HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 129

Figure 9.6. This idyllic view of Monticello was drawn the summer before the incumbent's death in 1826.
It shows Jefferson's grandchildren gamboling over the estate's famous gardens. An unspoken irony of the
image (in addition to the absence of slaves) is that Jefferson's debts—blown out beyond all recovery by
the Panic of 1819—ensured that his descendants would not inherit Monticello. The children are enjoy-
ing summer at their grandfather's estate for the last time. (© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello;
Photo: H. Andrew Johnson.)
In the words of historian Daniel Dupre, “The Panic of 1819 is not just a tale of banks and
currency, of debtors and creditors and sheriff's sales; it is the story of an emotional upheaval
and shattering of a collective expectation of progress and prosperity.” 53 The raw statistics are
brutal enough. In the crash year 1819, imports dropped 55% and exports more than 40% as
business nationwide ground to a halt. In the West, newspapers likened the subsequent depres-
sion to the “Famine of Egypt.” In Kentucky, debtors overflowed the jails and filled the town
squares. Court records from the period are conspicuously missing from frontier towns of that
state, raising the possibility they were later destroyed to hide community shame at the wave
of criminal default brought on by the Panic. Some bankrupt men were driven to suicide, while
others hid in churches or escaped into the wilderness with their families, hoping to restart
their lives beyond the reach of debt collectors.
A ghost map of early nineteenth-century Missouri would show dozens of towns—with
hopeful names such as Missouriton, Washington, and Monticello—founded during the heyday
of the boom, only to be abandoned in the crash. 54 “Last year we talked of the difficulties of
paying forour lands,” wrote one speculator, “this year thequestion is, how to exist.” Bankrupt
land investors in the West and South ultimately forfeited hundreds of thousands of acres back
to the federal government, stalling westward migration for more than a decade. Meanwhile,
in the eastern cities, John Quincy Adams reported “enormous numbers of persons utterly
ruined; multitudes in deep distress; and a general mass disaffection to the government.” 55
Outside Baltimore, the indigent set up shantytowns, as would become a common sight in the
American cities of the 1930s. In Boston, the streets “present[ed] a dull and uncheery spec-
tacle—silence reigns, [with] gloom and despondency in every countenance.” 56 The Panic of
1819 had succeeded to the unrelenting misery of “hard times.”
The eruption of Tambora was thus responsible for far more than a single summerless year
in New England. By precipitating violent short-term fluctuations in the price of grain in the
transatlantic region, the Tamboran weather of 1815-18 was a primary cause of the United
States' first major economic depression. 57 The collapse of the European market for American
commodities in 1818, combined with a currency crisis, crippled every sector of the U.S. eco-
nomy and brought an abrupt end to the so-called Era of Good Feelings that followed the end
of the war with Britain. The financial meltdown of 1819-22—when the U.S. population stood
at barely ten million—might not have equaled the Great Depression of the 1930s in scale,