1788
1781 1782 1783 1784 1785 1786 1787 1788 1789 1790
The Parlement at Paris presents Louis XVI with a list of grievances as the country suffers its worst economic chaos of the century. Naval hero Admiral de Grasse, marquis de Grasse-tilly, has died at Le Barr, outside Paris, January 11 at age 65, and France is in turmoil. Louis recalls Swiss banker Jacques Necker, 55, as minister of finance, making him secretary general and virtual premier as drought reduces the harvest and wheat prices soar. Grain reserves are depleted as a result of last year's edict permitting grain producers to sell without restriction, but finance minister Jacques Necker suspends grain exports. He requires that all grain be sold in the open market once again to allay suspicions that the endless line of heavy carts seen to be carrying grain and flour are bound for ports to be shipped abroad. Most Frenchmen remain convinced that the king has an interest in the Malisset Company, which he has entrusted with victualling Paris, and that the king and the aristocracy are profiting at the people's expense. Hungry peasants and townspeople seize wagons in transit even when escorted in large convoys, farmers resist bringing their grain to market lest it be commandeered, and people starve. Necker's wife, Suzanne (née Curchod), 48, was engaged to the English historian Edward Gibbon before his father broke off the match in 1758 (they have remained friends), and since her marriage in 1764 she has helped her husband in his career with her brilliant Paris salon. The king (or Necker) calls upon the Estates General to assemble in May of next year for the first time since its dissolution in 1615 (see 1789). Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez dies at Paris December 8 at age 59, having gained fame for the innovative strategems that he has devised for defeating British men of war off the coasts of India and Ceylon from 1782 to 1783.
Sweden's Gustav III demands the return of Karelia and Finland from Russia, declares war in June with British diplomatic support, and invades Russian Finland, beginning a 2-year conflict that will end with Finland and Karelia still in Russian hands (see 1790).
Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire gains support from Austria, which joins with Catherine the Great under terms of a 1781 alliance treaty and declares war on the Turks. Bohemian-born Austrian soldier Joseph Wenzel Radetzky, 22, get his first taste of battle to begin a brilliant military career.
The 44-year-old Albanian brigand Tepelenë Ali uses murder, intrigue, and lavish gifts to gain appointment from Constantinople as governor (pasha) of Janina, a position that he will use to install his sons as governors of Trikkala, the Morea, and Lepanto as he increases his personal wealth through extortion. The British and French will treat him virtually as an independent monarch (but see 1819).
The Young Pretender Charles Edward "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Stuart dies at his native Rome January 31 at age 67, having long since alienated his friends by his drunken debaucheries. The Young Pretender's 62-year-old brother Henry Cardinal Stuart is archbishop of Frascati and proclaims himself Henry IX, but although he gains some support for his Jacobite claim to the throne he will soon lose all his property in Italy.
Spain's Carlos III dies at Madrid December 14 at age 72 after an enlightened reign of 29 years in which he has encouraged trade and industry, suppressed lawlessness, constructed roads and canals, improved sanitation, and supported the American colonists. Greatest of the Spanish Bourbons, he is succeeded not by his firstborn son (an epileptic imbecile who is set aside) but rather by his slothful 40-year-old second son, who will reign until 1808 as Carlos IV.
The trial of Warren Hastings begins in London's Westminster Hall February 13 (see 1784). He has been impeached at the bar of the House of Lords on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors" (playwright Richard B. Sheridan has delivered a 5½-hour speech favoring impeachment), and the case against him is handled by House of Commons members who include Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Charles Grey. Few of his critics have ever set foot in India, but Burke calls Hastings, "The captain-general of iniquity—thief—tyrant—robber—cheat—sharper—swindler. We call him these names, and are sorry the English language does not afford terms adequate to the enormity of his offences" (see 1795).
Delhi is seized by the Ghulam Qadir, chief of the warlike Afghan tribes (Rohillas) who have settled in India; unable to find the Mughal imperial treasury, the Rohillas vent their frustration by blinding the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, who is given sanctuary by the Maratha chief Sindhia.
A Chinese army invades Vietnam, whose Later Le dynasty was ended last year. A peasant army headed by Nguyen Hue of the Tay Son brothers opposes the invaders, who will be defeated next year and forced to withdraw (see 1793).
Former North Carolina colonial governor William Tryon dies at London January 27 at age 58, having served also as governor of the New York colony.
The United States Constitution becomes operative June 21 as New Hampshire ratifies the Constitution by a vote of 57 to 47, becoming the ninth state to ratify. Georgia has ratified January 2, Connecticut January 9, Massachusetts February 6. Federalist Paper No. 51 has appeared February 8 (see 1787): written by James Madison, it has said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Maryland has ratified the Constitution April 28, and South Carolina May 23 to become states of the Union. Massachusetts has become the sixth state of the Union by a 19-vote margin, with former Shays rebels among the 168 who opposed ratification, but an economic upsurge has quieted unrest in the commonwealth. Virginia and New York ratify June 25 and July 26, respectively, New York by a vote of 30 to 27 as Federalists win a razor-thin majority. Former Virginia House of Delegates member John Taylor, 34, has bitterly opposed ratification, arguing that the Constitution gives far too much power to the central government.
Observations on the New Constitution and on the Federal Union by "A Columbian Patriot" expresses the anti-Federalist views of Mercy Otis Warren, now close to 60, who would have preferred "a union of the states on the free principles of the late Confederation"; Récherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l'Amérique septentrionale (four volumes) by Italian physician-merchant Philip Mazzei, now 57, who was an ardent supporter of the War of Independence (his work is published at Paris).
New Holland (Australia) receives its first European settlers: Botany Bay becomes a British penal colony January 20 as the first shipload of convicts arrives at the harbor discovered by the late Captain Cook in 1770 (see 1786). The 736 prisoners landed from the Sirius and her 10 sister ships (four of them for female convicts) left Plymouth and Portsmouth in the spring of last year under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, now 49, and have taken 252 days to make the voyage of more than 1,500 miles to what will be called New South Wales, whose first governor is Captain Phillip. They are soon augmented by new arrivals, and Governor Phillip moves the colony to a neighboring area that will be called Sydney after British Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, 55, 1st viscount Sydney. Suppressing rebellious convicts and troops while coping (until mid-1790) with food shortages, Governor Phillip will conciliate the Aborigines (who live in nomadic tribes and whose numbers will later be estimated at between 300,000 and 1 million) and build a permanent community before returning to England in 1792 for reasons of health. In the next 40 years, more than 160,000 men, women, and children will be transported to New South Wales.
Explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, leaves Botany Bay March 10 and will never be heard of again (see 1787; DuMont d'Urville, 1828).
Explorer Alejandro Malaspina returns to Spain in May after a 20-month commercial voyage that has taken him around the world in command of the frigate Astrea on behalf of the Royal Philippine Company (see 1783). Now 33, he and his colleague José de Bustamante y Guerra propose to the government at Madrid in September that it provide two corvettes for a political-scientific expedition that would visit nearly every Spanish possession in America and Asia (see 1789).
Virginia-born pioneer Bland Williams Ballard, 28, comes under attack from tribesmen March 31 near what later will be Shelbyville, Kentucky. The Indians kill his father, stepmother, and several siblings, but Ballard succeeds in withdrawing the survivors with help from his wife, Elizabeth (née Williamson), who survived an Indian massacre in September 1781 while Ballard was serving with General George Rogers Clark in the Ohio Valley.
The Ohio Valley gets its first permanent settlement at Marietta April 7. New Englanders under the leadership of Massachusetts-born Continental Army veteran General Rufus Putnam, now 50. They name the place in honor of France's queen Marie Antoinette.
Cincinnati has its beginnings in a few buildings erected on the Ohio River by settlers who call the place Losantiville, but explorer-fur trader John Filson is killed by an Indian while engaged in laying out the settlement in October at age 41 (approximate). He and some associates had bought a tract of land in the area (see 1790).
Dubuque has its beginnings in an Illinois country settlement established by French-Canadian entrepreneur Julien Dubuque, 26, who negotiates an agreement with Fox tribal leaders to mine lead.
Massachusetts merchant and statesman Nathaniel Gorham, 50, goes into partnership with Connecticut land speculator Oliver Phelps and purchases a tract of land more than 6 million acres in size that has been ceded to Massachusetts by New York. Gorham represented his state at the Constitutional Convention last year, but the deal will prove disastrous to him and he will be bankrupt by 1790.
Prices on the Paris stock exchange plummet July 19 (see politics, 1789).
Steam engine inventor James Watt follows a suggestion by his partner Matthew Boulton and applies a centrifugal governor to provide automatic control of the engine's speed (see 1784; 1790).
New York-born New Jersey lawyer-inventor John Stevens, 39, develops a multitubular steam boiler for marine engines (see 1789; 1804).
Scottish engineer William Symington, 25, invents the first practical steamboat, installing a direct-action steam engine in a paddle-boat. His vessel attracts no commercial attention (see 1787; 1791).
Sheffield silver plate inventor Thomas Boulsover dies at Sheffield in September at age 82.
Traite des Affinities Chymiques, ou Attractions Electives by the late Swedish chemist-physicist Torbern Bergman includes affinity tables summarizing results of his studies of displacement reactions. The University of Uppsala scientist obtained nickel in its pure state before his death 3 years ago (see food, 1770).
Mechanique Analitique by Joseph-Louis Lagrange of 1761 calculus fame is a strictly analytical treatment of mechanics. Lagrange bases statics on the principle of virtual velocities and dynamics in a work that is based in turn on d'Alembert's principle of 1743.
Experiments on the Action of Sunlight on Vegetation (Expériences sur l'action de la lumière solaire dans la végétation) by botanist Jean Senebier establishes the fact that green plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of light (see 1783; 1800).
Naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, dies at Paris April 16 at age 80, having completed only 36 of his proposed 50-volume Histoire naturelle. The remaining volumes will be completed by the comte de Lacépède.
English physician Thomas Cawley notes abnormalities of the pancreas in the autopsy of a diabetic patient (see 1783). It is the first observation of any relationship between diabetes and the pancreas, but Cawley ignores it and persists in the belief that diabetes is a kidney disease (see Lancereaux, 1860).
New York physicians go into hiding for 3 days in April as a mob riots in protest against grave robbers, who in years past have taken remains from the Negro Burying Ground and the cemetery of the alms house but, more recently, have begun digging up the bodies of "respectable" people (the city has appointed a night watchman to guard graves on the common). Pathologist Richard Bayley has set up a laboratory at the 17-year-old Society of the Hospital of the City of New York on Broadway at Pearl Street, and surgeon Wright Post has been giving anatomy lessons, using cadavers to illustrate his points. Boys playing on Sunday afternoon, April 13, outside the hospital see an arm that a young doctor has left near an open window to dry, one of them climbs a ladder that painters have left against the hospital's wall, and when he peers in the window he discovers medical students and physicians dissecting a cadaver for study. He runs home, by some accounts, and tells his father, who takes some friends and visits the grave of his recently buried wife; finding the casket open and the corpse gone, the men rush to the hospital. By other accounts, the boy tells his companions what he has seen and they shout the news to passersby in the street. An angry mob gathers, tears down the hospital's iron fence, smashes windows, and batters at the oak doors. Mayor Duane calls for civilian volunteers to help stop the violence; the mob pelts the men with dirt and bricks, and a second, larger, group of volunteers receives similar treatment. The mayor sends most of the doctors to the country but Dr. Samuel Bard, now 46, stands up to the mob, throwing open his windows and placing himself in full view of the crowd while most other physicians hide for fear of their lives. Bard was a Loyalist during the Revolution but remained in the city after the British evacuated late in 1783. Ransacking offices and laboratories in search of incriminating evidence, the mob buries (or reburies) every cadaver it can find and seizes four doctors, but the sheriff rescues them and puts them in jail overnight to protect them. A mob of 5,000 storms the jail Monday afternoon, injuring Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Baron von Steuben, Mayor Duane, and Gov. Clinton. A brigade of artillery is called in to protect the jailhouse, and when the mob continues to menace the peace the infantry is ordered to fire into the mob, three citizens are killed, and the riot continues through Tuesday, but the state will pass a law next year enabling physicians to obtain cadavers without robbing graves (see New York Hospital, 1791; Burke, 1829).
Some followers of religious leader Jemima Wilkinson establish a settlement near Seneca Lake in upstate New York (see 1784). The "Friends' Settlement" will have a population of 260 by the time that the self-styled Publick Universal Friend arrives in 1790; she will move a few miles west in 1794 with a small group of her most devoted followers to establish the Jerusalem township, but hostile outsiders will circulate stories of her authoritarian rule, severe punishments, and sexual misconduct in the religious community.
Josef II orders Austrian Jews to adopt "proper recognizable surnames." They have been known until now largely by biblical patronyms and when some object to changing their names, the emperor's officials give them such surnames as "Fresser," "Pferd," and "Weinglas."
Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalists in Arabia expand their influence beyond the Nejd plateau (see 1773; 1802).
Siam's king Phraphuttahayotfa Chulalok convenes a synod at Bangkok to define orthodox Buddhist scriptures.
The Times of London begins publication January 1. Shipping losses bankrupted coal merchant John Walter, 49, 6 years ago after 27 years in the business. He switched to publishing books, went from that into newspaper publishing, and now changes the name of the Daily Universal Register that he began publishing in 1785 after acquiring patents to a process for printing from logotypes (blocks of words or portions of words instead of individual letters) with the intention of using the process to print pamphlets and books. Walter's small, partisan newspaper derives much of its income from suppressing news at the behest of prominent persons who pay for such suppression, but Walter will serve 2 years in prison after being convicted of publishing criminal libels on the Prince of Wales and the duke of York.
Nonfiction: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (volumes IV, V, and VI) by Edward Gibbon is published at London May 8 (the historian's 51st birthday) (see 1781). Gibbon returned last year from Lausanne, where he went to economize and to complete the work whose first volume appeared 12 years ago and whose final volume deals with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. "History," Gibbon has written, ". . . is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"; emphasizing the importance of intellectual freedom, he says toward the end of his final chapter, "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." His work has run to 1½ million words that include nearly 8,000 footnotes, which account for one-quarter of the total and offer sometimes ribald information not in the main text (e.g., Theodora "would spread herself out [nude except for a narrow girdle] and lie face upwards on the floor. Servants on whom this task had been imposed would sprinkle barley grains over her private parts, and geese trained for the purpose used to pick them off one by one with their bills and swallow them."); Classical Dictionary (Bibliotheca Classica) by English scholar John Lempriére, 23, is a reference book in classic mythology and classical history; Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society by Hannah More; Lettres sur le Caractère et les Ecrits de J. J. Rousseau by French libertine Mme. de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein), 22, whose 2-year-old marriage to the Swedish ambassador has turned sour. Daughter of the finance minister Jacques Necker and his wife, Suzanne, Mme. de Staël is becoming notorious for her love affairs.
Poetry: "The Indian Burying Ground" by Philip Freneau.
Painting: Antoine Lavoisier and his Wife and Love of Paris and Helena by Jacques Louis David; Portrait of Hubert Robert by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun; An Architect and His Family by Marguerite Gérard (date approximate); Tiger Hunt in the East Indies by Johann Zoffany; Manuel Osorio de Zuñoga and Family of Duke of Osuna by Francisco de Goya. Thomas Gainsborough dies at London August 2 at age 61.
Actress George Anne Bellamy dies at London February 16 at age 60 (approximate), having been famous in her time for playing the tragic Shakespearean roles of Juliet and Desdemona.
Composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach dies at Hamburg December 14 at age 74.
England's newly founded Marylebone Cricket Club codifies the rules of a game played since the 15th century if not longer (see 1787; baseball, 1839; Grace, 1860).
Cabinet-Maker's London Book of Prices includes 10 designs signed "Hepplewhite" or "Heppelwhite" (see 1786). The late George Hepplewhite's widow, Alice, has continued his business and financed publication of his book Hepplewhite's Cabinet-Maker and Upholster's Guide; or, Repository of Designs for Every Article of Household Furniture, in the Newest and Most Approved Taste Displaying a Great Variety of Patterns . . . in the Plainest and Most Enriched Styles . . . It contains nearly 300 simple but elegant designs for furniture and other furnishings, and the small edition will be followed by larger ones next year and in 1794.
Providence, Rhode Island, merchant and slave trader John Brown and his wife, Sarah, move into a handsome new brick house at 52 Power Street. Designed by Brown's younger brother Joseph, 55, and decorated with furniture commissioned from cabinetmakers at Providence and Newport, French wallpaper, Chinese objets d'art, fine porcelain, and silver, the Georgian mansion will survive into the 21st century.
The prisoners who arrive at New Holland's (Australia's) Botany Bay in January have provisions that include oatmeal, cheese, salt meat, dried peas, vinegar (thought to prevent scurvy), salt, tea, and spirits.
Royal Worcester Porcelain Company gets its name following a visit by Britain's George III and Queen Charlotte to the pottery founded in 1751.
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