HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 130

but it was the young republic's first depression and, by many measures, the most wrenching
national economic crisis of the nineteenth century. The Tambora period and its aftermath in-
troduced shell-shocked Americans to the nasty vicissitudes of both climate and commerce.
It dealt a body blow to republican optimism, the effects of which reverberated well into the
1820s.
Furthermore, from an environmental viewpoint, the legacy of the mid- to late
1810s—endless cold weather followed by proverbial “hard times”—challenged Americans'
Jeffersonian faith that the country's future lay in the sunny conjunction of an improving
climate, expanding agriculture, and economic growth. The coincidence of hard times with
the return of good weather after 1818 was especially demoralizing. A frustrated Committee
on Manufactures in Washington wondered at the paradox of financial collapse in a country
where “the sea, the forest, the earth, yield their abundance; the labor of man is rewarded; pes-
tilence, famine, or war commit no ravages; no calamity has visited the people; peace smiles
on us: [and] plenty blesses the land.” In the Panic of 1819, the American public experienced
the apparent historical decoupling of climate and prosperity, a signature of industrial mod-
ernity. While the Year without a Summer made beggars of the Europeans, it was the return
of normal weather in 1818 that threw the dependent American economy into disarray. 58 The
United States had suffered the first rude shock of nineteenth-century economic globalization.
Post-panic, the United States moved quickly to improve its competitive position in the
global market. Just as the extreme weather disaster of 1816 set of a wave of transport in-
frastructure construction—including the Cumberland Pike and Erie Canal—to better connect
the country's agriculture with its points of sale, response to the 1819-22 depression focused
on the rationalization of currency and depersonalization of credit. No more signing extravag-
ant, unbacked bills for friends, family, and creditors, à la Thomas Jefferson. Instead, a new
Hamiltonian era of national credit and currency evolved under a more stably administered
national bank—until Andrew Jackson arrived to tear it all down again in the 1830s. 59
In all this, however, one truth about the Tambora emergency in the transatlantic zone
should not be lost sight of. Without an international market in grain to ship food supplies
from Baltimore, Constantinople, and Odessa to the capitals of western Europe, millions more
people would surely have starved to death in the European subsistence crisis of 1816-17. 60
The crippling depression that subsequently afflicted the United States represents the econom-
ic “downside” of this market response to a short-term international food emergency. By 1818,
Tambora's pall of gloom had passed, as abruptly and mysteriously as it had come. And yet
its destructive impact—both ecological and economic—endured many years. During the sub-
sequent “hard times” of 1819-22, American farmers abandoned their golden wheat fields in
the West, while warehouses full of grain—so recently in desperate demand—were left to rot
unsold in the port of New Orleans.
THE RETURN OF CLIMATE PESSIMISM
For all their differences, Thomas Jefferson and the Comte de Buffon shared the Enlightenment
dream of geo-engineering—of a global climate moderated and perfected through agricultural
science. Little did they realize, however, that a massive global experiment in climate engin-
eering was just underway in their lifetimes through the industrial application of fossil fuels.