1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800
The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II dies suddenly at Vienna March 1 at age 44 and is succeeded by his son, 24, who will reign until 1806 as Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor (he will then reign as the first Austrian emperor Franz I until 1835).
A Swedish assassin shoots Gustav III in the back March 16 at a midnight masked ball in the Stockholm Opera House; his wound is not fatal, but it becomes infected and the king dies March 29 at age 46 after a 21-year reign. His 13-year-old son succeeds to the throne and will reign as Gustav IV until his forced abdication in 1809.
Austria and Prussia form an alliance against France, partly at the instigation of émigré French noblemen, and France declares war on both countries April 20, beginning what will escalate into a world war that will continue until 1815. Army veteran Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez, 53, has been appointed minister of foreign affairs in March and is named minister of war June 12, but he resigns June 15 to take command of the army in the north as Austrian and Prussian troops invade Flanders and march on Paris.
The beheading machine proposed in 1789 by Joseph I. Guillotin is used for the first time April 25 at Versailles to execute a thief. Built by harpsichordist Tobias Schmidt, it has a collar to hold the victim's neck in place and a blade shaped to make it slice cleanly. The executioner holds the thief's head up for all to see, but the crowd at Versailles is accustomed to hangings and expresses disappointment. Only 10 percent of guillotine victims will be of the nobility, most of the 400,000 people put to death in the revolution will be shot, burnt, or drowned, and the guillotine will often require several chops to do its job.
Three French armies commanded by Lafayette, Rochambeau, and Marshal Nicolas Luckner, 70, suffer reverses in combat with the Austrians and Prussians. Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel, dies at Vechelde July 3 at age 71; a brother-in-law of the late Friedrich the Great, he is succeeded by his son Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, 56, who will be less successful on the battlefield. France's Legislative Assembly announces July 11 that the nation is in danger.
A Paris mob storms the Tuileries Palace August 10 at the instigation of Georges Jacques Danton, now 33, after Louis XVI orders his Swiss guards to stop firing on the people. Some 600 guardsmen are massacred, the king and his family are held prisoner in the Temple, and the Paris commune takes power under Danton.
Marie Antoinette's aristocratic superintendent of household and intimate companion Marie-Therèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Princesse de Lamballe, 42, is transferred to La Force prison August 19, refuses to take the oath declaring her detestation of the monarchy, and is torn to pieces by the mob as she leaves the Paris courtroom September 3 (her head is lopped off and carried on a pike before the queen's window). She escaped to England in 1791 but returned to share the queen's imprisonment in the Temple.
The French National Assembly declares General Lafayette a traitor August 19 and he flees to Liège, where the Austrians take him prisoner. The emigration of her aristocrats has cost France nearly all of her high-ranking military officers and most of the army's subalterns; the zealous but untrained troops mustered to support the revolutionary regime panic at the sight of enemy troops.
French authorities arrest monarchist Antoine Barnave August 29 and imprison him at his native Grenoble (see 1791). He has been systematically attacked for his royalist sympathies since January and is transferred to Paris November 3 to face trial, having written while in prison an Introduction to the French Revolution (Introduction à la révolution française), outlining a "natural history" of society's evolution toward the supremacy of the middle class (see 1793).
Verdun falls to the Prussians September 2 as France's foreign invaders continue their march on Paris with support from Hessian mercenaries and some 15,000 French noblemen.
Monarchist André-Boniface-Louis Riqueti, vicomte de Mirabeau, dies at Fribourg-en-Brisgau September 15 at age 37, having boasted of his late brother Honoré's genius even while opposing him. He has raised a legion abroad to fight the revolutionists, but the German princes who initially helped him later found his insolence intolerable and removed him from command.
The new duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand leads an army of more than 30,000 Prussians and Austrians into France and lays siege to Lille; French patriots who include many women enlist in the army to fight the invaders and defend the ideals of "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité." General Dumouriez outmaneuvers Brunswick in the Argonne Forest to hold up the invasion; forced to fall back, he manages to check the panic in his ranks. The invaders are closer to Paris than the new regime's defenders, but Dumouriez orders General François Christophe de Kellermann, 57, to wheel around with his 20,000 troops and confront Brunswick's army on the plateau of Valmy.
The Battle of Valmy September 20 ends in victory for General Kellermann, whose 36,000 troops halt the Austrian and Prussian invasion in a fog-shrouded artillery duel wherein women, often dressed in rags, fight in the front ranks alongside men. Largely because the French cannon are superior to those of the enemy, the revolutionary armies gain their first triumph with help from the women; heroines of the army include Reine Chapuy, Rose Bouillon, Catherine Pocheta, and the young Fernig sisters (see 1793).
The French National Convention meets September 21, abolishes the monarchy, decrees perpetual banishment for French émigrés, and declares September 22 to be the first day of the Year One of the new French Republic.
The duke of Brunswick negotiates with the French for a week following the Battle of Valmy, the talks come to naught, disease has decimated Brunswick's army, and Brunswick leads his troops home in a retreat that turns into a disaster. An epidemic of dysentery halts Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm II in his march against France's revolutionary armies; he retreats across the Rhine with only 30,000 effectives, down from an original force of 42,000 counting Austrian allies. French forces under Adam Philippe, 53, comte de Custine, rout the Prussians to take Mainz and Frankfurt-am-Main (but see 1793); Custine served with General Rochambeau in the American Revolution. General Dumouriez invades Flanders, crushes an Austrian army November 6 at the Battle of Jemappes, and takes Brussels and the Austrian Lowlands before the Prussians retake Frankfurt.
Thomas Paine enlarges upon his 1791 pamphlet "The Rights of Man" to urge the overthrow of the British monarchy; British authorities indict him for treason, he escapes to France, and the French make him an honorary citizen.
The French National Convention issues a proclamation November 19 offering assistance to peoples of all nations who want to overthrow their governments.
Former British prime minister John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, dies at London March 10 at age 79; former admiral Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, at London April 30 at age 74; Admiral George Brydges Rodney, 1st Baron Rodney (of Stoke-Rodney), at his native London May 24 at age 74; Sir John Burgoyne at London June 4 at age 68; John Paul Jones at Paris July 18 at age 45 (he served Russia's Catherine the Great after the American Revolution but was dismissed following a sex scandal. His body is buried in St. Louis Cemetery but will be found in 1905 and reinterred in 1911 at Annapolis, Maryland); former British prime minister Frederick North, Lord North (of Kirtling), dies of dropsy (edema) at his London home August 5 at age 60.
The Treaty of Jassy signed January 9 in Moldavia concludes the Russo-Turkish war that began in 1787 and confirms Russian domination of the Black Sea. Confirming the Treaty of Kücuk signed in 1774, it advances the Russian border to the Dneister River and restores Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Wallachia to the Ottoman Turks.
Relations between Poland and Russia grow strained (see 1791). Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, 22, returns from travels in western Europe and plays a prominent role in an anti-Russian campaign (see second partition, 1793).
Brazilian patriot and revolutionary Joaquim José da Silva Xavier is convicted after a 2-year trial at Rio de Janeiro (see 1789). Sentenced to death, he is publicly hanged April 21 at age 43 and cut into pieces as a warning to other would-be revolutionaries against Portuguese rule (see 1822).
The Insurrection Act signed by President Washington May 2 authorizes the president to send in federal militia to suppress an uprising when notified by a federal associate justice or district judge that the unrest cannot be handled by ordinary judicial proceedings (see Whiskey Rebellion, 1794).
Kentucky is admitted to the Union June 1. The 15th state, it incorporates territory ceded by Virginia in 1781.
Virginia planter-statesman George Mason dies at his 34-year-old Gunston Hall plantation home October 7 at age 67; former Continental Congress president Henry Laurens near his native Charleston, South Carolina, December 8 at age 68; former diplomat Arthur Lee at his Middlesex, Virginia, estate December 12 at age 51.
Denmark abandons the slave trade and becomes the first nation to do so (see Sweden, 1813).
The commissioners sent last year by Paris to restore order in Saint Domingue begin to divide the colony into two governments, but the military commanders serving under Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel sympathize with the slaves in what later will be Haiti and support emancipation (see 1793).
Historian Edward Gibbon writes to Lord Sheffield to approve the vote against slavery by the House of Commons, but expresses a fear: "If it [the vote] proceeded only from an impulse of humanity, I cannot be displeased . . . But in this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the slave trade, was there no leaven of new democratical principles? No wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear" (see Paine, 1791).
Vindication of the Rights of Woman by English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, 33, at London is a blunt attack on conventions. Rejecting the notion, advanced by Rousseau, that women are inferior to men, Wollstonecraft argues that women should have the same opportunities in education and employment as men and be able to consort with them on equal terms. Daughter of a drunkard and wife beater who squandered his fortune, Wollstonecraft is largely self educated, started a school 10 years ago, but had no success. Man of letters Horace Walpole calls her "a hyena in petticoats"; she meets U.S. timber merchant Captain Gilbert Imlay at Paris, where she goes to witness the Reign of Terror for a book, and will bear a daughter by him in 1794.
Divorce becomes legal in France September 20 under terms of a law enacted by the Assembly (see 1542), enabling commoners to escape oppressive marriages that were indissoluble under the ancien régime. Couples can now divorce quickly, easily, and cheaply, with no guilt attached to either party, but the law requires a waiting period of 6 months in cases of unilateral divorce (see 1803).
Mount Hood in the Cascade Range of Oregon Territory gets its name from British navigator William Broughton, who sights the snowcapped 11,235-foot volcano and names it for Admiral Samuel Hood, now 67, Baron Hood of Catherington.
Riverhead, Long Island-born minister's son John Cleves Symmes, 52, wins approval from President Washington for a land patent that allows him and some associates to purchase about 330,000 acres in the Northwest Territory between the Great Miami and Little Miami rivers at about 67¢ per acre (they asked Congress in 1788 to let them buy 1 million acres, having sent out surveyors to mark off the claim). Symmes became interested in the area while serving as a member of Congress in the 1780s. His patent for the Symmes Purchase (or Miami Purchase) carries with it the same requirements imposed on the Ohio Company (see 1787)—that land be set aside for a school, for religion, for use by the government, and for a university (Symmes ignores that stipulation).
Alejandro Malaspina sends the schooners Sutil and Mexicana north from New Spain to explore the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia in the Nanaimo area near Alaska (see 1791; 1794).
Paris has 5 days of rioting in January as the cost of living soars.
France's Girondist government issues more paper assignats as the war with Austria and Prussia creates irresistible demands for more paper currency (see 1790). The new assignats fuel the nation's inflation, diminish the people's traditional thrift, and encourage loose luxury as money declines in value and incentives to save disappear (see 1795).
France's crown jewels disappear in September during a week-long orgy of looting as civil order collapses. Included is the 67-carat French Blue diamond acquired by Louis XIV in 1668 (see Hope Diamond, 1830).
Swiss-born statesman (Abraham Alfonse) Alfonse Gallatin, 34, of Pennsylvania demands that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton submit a statement of the national debt as of January 1, distinguishing moneys received from each source of revenue and expended under each appropriation. A member of an aristocratic Geneva family, Gallatin came with a friend to America at age 19, went into business at Boston, briefly taught French at Harvard College, and served as a senator in the Pennsylvania state legislature before being elected to the U.S. Senate last year (his election was disallowed because of questions about his citizenship, but he will be elected next year to the House of Representatives; see 1800; Alien Acts, 1798).
U.S. money markets collapse in March following the failure of some land companies organized by New York speculator William Duer of 1784 Empress of China fame. A former assistant secretary of the treasury, Duer has sought European capital for the settlement of lands in the Ohio Valley, his scheme fails, and New York investors and speculators lose some $5 million, an amount equal to the value of all the buildings in the city (Boston and Philadelphia sustain losses of $1 million each).
Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton averts a U.S. economic depression by supporting the government's 6 percent bonds at par value.
The Coinage Act adopted by Congress April 2 establishes the Mint of the United States at the insistence of Secretary of State Jefferson and begins decimal coinage of gold, silver, and copper at Philadelphia, with the U.S. dollar defined in terms of fixed weights of gold and silver (see 1785; 1873). Americans have up to now been using pounds, shillings, francs, centimes, doubloons, pesos, pesetas, and other foreign specie, notably Spanish reals. Philadelphia astronomer-instrument maker David Rittenhouse turns 60 April 8 and reluctantly becomes first director of the Mint, converting an abandoned distillery into Ye Olde Mint with hand-turned metal presses, but since it is cumbersome to transact business with large numbers of coins, state-chartered banks, insurance companies, and even individuals issue paper money convertible into gold or silver coins, and these are accepted at discount value depending on how far away one is from the point of issuance. The Coinage Act authorizes minting of the $10 Eagle, $5 half-Eagle, and $2.50 quarter-Eagle gold coins as well as the silver dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime, and half-dime; the federal government will not issue paper currency until 1863 (see 1842).
The New York Stock Exchange has its origin May 17 in an agreement drafted by 24 local brokers who have been buying and selling government bonds and other securities under an old buttonwood (sycamore) tree at 62 Wall Street. Pushed by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, they formalize methods by which they will do business, pledging themselves to trade with each other before trading with any outsider and not to charge commissions in excess of .25 percent. Prices are quoted in eighths because the most commonly circulated coins are Spanish reals that are frequently cut into eight parts, called "pieces of eight" (see 1817).
The insurrection in Saint Domingue (later Haiti) ruins business in the colony; Boston-born merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins, now 27, joined his older brother James in business there in 1785, found the climate unhealthy, returned to Boston (a younger brother took his place), married the daughter of Samuel Eliot, and through his wife's connections voyaged to Batavia and Guangzhou (Canton) as a supercargo on a ship owned by Elias Hasket Derby of Salem. He has entered the China trade and now goes into business under the name J. & T. H. Perkins with his older brother (it will be renamed T. H. Perkins after James's death in 1822), trading at first mostly in porcelain, silks, and tea. They will soon participate in more speculative ventures that will include dealing in opium.
The Lancaster Road has its beginnings at the Philadelphia State House, where some 5,000 investors meet and subscribe $30 each to buy shares in the toll road that will be the first major publicly financed U.S. turnpike (see 1794; Cumberland Road, 1811).
Western Inland Lock Navigation Company is incorporated through efforts by Continental Army veteran General Philip J. Schuyler, 58, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, businessman Elkanah Watson, 34. The new company will soon engage English engineer William Weston, now 40, to help it broaden the channel of the Mohawk River as the basis of a great inland waterway linking the Hudson River to Lake Ontario via the Mohawk and Oneida Lake (see 1815).
Hudson's Bay Company seaman-fur trader-explorer Samuel Hearne dies in England in November at age 47; steamboat inventor James Rumsey at London December 20 at age 49 while working on an improved model (see Fulton, 1807).
Eli Whitney and Katherine Greene invent a cotton "gin" that will revolutionize the economies of the United States and Britain. Just out of Yale, the 26-year-old mechanical genius has been visiting at Mulberry Grove on the Savannah River; Mrs. Greene (née Littlefield), 37, widow of Revolutionary War hero General Nathaniel Greene, met Whitney aboard ship (he was en route to the Carolinas for a tutoring position), and invited him to her Georgia plantation. When she complained that her embroidery frame did not fit right, he devised a new tambour that pleased her. She has remarked that the locally-grown upland short-staple cotton have green seeds that are difficult to separate from the lint, quite unlike the long-staple sea-island cotton whose black seeds are easily separated and which has long been a staple of American commerce. It takes a slavewoman a full day to clean the seeds out of the fiber and produce one pound of clean cotton. Whitney studies the problem and after 10 days has constructed a model for a cotton "gin." With Mrs. Greene's encouragement, he works on his gin for the next 6 months, but although it pulls the seeds from the cotton it has a problem: the loose seeds get clogged in the rollers. Mrs. Greene hands him a brush from the hearth, Whitney installs it in his cotton gin, and it sweeps away the seeds. The simple cylinder produced by Whitney contains teeth made of bird-cage wire bent and pointed into the shape of sawteeth, each circle of teeth moving in a slot slightly smaller than a cotton seed. When the cylinder is turned, the teeth carry the cotton through the slot, leaving the seeds behind, and a slave can clean 50 pounds of green-seed cotton per day instead of one pound—a great advance over the "churka" used in India since 300 B.C. to clean cotton at a rate of five pounds per day. Use of the gin will lead to production of far more cotton for the textile mills of England and New England (see 1800).
Inventor and industrialist Sir Richard Arkwright dies at Cromford, Derbyshire, August 3 at age 59, having fathered the factory system and amassed the world's first great fortune to be derived from factories (his water-powered cotton-spinning machine is used in mills throughout England, France, and America).
An epidemic of bubonic plague in Egypt takes as many as 800,000 lives.
Smallpox strikes Boston; 8,000 volunteer for inoculation (see 1721; Jenner, 1796).
The United States Postal Service is created by act of Congress February 20.
The Libel Act adopted by Parliament at the urging of Charles James Fox gives juries the right to decide what is and is not libelous, a decision left until now up to judges.
Nonfiction: Principles of Moral and Political Science by Adam Ferguson; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind by University of Edinburgh philosopher (and mathematics professor) Dugald Stewart, 38, who has been influenced by the "common sense" views of Thomas Reid but takes a more scientific approach (second and third volumes will appear in 1814 and 1827, respectively).
Poetry: "Afton Water" and "Ye Flowery Banks O' Bonnie Doon" by Robert Burns appear in the ScotsMusical Museum IV: "Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes."
Painting: Self-Portrait by French painter Marie Geneviève Bouliar, 30. Sir Joshua Reynolds dies at London February 23 at age 68.
Opera: Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage) 2/7 at Vienna's Burgtheater, with music by Italian composer Domenico Cimarosa, 43.
Venice's Teatro de la Fenice opens with 1,500 seats between the Canal della Verona and the Campo San Fantin.
First performances: Symphony No. 94 in G major (The Surprise) by Joseph Haydn 3/23 at Vienna. Three Sonatas for Violin and Pianoforte by English soprano-composer Elizabeth Billington (née Weichsell), 26, is published at London, but James Ridgeway's scurrilous Memoirs of Mrs. Billington From Her Birth titillates gossips and makes life uncomfortable for the young woman. Her German-born father is chief oboist at the King's Theater, she and her brother Carl have given recitals since 1774, and she married at age 18 against her family's wishes (see 1794).
Anthem: "La Maiseillaise" by French army officer Rouget de Lisle, 32, who composes the song the night of April 24 at Strasbourg not as a revolutionary anthem but as a royalist patriotic song in support of the government that 4 days earlier declared war against the Holy Roman emperor Franz II and Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Popular song: "Oh! Dear, What Can the Matter Be?" is published at London.
A new French law makes it illegal to use royal insignia; playing cards are redesigned so that kings, queens, and jacks on picture cards are replaced by depictions of Racine, Rousseau, or Voltaire, or symbols of "Modesty," "Justice," or "Prosperity."
Duncan Phyfe, 25, sets up a New York joiner's shop that he will continue until his retirement in 1847. The Scottish-born cabinetmaker begins producing mahogany chairs, tables, and couches that will make the name Duncan Phyfe as famous as the names Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Chippendale (see 1749; 1791).
Architect Robert Adam dies at London March 3 at age 63 and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He has designed the city's Adelphi buildings, the Home House in Portman Square, and 20 St. James Square, and his country houses include Luton Hoo, Croome Court, Kedleston Hall, Kenwood, and Nostell Priory, all done in an elegant style that has superseded the more austere Palladian style.
Captain William Bligh loads Tahitian breadfruit aboard the decks of H.M.S. Providence for planting in the Caribbean islands (see 1791; 1793).
The Farmer's Almanac is founded by Dublin, New Hampshire, printer Robert B. Thomas, who establishes a format that will be continued for more than 200 years, offering weather predictions that will prove about 40 percent accurate (the publishers will claim 74 percent).
The United States exports some 8,000 tons of pearlash (potassium carbonate) to Britain and Europe for use in baking (see Hopkins, 1790). Produced by burning wood, pearlash releases the carbon dioxide in the dough baking in the oven, causes the bread to rise, and is revolutionizing the baking industry. (Potash-water is an aerated beverage much like soda water.)
The first U.S. cracker bakery opens at Newburyport, Massachusetts, where baker Theodore Pearson specializes in making pilot's bread (ship's biscuit) (see Bent, 1801).
Louis XVI and his family remain imprisoned in the Temple, where a kitchen staff of 13 prepares and serves daily dinners and suppers of three potages, four entrées, three dishes of "roast or mixed grill," and four entremets, bread, a plate of petits fours, three compotes, three plates of fruit, a bottle of champagne, a carafe each of bordeaux, malvoisy (monembasia, known in Britain as malmsey), madeira, and coffee.
Chefs to great French houses set up in business as traiteurs (caterers) to the public as aristocrats emigrate to escape the looming Reign of Terror.
1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800
