1803
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Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court rules that any act of Congress is null and void if it conflicts with the Constitution. Federalist William Marbury has sued Secretary of State James Madison, who in 1801 denied Marbury his appointment as a justice of the peace, an appointment made by outgoing president John Adams. Marshall knows that if the Court forces Madison to deliver the commission it will be ignored by the Jefferson administration, thus weakening the power of the judiciary, and if the Court supports Madison it will be perceived that the justices acted out of fear. Marshall rules that Madison should have delivered the commission to Marbury but that the Judiciary Act of 1789 giving the Supreme Court power to issue writs of mandamus exceeded the authority given to the court under Article III of the Constitution and is therefore null and void. The unanimous decision handed down February 24 in the case of Marbury v. Madison establishes the Court as the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
Ohio enters the Union March 1 as the 17th state.
The Louisiana Purchase April 30 doubles the size of the United States, extending her western border to the Rocky Mountains and thwarting any further hopes that Britain, France, or Spain may have for dominion over North America. President Jefferson has offered to buy the city of New Orleans from France; desperate for funds to finance Bonaparte's military adventures, foreign minister Charles de Talleyrand recognizes that France's hold on Saint Domingue is shaky. He does not want the Mississippi Valley to fall into British hands, so he ignores the terms of the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain and agrees to sell the entire 828,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory to the United States for 80 million francs (about $15 million). With economist Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours acting as intermediary, U.S. Minister to France Robert R. Livingston negotiates the treaty authorizing the purchase that is financed in part by the 40-year-old London banking house John & Francis Baring & Company. The U.S. Senate ratifies the treaty October 20 (the vote is 24 to 7, with all but one Federalist senator opposing it), the French flag comes down at New Orleans December 3, and the U.S. flag is raised in its stead.
Massachusetts and New York threaten to secede from the Union in protest against the Louisiana Purchase that President Jefferson has made without consent of the Senate and has cost nearly twice the entire U.S. national budget. About 400,000 whites inhabit the new territory, most of them in the Deep South.
Revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams dies at his native Boston October 2 at age 81. He served as governor of Massachusetts from 1794 to 1797.
A seven-vessel U.S. Navy fleet sails into the Mediterranean under the command of Captain Edward Preble, 42, to stop attacks on American merchant shipping by Barbary Coast pirates (see 1801). Preble meets with the sultan of Morocco, resolves treaty violations, and sails on to Tripoli, where he mounts a blockade of the harbor, but the 38-gun frigate Philadelphia runs aground on a sand bar October 31 and is captured. The Tripolitanian corsairs put more than 300 members of her crew in chains and hold them for ransom, escalating hostilities with the United States (see 1805; Decatur, 1804).
Swiss cantons regain their independence under terms of the Act of Mediation.
Britain and France renew hostilities May 16, the French complete their occupation of Hanover, and they threaten to invade England from Boulogne, where they begin to assemble an invasion fleet.
Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, 25, leads a rebellion against the British. He spoke with Bonaparte and Talleyrand last year in an effort to obtain French support. His small band of followers commits two murders and other acts of violence July 23 in a move to capture the viceroy, but the rioters are quickly dispersed. Emmet escapes, goes into hiding, is captured August 25, tried by a special court, and hanged September 20 having said the night before, "let no man write my epitaph."
British Army officer William (Henry Cavendish) Bentinck, Lord Bentinck, 29, is appointed governor of Madras, raising eyebrows that a man so young should be given such a high position. Second son of the 3rd duke of Portland, Bentinck was commissioned an ensign in the Coldstream Guards at age 17 and by age 20 was a lieutenant colonel (see mutiny, 1806).
The Battle of Assaye September 23 in the Second Anglo-Maratha War ends in victory for British forces under Arthur Wellesley, 34, who has restored Baji Rao II as Maratha peshwa of Poona in May (see 1802). Wellesley is a brother of India's governor general Richard Colley, 1st marquis Wellesley; he defeats the Maratha chief Daulat Rao Sindhia of Gwalior but is recalled as London becomes alarmed at his policies. Wellesley has been serving under General Gerard Lake, now 59, who was named commander in chief of British forces in India 3 years ago, arrived in July 1801, has worked to modernize the Indian Army, and defeats Sindhia's French-trained forces, occupying Delhi, winning a battle at Laswari November 1, and capturing Sindhia; under terms of the Treaty of Surji-Arjungaon signed by Lake and Sindhia December 30, Sindhia agrees to receive a British resident, his control over Rajasthan is relaxed, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II comes under British protection, and the East India Company is entrusted with the administration of Sindhia's territories in Gohad and Gujurat (see 1805).
The Hawaiian chief Kamehameha, 66, unites the eight major Sandwich Islands, employing American, English, and Welsh governors (see Cook, 1778; Kamehameha II, 1818).
Denmark forbids her subjects from engaging in the slave trade as of January 1, but planters in the Danish West Indies continue to use slave labor in their sugar fields (see Britain, U.S., 1807).
South Carolina resumes importing slaves as Eli Whitney's 1792 cotton gin makes cotton growing profitable and boosts demand for field hands.
Bonaparte revokes the French assembly's emancipation decree of 1794, declaring his intention to reintroduce slavery in Hispaniola and other French territorial possessions (see politics, 1802). Former black and mulatto slaves rebel under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, now 45, and his lieutenant Henri Christophe; Bonaparte sends out a new, 5,000-man army to subdue the rebels, but they obtain British help to expel the French, who bring in from Martinique a son of the prominent general Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau. A Royal Navy captain accepts the surrender of Les Cayes October 12, Christophe assembles a 20,000-man army to oppose the 5,000 men mustered by Rochambeau, the two forces meet November 11, Rochambeau capitulates to Dessaliines November 19, he agrees to turn over the island's forts and artillery undamaged within 10 days on condition that he and his troops be allowed to embark with all their baggage, and a proclamation signed November 22 promises justice to all men of good will, including former white property owners (see politics, 1804).
Divorce becomes much harder to obtain in France under the Civil Code established by Bonaparte (see 1792). Adultery, ill treatment, and condemnation to certain degrading forms of punishment remain grounds for divorce, but while a man may divorce his wife on simple grounds of adultery she may divorce him on such grounds only if he actually brings his mistress into his home; the new code eliminates incompatibility as a cause, and divorce by mutual consent requires permission from family members. The new code will reduce the incidence of divorce by roughly 10 percent (see 1816).
Chicago has its beginnings in Fort Dearborn, built by U.S. federal troops on Lake Michigan and named for President Jefferson's Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. Sainte-Domingue (Haiti)-born trader Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable, now 53, settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, helped build his trading post into an important fur- and grain-trading establishment, but sold out 3 years ago and moved to Missouri Territory (see 1825; transportation [steamboat], 1832).
Buffalo, New York, is laid out at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Erie by Holland Land Company surveyor Joseph Ellicott (see architecture [Washington], 1790).
Cotton passes tobacco for the first time as the leading U.S. export crop.
Renewal of hostilities in Europe brings higher prices for American farm products and increases trade for U.S. shipping merchants such as Asa Clapp, 41, of Portland; George Cabot, 51, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and James Lloyd, 33, of Boston; and Nicholas Brown Jr. of Providence.
Boston-born mercantile clerk John Perkins Cushing, 16, voyages to China in the company of Ephraim Bumstead, oldest apprentice in the trading firm Perkins & Co. operated by Cushing's uncle Thomas Handasyd Perkins, now 28. Bumstead will soon die; Cushing will remain in the Orient and spearhead the firm's participation in opium trading (see 1816).
Merchant John Brown dies at Providence, Rhode Island, September 20 at age 67, having used some of his profits from the slave trade and China trade to help finance the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University). He withdrew from Nicholas Brown & Company in about 1770, manufactured cannon for the Continental Army, and has served in Congress; his 34-year-old nephew Nicholas, Jr. heads the firm that bears the family name that will be used beginning next year for the college founded in 1764.
Traite d'économie politique by French political economist Jean Baptiste Say, 36, helps popularize the ideas of the late Adam Smith, whose beliefs Say expounded in La Décade, which he edited from 1794 to 1800. A champion of free markets, Say will be famous for the statement, "Supply creates its own demand," although he will never actually use those words, and will be credited by some with inventing modern capitalism. "I do not see how the products of a nation in general can ever be too abundant," he writes, "for each such product (through payment of wages, profits, etc.) provides the means for purchasing another. The mass of products composes the mass of a nation's wealth, and wealth is no more inconvenient to nations than it is to private persons."
E. I. du Pont de Nemours is founded in Delaware with $36,000 in capitalization (see 1802). President Jefferson has promised government orders, the company's Eleutherian Mills will be producing gunpowder in commercial quantities by the spring of next year, sales for 1804 will total $10,000, they will reach $43,000 by 1807, and profits will exceed $40,000 per year by 1811 (see 1814).
The Ames Shovel Company started by John Ames in 1774 is taken over by his son Oliver, 24, who invests $1,600 to expand operations and moves the firm to Easton, Massachusetts. Faced with little competition, Ames shovels will be the largest-selling U.S. shovels and play a major role in digging the Erie Canal (see transportation, 1817) and other canals, building U.S. railroads, digging the trenches and foxholes that U.S. troops will use, and digging the graves for America's dead (see politics [Oakes Ames], 1862).
Steamboat pioneer John Stevens obtains a patent April 11 for a multitubular boiler (see 1791). Colonel Stevens paid about $90,000 in 1784 for a New Jersey island separated from the mainland by marshes, renamed it Hoboken from an amalgamation of the Dutch and Indian words for it, hopes to develop it as a resort, and sees possibilities in a steamboat ferry service that will make it easily accessible from Manhattan (seeLittle Juliana, 1804).
Pennsylvania-born engineer Robert Fulton, 38, develops a small ship propelled by steam power. His Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation appeared in 1796. He persuaded English investor John Barker Church the following year to back him in a scheme to build canals that used inclined planes for raising and lowering ships, and he has been in Paris since 1797 working on that scheme and on his submarine Nautilus (see 1807; Symington, 1788; Fitch, 1791).
Construction begins in Scotland on a 60.5-mile Caledonian Canal to connect the Atlantic with the North Sea across northern Scotland. Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, 43, has been employed to help develop the Highlands; in addition to being responsible for the canal, he will build more than 900 miles of roads, including many bridges (see 1814).
The Middlesex Canal opens December 21 to connect the Merrimack River with Boston Harbor. Workers have used Ames shovels to dig the waterway.
Connecticut clockmaker Eli Terry, 31, introduces wooden-wheeled clocks much like those produced in the Black Forest since 1660. Factory workers and miners have employed "knocker uppers" to wake them 1 hour before their shifts, and the Industrial Revolution is creating a demand for accurate and affordable timepieces. Following the ideas of French watchmaker Frederic Japy and of Eli Whitney, Terry makes his clock parts interchangeable to permit mass production, and he will soon replace his wooden wheels with brass ones. When he encounters sales resistance to his clocks, Terry will become the first U.S. merchant to offer merchandise on a free-trial, no-money-down basis, and he will discover that farm families grow accustomed to having a clock and will sooner pay for a clock than give it up (see Seth Thomas, 1810).
English artillery officer Henry Shrapnel, 42, develops an explosive shell that will be called the shrapnel shell.
A table of atomic weights arranged by English chemist-physicist John Dalton, 37, at Manchester represents the first clear statement of atomic theory (see Mendeléev, 1870).
"Absorption of Gases by Water and Other Liquids" by John Dalton states Dalton's law of partial pressures (see 1808).
English physician-chemist William Henry, 27, posits the idea that the amount of gas absorbed by a liquid is in proportion to the pressure of the gas above the liquid, provided that no chemical action occurs. It will be called Henry's law.
Essai de statique chimique by Claude Berthollet, now 54, presents his ideas on chemical equilibrium, employing the system of chemical nomenclature that he devised with the late Antoine Lavoisier. Berthollet has been the first to recognize that the completeness of chemical reactions depends in part on the masses of the reacting substances, and although he has erred in concluding that elements unite in all proportions he comes close to formulating the law of mass action (see Proust, 1808). Berthollet has helped the French war effort by finding a way to obtain iron from ore and convert it into steel, but while his preparation of potassium chlorate has permitted the manufacture of colored fireworks it has not provided the substitute for saltpetre in gunpowder that he intended.
Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, 24, at Uppsala isolates the silvery metallic element cerium from ore found in the Bastnas mine and names it after the asteroid Ceres discovered 2 years ago (see Klaproth, 1797). A protégé of Anders Ekeberg, Berzelius will gain a reputation far exceeding that of his mentor; mineralogist and mine owner Wilhelm Hising (later von Hisinger), 37, has helped him in his work. Cerium will prove to be the most abundant of the rare earths and along with its oxide will find extensive industrial use later in this century and in the next.
English chemist Smithson Tennant, 42, discovers the elements iridium and osmium. Curious about the black metallic substance created every time he treats platinum with aqua regia (a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acids), he tries to alloy it with lead and is able to separate it into two metals, the second of which produces a toxic gas (osmium tetroxide) that will get its name from the Greek word osme (smell).
The Natural History of Fishes (Histoire naturelle des poissons) by Etienne de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède, is published in its fifth and final volume (the first appeared in 1798). Lacépède was appointed natural history professor in the study of fishes and reptiles during the Revolution and worked at the relocated Paris Botanical Garden; he was elected to the Senate in 1799 and became president of the Senate 2 years ago. A lack of research materials has resulted in some errors, but fellow scientists recognize Lacépède's icthyological studies as the most fruitful to be published on the subject thus far.
Physician-botanist Erasmus Darwin dies following a heart attack at Derby April 18 at age 70, having excelled as a poet and inventor as well as a scientist. The "Lunaticks" of his Lunar Society at Birmingham have been a major force in driving Britain's Industrial Revolution.
Parliament votes Edward Jenner a grant of £10,000 for his smallpox vaccination discovery of 1798. It will vote him another £20,000 in 1806.
Color blindness will be called Daltonism; John Dalton gave the first clear statement of the defect when he was 28.
Constantinople loses 150,000 to plague.
Cardinal Rohan dies at Ettenheim, Baden, February 17 at age 68, having lived in exile from his native Paris since his acquittal in the diamond necklace trial of 1786.
Harmony, Pennsylvania, is founded as a celibate religious communistic society by Harmonites led by German separatist George Rapp, 46, who emigrates to Pennsylvania's Butler County with a group of followers. The group will move in 1814 to Indiana, where it will establish another Harmony in the Wabash Valley, but in 1825 it will move back to Pennsylvania to settle in a town below Pittsburgh that will be called Economy (see human rights [New Harmony], 1824).
Improvement in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes by English Quaker schoolmaster Joseph Lancaster, 25, is based on his experience teaching a free school of 1,000 boys opened 2 years ago in the London suburb of Southwark. Having read Andrew Bell's 1797 book An Experiment in Education, Lancaster has organized a corps of elder boys as monitors to oversee and instruct, and his Lancastrian system will be widely adopted in nonconformist schools.
The Sydney Gazette begins weekly publication in New South Wales. Printed by a convict, it is the first newspaper in the colony (see 1831).
Nonfiction: Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries (Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains) by French social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, 42, who served as a captain of artillery at Yorktown in 1781, was imprisoned in the Palais de Luxemoburg during the Reign of Terror in 1793, and found when he came out that he had become fantastically rich, having bought up newly nationalized land with money borrowed from a friend.
Novelist Wilhelm Heinse dies at Aschafflenburg, near Frankfurt-am-Main, June 22 at age 57; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos at Taranto, Italy, November 5 at age 62 while campaigning as a general for Bonaparte.
Poetry: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border compiled by Scottish poet Walter Scott, 32, is published as Scott works on his own first original poem (see 1805); The Temple of Nature by the late Erasmus Darwin presents his views on evolutionary theory, declaring that all of life originated in the sea and can be traced back to a common ancestor ("Organic life beneath the shoreless waves/ Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;/ First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,/ Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;/ These, as successive generations bloom,/ New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;/ Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,/ And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing" (his publisher has changed Darwin's original title, The Origin of Society, lest it be construed as antireligious; see science, 1859); "Misfortune and Pity" by French abbé Jacques Delille, 65: "Fate makes our relatives, choice makes our friends."
Poet-critic Johann G. von Herder dies at Weimar December 18 at age 59.
Painting: The McNab by Henry Raeburn; Calais Pier by J. M. W. Turner, who last year made his first trip abroad and has begun imitating the old masters: Titian, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Adélaïde Labille-Guíard dies at Paris April 24 at age 53.
The British Museum's Elgin Marbles have their beginning as Thomas Bruce, 37, 7th earl of Elgin, starts shipping home from the Piraeus some portions of the sculptured frieze of the Parthenon completed on the Acropolis at Athens in 438 B.C. (see 1687). Britain's minister to the Ottoman Empire since 1799, Elgin will claim that he had permission from the sultan to "save" them from deterioration (contractors have for centuries cannibalized the ruins for new structures or burnt marble for lime to use in their walls; the Greeks and others will charge that Elgin simply plundered the monuments to install them in his Scottish mansion Broom Hall, having his workers saw them off clumsily, crating hundreds of pieces in boxes); in the next 9 years he will have large parts of the frieze and other works from the Acropolis shipped home, using his high position to have Royal Navy ships employed for the purpose (see 1816).
John James Audubon, 18, arrives at Philadelphia. Son of a Creole woman in Hispaniola, he was legally adopted by his French father and raised at Nantes. He will move to Kentucky in 1808, open a general store at Louisville, and begin painting American birds from life (see 1813; 1830).
Theater: The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina) by Friedrich von Schiller 3/19 at Weimar's Hoftheater. Sarah Siddons leaves the Drury Lane Theatre for Covent Garden, where she will perform until her retirement in 1812 (see 1782).
Playwright-poet Count Vittorio Alfieri dies at Florence October 8 at age 54 and is buried in the Church of Santa Croce.
First performances: Symphony No. 2 in D major by Ludwig van Beethoven 4/5 at Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien, in a concert that includes also Beethoven's only oratorio Christ on the Mount Olives (Christus am Oelberg) and his Concerto No. 3 in C minor for Pianoforte and Orchestra with Beethoven as soloist.
President Jefferson appoints Yorkshire-born architect and civil engineer Benjamin (Henry) Latrobe, 39, surveyor of the public buildings of the United States, giving him responsibility for completing the Capitol at Washington, D.C., whose north wing has been used by Congress since its completion 3 years ago. Latrobe emigrated to America 8 years ago and has designed the state penitentiary at Richmond, Virginia, the Bank of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, and that city's Sedgeley House. His south wing and Supreme Court Chamber will be completed by 1807, its exterior will conform to architect-inventor William Thornton's plan of 1792, but Latrobe will design the interior, incorporating corn cobs and tobacco leaves in the capitals. He will retain his position until he resigns in 1817 (see 1814).
Congress enacts a bill providing federal assistance to a New Hampshire town that has been devastated by fire; similar ad hoc legislation will be passed over the years in response to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the like.
A Treatise on Farming by Loudon County, Virginia, farmer John Alexander Binns, 42, originates what will be called the "Loudon system" of soil treatment. Binns has experimented with crop rotation, deep plowing, and the use of gypsum as fertilizer.
Brewer Arthur Guinness dies at Dublin January 23 at age 77, having established a company that will continue into the 21st century. He has fathered 21 children; 10 survive.
Brookville, Md., engineer Thomas Moore, 43, patents the world's first ice "refrigerator," having coined the term 3 years ago. He has placed one wooden box inside another, insulated the space in between with charcoal or ashes, and places a tin box container at the top of the inner box. Moore's icebox will be in common use by 1838 (see Perkins, 1834).
Almanach des Gourmands by Paris lawyer-gastronome Alexander-Balthazar-Laurent (Grimod de La Reynière) is the world's first restaurant guide. Arrested at the behest of his family in 1786 for having committed so many indiscretions, the misshapen, club-footed Grimod de la Reynière (who always wears gloves; his webbed fingers were replaced with mechanical metal fingers by surgeons in his infancy) was sent to the Abbaye de Domèrvre near Toul, where he learned about cooking, and later inherited a fortune (plus a palace on the rue des Champs Elysées). Spurned by a famous actress, he has turned his attention to the pleasures of the table and founded the Jury Dégustateur. His Almanach lists 500 restaurants and guides Parisians in the art of eating with pointers about shops, changing manners and customs, notes on cartes des jours and information on seasonal specialties. It will be published annually for the next 8 years. The original marmite, or stockpot, of the restaurateur Deharme in the rue des grands-Augustins has not been off the fire for 85 years, during which time it has cooked at least 300,000 capons that are available at any hour of day or night.
Parliament enacts the first British abortion law, earlier laws having been enacted in ecclesiastical courts but not civil courts. The new law outlaws abortion after 4½ months, when the fetus is deemed to have "quickened" (see 1867; Pius XI, 1869)
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