1790
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The Holy Roman Emperor Josef II dies at his native Vienna February 20 at age 48, 3 weeks after withdrawing all his reforms. He is succeeded by his 42-year-old brother, who will reign until 1792 as Leopold II.
Belgians revolt against the new emperor Leopold, who threatens to cede the Austrian Lowlands to France if Britain supports the revolution (see 1789). William Pitt yields to the pressure, he refuses to recognize Belgian independence, and the Austrian troops crush the revolt at Brussels (see 1830).
Scottish Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald dies at Kingsburgh House, Skye, in the Inner Hebrides March 5 at age 67.
French nobleman Louis-Marie, vicomte de Noailles, proposes in June that all titles and liveries be abolished (see 1789). Noailles will soon emigrate to America as the Revolution becomes more violent (see 1804).
France's Louis XVI accepts the constitution drafted by revolutionists in the Festival of the Champs de Mars. Ideologue-poet Louis de Saint-Just attends the Fête de la Fédération at Paris July 14 as commander of a militia organized at Blérancourt in rural Picardy.
Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli returns to his native island in July (see 1769); now 65, he will break with the French in 1793, gain support from the Royal Navy, expel the French in 1794, and offer suzerainty to Britain's George III, who will accept, but the king's viceroy Sir Gilbert Elliot will choose someone else as his chief adviser and Paoli will return to England in 1795 to live on another government pension.
Swedish forces gain a major victory over Russia at the Battle of Svenskund July 9 to 10, but the 2-year Russo-Swedish war ends in August with the signing of the Treaty of Värälä, which maintains the territorial borders that were arranged in 1743 and that will remain unchanged until 1809.
Austrian military commander Gideon von Loudon dies at Neutitschein July 14 at age 73 as the Austro-Turkish war continues.
The British make an alliance with the nizam of Hyderabad, and a third Anglo-Mysore War begins.
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace," says President Washington in an address to Congress at New York January 8. Washington moves into larger quarters in February, taking up residence at 39 Broadway with his wife, Martha, and a staff of 21, including seven slaves (the entire federal government has only five employees). Thomas Jefferson arrives at New York March 21 to take up his duties as the first U.S. secretary of state and finds to his dismay that monarchist sentiment is rampant in the federal capital, with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton championing the idea of a strong central government in what Jefferson considers a betrayal of the democratic ideals for which the Revolution was fought. The Virginia planter locks horns with Hamilton's Federalists, pressing to make the rights of individual states paramount in the new republic.
Benjamin Franklin dies at Philadelphia April 17 at age 84, having been bedridden for a year and dependent on opium to ameliorate his intense pain. The city gives him the most splendid funeral thus far in its history; a freethinker, he has not belonged to any church, has poked fun at Puritan intolerance, helped raise funds to build a hall at Philadelphia "expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something," contributed to the building fund of every sect in the city (including £5 for the Jewish congregation Mikveh Israel), and arranged to have all the city's clergymen accompany his casket, walking arm in arm with Philadelphia's rabbi. Europeans recall the words of the late economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who said, "He snatched the lightning from the skies and the scepter from tyrants"; former Continental Army commander Israel Putnam dies on his Connecticut farm at Pomfret May 29 at age 72, having remained nearly illiterate all his life.
Rhode Island ratifies the Constitution May 29 by a margin of two votes and becomes the 13th state of the Union, having declined 13 times in 2 years to ratify because the document in three places implies acceptance of slavery and the colony's influential Quaker community has denounced it. While the other 12 states drew up new constitutions at the outbreak of the Revolution, Rhode Island retained her 1636 colonial constitution, which did not provide for amendment and left it up to the legislature to define voting qualifications (see Dorr, 1841).
The Resident Act passed by Congress at New York July 16 confirms Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton's choice of a new location for the federal government on the banks of the Potomac near the Maryland town of Georgetown, thus resolving a dispute between North and South. The marshy site has been purchased on orders from President Washington by Georgetown businessman Benjamin Stoddert, 39, who has taken care not to create a frenzy of land speculation. Congress meets for the last time at New York August 12, and the Washingtons leave in October, as does Jefferson, for the new capital at Philadelphia. Jefferson has called New York "a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature," and wives of Southern congressmen have pushed their husbands to move closer to home.
Revolutionary leader and former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin dies at his native Boston November 6 at age 64.
Virginia's slave population reaches 200,000, up from over 100,000 in 1756.
Abolish slavery in the French colonies, English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson urges the revolutionists at Paris (see 1787; 1794).
France abolishes the Gabelle (salt tax) (see 1780); the courts have convicted some 1,500 people, including dozens of children aged 12 to 15, of dealing in contraband salt (see 1804).
Marie de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, proposes July 3 that French women be granted civil rights.
The Indian Nonintercourse Act passed by Congress forbids taking of lands from Indian tribes without 1791 congressional approval, but Maine, Massachusetts, and other states will continue to appropriate Indian lands without such approval.
Cincinnati gets its name as the 2-year-old town of Losantiville on the Ohio River is renamed by the Northwest Territory's first governor, General Arthur St. Clair, who calls it Cincinnati after the Society of the Cincinnati formed by officers of the Continental Army at the end of the Revolution (see 458 B.C.).
Virginia lawyer and landowner Thomas Nelson, Jr., dies bankrupt of asthma on his small Hanover County estate January 4 at age 60, having signed the Declaration of Independence and had his fortunes destroyed in the war with Britain.
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton presents his first report on the public credit to Congress in January. Charged with creating a financial system for the new government, Hamilton draws sharp criticism from Southerners by proposing that the national debt be funded (see loan, 1789), with the federal government assuming the unpaid debts assumed by the states during the Revolution. Speculators from New York and New Jersey have bought up depreciated securities; James Madison and other Southern delegates oppose paying off these securities at par value plus accrued interest, which would allow the speculators to make huge profits. The Southern states have already paid their war debts; Secretary of State Jefferson works out a compromise that leads to congressional passage of Hamilton's debt-assumption act combined with a relocation of the nation's capital to Washington, D.C., after a stopover in Philadelphia (see Bank of the United States, 1791).
New York remains a comparatively minor commercial center as compared to Philadelphia and Boston; even Sag Harbor, near the eastern end of Long Island, clears more square-riggers than New York and is the state's primary port of entry.
France's revolutionary government acts to revive trade, which has stagnated as a result of businessmen, capital, and gold fleeing the country. The government prints assignats—paper money issued against the security of public lands confiscated from noblemen who have emigrated—and the new paper money stimulates production for a while, reviving employment (but see 1796).
Economist-philosopher Adam Smith dies at Edinburgh July 17 at age 67. He destroyed nearly all of his manuscripts shortly before his death.
Boston mariner-fur trader Robert Gray, 35, brings his Columbia back to port after a 3-year voyage around the world and enriches the ship's seven stockholders, who include architect Charles Bulfinch and merchant John Derby. News that furs acquired for trinkets from Indians on the northwest American coast fetch high prices at the Chinese river marts of Guangzhou (Canton) begins a large triangular maritime trade. Boston merchants will ship cargoes of cloth, clothing, copper, and iron to the Columbia River to be bargained for furs and to the Sandwich Islands for sandalwood (see 1791). The sea captains will sell the cargoes at Guangzhou and return around the Cape of Good Hope with Chinese porcelains, teas, and textiles. In another triangular trade, the Bostonians will exchange West Indian sugar for Russian iron and linens.
The United States Coast Guard has its beginnings in a measure adopted by Congress August 4 establishing a service to enforce customs laws that prohibit the smuggling that cheats the government of its chief source of revenue. Placed under the control of the Treasury Department, it is known variously as the system of cutters, the Revenue Service, and the Revenue-Marine but will be officially named the Revenue Cutter Service in 1863 (see 1915; Life-Saving Service, 1878).
Congress grants General von Steuben a pension of $2,800 per year, enabling him to escape bankruptcy, and he will divide his time hereafter between New York City and the farm at Remsen, New York, granted him by the state.
Steam engine inventor James Watt devises a pressure gauge for his engine. He has received £76,000 in royalties on his patents since 1779, and his engine has come into widespread use in cotton, iron, flour, and paper mills, mines, distilleries, and canals and waterworks.
Congress votes April 10 to establish a patent office that will protect inventors and give them an incentive to develop new machines and methods (see transportation [Stevens], 1789). The first U.S. patent is awarded July 31 to Vermont inventor Samuel Hopkins for an improved method of "making Pot-ash and Pearl-ash," the first used in agriculture, the second in baking. Hopkins has devised a method of leaching the lye out of wood ashes, but most U.S. women are proud of their own yeast and continue to use that for baking rather than pearlash (potassium carbonate) (see 1792).
Newburyport, Massachusetts, inventor Jacob Perkins, 24, invents a nail cutter and header that is effective in a single operation (see 1834; Reed, 1786). So costly are nails that they are carefully salvaged when a building burns down (see tariff, 1789).
Mechanic Samuel Slater travels to Providence, Rhode Island, in January; meets with merchant Moses Brown; and demonstrates that he can construct textile-making equipment from plans he has committed to memory before leaving England (see 1789). Brown & Almy contracts with Slater April 5 to have him reproduce Richard Arkwright's spinning frame. He has been tinkering without a contract alongside the firm's engineers in a small rented building to rework a spinning frame modeled on the Arkwright water frame, a lack of tools and skilled mechanics delays completion of the work, but the new firm of Almy, Brown & Slater opens the first successful U.S. cotton mill December 21 at the falls of the Blackstone River near what later will be called Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater and Smithfield, Rhode Island-born mechanical engineer David Wilkinson, 19, have set up a mill that operates satisfactorily after a correction is made in the slope of the carder teeth (see child labor, 1793; Whitney, 1792).
Some 200 English spinning mills now employ the patented Arkwright frame of 1769, but France has at most only eight mills using the water frame, and the few steam engines being used in France are almost all of the crude Newcomen variety (see 1705).
A committee established by the 124-year-old Paris Academy of Sciences works to institute a uniform system of weights and measures at a time when a meter measures 100 centimeters at Paris, 98 at Marseilles, 102 at Lille, and 96 at Bordeaux. Paris-born Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 36, proposes to the National Assembly May 8 that it adopt a metric system; bishop of Autun and a member of the Assembly, the club-footed Talleyrand has requested formation of the committee, whose members include the chemist Antoine Lavoisier (see 1791).
French Jews gain a grant of civil liberties.
The colony of "Jerusalem" is founded in upstate New York by religious leader Jemima Wilkinson, now 39, who favors celibacy (year approximate).
Letters on Education by English reformer Catherine Macaulay, 59, expresses the notion that when the two sexes receive equal education the outcome will be intellectual equality. "Moreover, whenever significantly intellectual sex differences emerge they can be readily explained in terms of differences in education."
The new Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II restores press censorship, which was lifted by his predecessor in 1781 (see 1848).
Nonfiction: Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke champions the cause of conservatism as opposed to Jacobinism; Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie by philosopher Solomon Maimon criticizes Immanuel Kant's 1781 work. Kant calls Maimon his most perceptive critic, saying that he has understood the work better than most others; Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile by Scottish explorer James Bruce, 60, who journeyed to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1768 and describes cattle drivers who tripped up a cow and "cut off thicker, longer beefsteaks from the higher part of the buttock of the beast," used skewers to pin the flesh back in place, covered the wound with clay, forced the animal to rise, and drove it off with the others to provide a fuller meal in the evening, when they would meet their friends (see food and drink [Charles Lamb dissertation], 1823).
Poetry: Fugitive Verses by Scottish poet Joanna Baillie, 28; "Beacon Hill" by Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Morton (née Apthorp), 31, whose husband, Perez, had an affair 2 years ago with her sister Frances that ended with Frances taking her own life. Her poem in the Columbia Centinel December 4 celebrates events that transpired at Boston during the War of Independence.
Congress enacts the first U.S. copyright law (see Britain, 1710). Lexicographer Noah Webster has lobbied strongly for passage of the measure (see 1909).
Painting: Queen Charlotte and Miss Farren (actress Elizabeth Farren, now 29) by English painter Thomas Lawrence, 21, who has received almost no formal education or artistic training except for a few lessons with Joshua Reynolds; Lady Raeburn and Sir John and Lady Clerk by "the Scottish Reynolds" Henry Raeburn, now 34; Portrait of Madame de Genlis by Adelaïde Labille-Guiard; Innocence between Virtue and Vice by French painter Marie Guillemine Lerouix de la Ville, 22, a student of Jacques Louis David who will marry royalist Pierre Vincent Benoist in 1793.
Kabuki actor Nakazo Nakamura dies at his native Edo June 6 at age 53, having introduced male roles in dance pieces (shosagoto) that were formerly reserved for female impersonators.
China celebrates the 80th birthday of the Qing emperor Qianlong (Chien-lung) September 24 with operas performed at Beijing (Peking) by troupes invited from various parts of the country, sparking a revival of opera on a major scale.
First performances: Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in D major (Coronation) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 10/9 at Frankfurt-am-Main for the coronation of Leopold II; Concerto No. 19 for Pianoforte and Orchestra in F major by W. A. Mozart 10/15 at Frankfurt-am-Main.
English philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard contracts camp fever while visiting Russian military hospitals and dies at Kherson in the Ukraine January 20 at age 63.
President Washington appoints French-born engineer Pierre (Charles) L'Enfant, 35, to design the federal city with a Capitol to be built on an 85-foot hill at the intersection of what will be Pennsylvania Avenue and Constitution Avenue (see 1793). L'Enfant has served in the Continental Army and, like Washington, is a Freemason. Secretary of State Jefferson names as chief surveyor Andrew Ellicott, 36, of Maryland, who has helped continue the Mason and Dixon line of 1767, and Ellicott employs astronomer-surveyor Benjamin Banneker.
Pineapples arrive in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii): Spanish adventurer Francisco de Baula y Marin has brought the fruit and will become an interpreter and friend of Kamehameha I, with whom he will go fishing as he trades scissors for pearls and supports himself by making candles, trousers, and brandy (see exploration, colonization, 1778; food and drink [first cannery], 1892).
The world's first carbonated beverage (soft drink) company begins production at Geneva. Local jeweler Jacob Schweppe has read the papers published by Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, perfected a process for making mineral water in 1783, and goes into partnership with Jacques and Nicholas Paul to sell his highly-carbonated artificial mineral waters (see Priestley, 1772; Bergman, 1770). The partnership will dissolve within a few years, and Schweppe will move to London, where he will open a factory at 11 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, to sell through chemists (pharmacists), purveying his Schweppe's soda water in round-ended "drunken" bottles thus made in order to keep their corks damp and thereby prevent their gas from escaping (see medicine, 1794; Silliman, 1809).
England now eats off Wedgwood porcelain (see 1769), and the food eaten now includes cheddar cheese imported from the United States.
Chefs to the French aristocracy find employment in many cases with British families as the Revolution puts their former patrons to flight.
The population of the United States reaches 3,929,000, 95 percent of it rural; New England alone has 1 million, having doubled since 1762. Population density nationwide is four to five people per square mile, and about one out of five Americans is a slave.
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