Jefferson experienced the Panic of 1819 as a profound, personal depression of
body and mind. “After two years of prostrate health,” he wrote in the fall of 1820, “you have
the old, infirm, and nerveless body I now am, unable to write but with pain, and unwilling
to think without necessity.” 51 In one sense, Jefferson's pain in these years is purely person-
al and pitiable: the unfortunate result of an old man's bad luck and wavering judgment. At
another level, however, it stands as a poignant symbol of national distress. Jefferson was nev-
er closer to the citizenry he ruled for eight years—and in whose imagination he held such
a vaunted place—than during the Panic of 1819, when over three hundred banks across the
nation failed overnight. His experience of crop failure, debt, and humiliation after 1816 was
shared by legions of his fellow Americans who lost their farms, jobs, homes, and life savings
in an economic crisis of epic dimensions. “Never were such hard times,” Jefferson wrote in
April 1820 as the U.S. economy subsided from panic into a general depression. “Not a dol-
lar is passing from one to another.” The former president was well aware of the scope of the
suffering, both nationally and near at hand. With the people of Virginia “in a condition of
unparalleled distress,” a breakdown of civil order seemed imminent. “I fear,” he wrote, “local
insurrections against these horrible sacrifices of property.” 52