1816
1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820
Admiral Samuel Hood, 1st Viscount Hood of Whitley, dies at London January 27 at age 91 as the victorious allies savor peace after 20 years of hostilities on land and sea. The end of the Napoleonic wars has disappointed thousands of Royal Navy officers and men, who had hoped to gain advancement through combat and enrich themselves through prizes taken at sea. Hood has served since 1796 as governor of Greenwich Hospital.
Napoleonic general Pierre-F.-C. Augereau dies on his estate at La Houssaye June 12 at age 58. Created duc de Castiglione in 1808, he declared for the monarchy after Napoleon's downfall 2 years ago but was forced to retire.
Ferdinand IV of Naples (now Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies) returns to Naples in December and reimposes authoritarian rule (see 1806; 1820).
A combined fleet of British and Dutch ships bombards Algiers, virtually destroying the corsairs (pirates) who have threatened the safety of merchant shipping in the Mediterranean (see Decatur, 1815).
Brazil proclaims herself an empire January 16 with the Portuguese prince regent João as emperor. Portugal's mentally deranged queen Maria I dies at Rio de Janeiro March 20 at age 81 after a 39-year reign, the last 17 years of which have been controlled by her son. He will reign until 1817 as João VI but remains in Brazil (see 1807; 1820).
Venezuelan revolutionist Francisco de Miranda dies in his prison cell at Cádiz, Spain, July 14 at age 66.
Argentina (United Provinces of La Plata) declares herself independent of Spain July 29 in a proclamation issued by the Congress of Tucuman.
Paraguayan military leader José Rodriguez de Francia, 50, assumes supreme powers, beginning a 24-year dictatorship in which he will develop a strong army, gain absolute power over the Guaraní Indian majority, and isolate his country, which declared independence from Spain only 5 years ago.
Britain returns Java to the Netherlands (see 1811; 1946).
President Madison's secretary of state James Monroe, now 58, wins election to the presidency, gaining 183 electoral votes as compared with 34 for Georgia states' rightist William H. Crawford, the last Federalist candidate for president.
Indiana enters the Union December 11 as the 19th state.
A survey to establish the boundary between Canada and the United States begins under the supervision of David Thompson (see 1809). It will take 10 years (see 1818).
France abolishes divorce entirely under a law adopted May 8 as Roman Catholicism becomes the state religion under Louis XVII (see 1803). Unhappy couples may obtain judicial separation, but although the chamber of deputies will pass divorce bills in the 1830s the chamber of peers controlled by the aristocracy will reject all efforts to return to the 1792 law enacted during the Revolution (see 1884).
The American Colonization Society is founded by Princeton, New Jersey-born Presbyterian clergyman and educator Robert Finley, 44, whose pamphlet "Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks" is published at Washington, D.C., in December. Supported by President Madison and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, his proposal to relocate free blacks to Africa wins support both from abolitionists and from slave owners such as Virginia planter and statesman John Randolph, now 43, who has called free blacks "promoters of mischief." Feelings that freed blacks will never be able to assimilate into a white social order are widespread. The Society holds its first meeting at Washington's Davis Hotel December 21 (those who attend include Clay, President-elect Monroe, the late George Washington's nephew Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, lawyer Francis Scott Key, and Rep. Daniel Webster). A second meeting 1 week later adopts a constitution, founder Finley will die of fever in Georgia next October at age 45 after becoming president of the University of Georgia, but the Society's surviving members will lobby Congress and the White House for financial support (see 1820).
The British Admiralty's second secretary Sir John Barrow, 52, sends Captain James Tuckey, Royal Navy, on an expedition to explore the Congo. Barrow has seen an opportunity to use the navy's peace-idled officers in his obsessions to discover the terminus of the Niger River and locate the Northwest Passage, but Tuckey's entire party is wiped out by yellow fever.
Pittsburgh is incorporated on the site of Fort Pitt, erected in 1759.
Congress charters a Second Bank of the United States, capitalized at $35 million (see 1811; Girard, 1812). Headquartered at Philadelphia and by far the largest bank in the country, it is the only bank permitted to operate across state lines (see 1818).
Congress imposes a 25 percent duty on all imports to protect America's infant industry from foreign competition and make the nation self-sufficient, but even with the tariff wall British manufacturers will find ways to undersell the Americans. Rep. Daniel Webster, 34, (N.H.) has opposed the tariff as a representative of New England shipping interests.
The New York merchant trading house G. G. & S. Howland is established by Connecticut-born shipowner's sons Gardiner Greene Howland, 28, and his brother Samuel (Shaw), 25, who have one schooner to begin trade with the Cuban port of Matanzas. Gardiner has worked for Le Roy, Bayard & McEvers; his marriage in mid-December 1812 to the daughter of William Edgar has given him the wherewithal and access to credit needed to start his own firm, which competes with Bayard and will overtake it (see 1825).
The brigantine Monkey carrying Turkish opium for the Boston-based firm Perkins & Co. sails into Macau to begin the firm's trade in a commodity that will prove far more profitable than silk or tea (see Cushing, 1803). Cultivation of opium poppies is illegal in China, but the British harvest vast fields of the flowers in India, processing the poppy resin in a government factory at Patna, where 150 workers mold opium (sometimes adulterated with sand or brown sugar) into round cakes the size of cannonballs, turning out 11,000 cakes per day, and smuggling it into China, where that much opium will supply the needs of 200,000 addicts for a month. Perkins will soon dispatch an agent to the Italian port of Leghorn (Livorno) and establish an opium-buying operation (see 1818).
The Hudson Bay Company's Red River Colony at Seven Oaks in what later will be Manitoba is destroyed June 19 by agents of the rival North West Company (see exploration, 1812). Red River Colony governor Robert Semple leads some 25 soldiers and settlers out of Fort Douglas to parley with a party of about 60 Métis (part European, part Indian) under the command of North West Company employee Cuthbert Grant, who has set out to run provisions past the colony and plundered several posts on the Assiniboine River. A fight breaks out, Semple and 19 of his men are killed (Grant loses only one man), the rest of the settlers are forced to leave or be massacred as well, but the settlement will be restored next year with help from founder Thomas Douglas, 5th earl of Selkirk. Bay Company officers capture North West Company official Duncan Cameron, now 52, and send him to England for trial, but he will win acquittal and damages for false imprisonment. Partner Simon Fraser, now 41, is arrested as head of the company's Red River Valley department, but he wins acquittal and retires to Ontario (see 1821).
The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society opens December 2 in the office of its secretary-treasurer George Billington in Sixth Street. The first U.S. savings bank actually to accept deposits, it will receive a charter early in 1819 and grow to become the largest U.S. thrift institution.
France's Caisse des Depots & Consignations is founded. The central investment fund for savings banks must invest "in the public interest."
The Luddite movement that British authorities suppressed in 1813 revives as a dismal harvest produces economic depression throughout Britain. Luddites attack Heatcote and Boden's mill at Loughborough June 28, smashing 53 frames valued at £6,000; they make well-organized efforts to smash machinery in riots at other industrial centers; Lord Byron writes an inflammatory poem ("Song for the Luddites"), saying, "As the Liberty lads o'er the sea/ Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,/ So we, boys, we/ Will die fighting or live free,/ And down with all Kings but King Ludd." A crowd gathers December 2 in London's Spa Fields and commits acts of violence, the rioters are vigorously prosecuted, six men are executed, three transported, but the movement will continue until rising prosperity ends it (see Cobbett, 1819).
English textile manufacturer John Fielden, 32, and his four brothers petition Parliament to protect child workers. The Fieldens themselves worked as children for their father, Joshua; they inherited his small business when he died 5 years ago and have expanded it, taking their cloth 20 miles away to Manchester each week and returning with imported cotton.
Inventor Richard Trevithick sails for South America, having received orders for nine of his high-pressure steam engines 2 years ago for use in Peruvian silver mines (see 1808). He will remain abroad until 1827, by which time George Stephenson and other engineers will have profited from his inventions and he will have lost all his money.
The Stirling engine patented by Scottish clergyman-inventor Robert Stirling, 26, is an external-combustion engine that will be used to pump water on farms and generate electricity, but although it has great potential for quiet operation, high efficiency, high power density, versatility in its fuel source, and low emission of pollutants, efforts to develop it for commercial use will have little success. Stirling engines will be manufactured, nevertheless, until 1922.
The steamboat Washington launched June 4 at Wheeling, Virginia, sets a pattern for U.S. riverboats. Designed by Captain Henry M. Shreve, 31, the 148-foot 400-ton Washington has a shallow draft to clear the snags and sandbars of the Ohio and Mississippi, and her two decks rise high above the water with two chimneys on either side of her small, boxlike pilothouse, a design that inspires spectators to call her a "floating wedding cake" (seeNew Orleans, 1811). Shreve's ship has two high-pressure, 24-inch cylinder, six-foot stroke engines placed horizontally on the deck instead of vertically in the hull, thereby making her shallow draft possible. Each of her engines operates a side-wheel and is unconnected to the other, so the pilot can reverse one engine to turn the ship in her own length. Her second deck is for passengers, who arrive at New Orleans October 7 on the ship's maiden voyage. By 1820 there will be more than 60 versions of Shreve's steamboat, whose owner will be memorialized in the name Shreveport, Louisiana (see 1817).
The United Kingdom has 2.5 million tons of merchant shipping; 1,000 tons are in steam (see 1826).
The Black Ball Line begins regular Baltimore clipper ship service between New York and Liverpool, but the full flowering of the clipper ship will not come for three decades (see 1790; 1832).
A French fleet of four naval vessels sets out in late June for Senegal in West Africa bearing the colony's new governor aboard the flagship Medusa with 240 would-be settlers and a crew of 160. Navigated by a civilian friend of the governor, who ignores the advice of seasoned naval officers, the Medusa founders on a sandbank well off the African coast July 2. The captain refuses to jettison the ship's heavy guns or her cargo of flour, and the governor orders a large raft built from the ship's timbers to accommodate all who cannot fit into the Medusa's six boats, which are taken over by the captain and the other officers. The boats tow the raft briefly before cutting it loose, there are only a few casks of wine to share among the 149 on the overcrowded raft, vicious fighting breaks out between drunken soldiers and desperate civilians, 89 people are lost within 2 days, 12 more die the third night, but one body is saved from the sharks and eaten by the survivors. When the brig Argus sights the raft 13 days later only 15 people remain alive, and more die in the sands of the Sahara. Charges are filed against the governor and his friend but they go free, and the captain is sent to prison for 3 years (see Géricault painting, 1819).
The celeripede invented by French physicist (Joseph-) Nicéphore Niepce, 51, is a primitive two-wheeled scooter propelled by the action of the rider's feet on the ground. German inventor Karl D. Sauerbroun devises a slightly more advanced version (see photography, 1822; Macmillan's bicycle, 1839).
Friedrich Krupp produces the first Krupp steel at Essen (see 1811). It is not cast steel, which Sheffield has resumed exporting to Europe, but consists of tiny bars of low-grade steel marketed as files for tanners (see 1826).
The Binomial Theorem (Der binomische Lehrsatz) by Bohemian mathematician Bernhard Bolzano, 34, at the University of Prague provides a detailed proof and suggests ways to distinguish finite and infinite classes. A professor at the university since his ordination as a priest in 1805, Bolzano has antagonized many of his colleagues by teaching that wars are unnecessary and militarism a waste of society's resources.
The Institut de France awards its grand prix to Paris-born mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy, 27, for a paper he has written on wave propagation. While working as a military engineer at Cherbourg, Cauchy solved a mathematical problem sent to him by the late Joseph de Lagrange and was persuaded 3 years ago by Lagrange and Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace, to devote himself full time to mathematics. The Academy of Sciences expels Gaspard Monge for political reasons, and Cauchy is appointed to take his place.
The Académie Française awards its gold medal to French mathematical-physicist Sophie Germain, 40, who has twice been denied the prize because of her sex. Her paper on the mathematical laws that apply to the elasticity of surfaces inspires another mathematician to write, "It is a work which few men are able to read and which only one woman was able to write." As a woman, Germain could not be admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique, so she collected professors' lecture notes from other students, submitted a paper to the late mathematician Joseph de Lagrange under a pseudonym, and impressed him so much that he became her mentor. She has carried on correspondence with mathematician Karl F. Gauss, also using a pseudonym. The Académie's award makes her name known throughout France, and she is the first woman ever invited to attend sessions at the prestigious Institut de Paris.
Treatise on Chemistry (Traité de chimie élémentaire) by Louis Jacques Thénard appears in its fourth volume (the first was published in 1813) and will the standard text for the next 20 years.
Chemist Louis-Bernard, Baron Guyton de Morveau, dies at Paris January 2 just 2 days short of his 69th birthday.
The Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath-Schools is founded at New York by schoolteacher Joanne Bethune.
Hindu College is founded at Calcutta through the efforts of reformer Ram Mohun Roy, 34, and other Bengali semirationalists who recognize value in Oriental learning for the advancement of civilization but see merit in so-called "English" education.
Journalist William Cobbett puts out a cheap edition of his 14-year-old Political Register in order to broaden his circulation and avoid the heavy taxes on ordinary newspapers. Now 53, he recognizes that the unrest among Britain's poor can be relieved only by a reform of Parliament and a reduction of interest on the national debt, but his paper is denounced as "two-penny trash," the government interprets even moderate proposals for change as sedition, it suppresses dissent, and Cobbett will flee to America next year to avoid arrest (see 1819).
Nonfiction: Science of Logic (Wissinschaft der Logik) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, now 46, whose third and final volume completes the "Hegelian" philosophy of the absolute that will dominate metaphysics during the second quarter of the century (the first volume appeared in 1812). Thesis generates antithesis, says Hegel, and both are superseded by a higher synthesis that incorporates what is rational in each and rejects the irrational.
Philosopher and moralist Adam Ferguson dies at St. Andrews, Fife, February 22 at age 92 (Sir Walter Scott composes his epitaph); author-physician-colonial agent Philip Mazzei dies at Pisa March 9 at age 85. He has lived in recent years on a pension from the Russian government.
Fiction: Emma by Jane Austen: "A single woman with a narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else"; The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality by Walter Scott; Headlong Hall by poet Thomas Love Peacock.
Poetry: "The Story of Rimini" by English poet (James Henry) Leigh Hunt, now 32, who since 1808 has been editor of the Examiner. "The two divinest things this world has got,/ A lovely woman in a rural spot!" writes Hunt, who returns to the rhythms of Chaucer and Spencer to pioneer a new romantic school; "The Siege of Corinth" by Lord Byron, who last year married heiress Anne Isabella Milbanke (she will leave him next year after giving birth to a daughter, Ada); "Kublai Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea./ So twice five miles of fertile ground/ with walls and towers were girdled round"; English poet John Keats, 20, has his first sonnet published May 5 in Leigh Hunt's Examiner and follows it in December with his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into the ken;/ Or like stout Cortéz, when with eagle eyes/ He stared at the Pacific—and all his men/ Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien" (he means Balboa, not Cortéz; see exploration, 1513).
Painting: Flatford Mill on the River Stour by John Constable; Mousehold Heath and Porington Oak by John Crome.
The Elgin Marbles go on display at the British Museum (see 1803). Now 50, Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, has gone into debt. He lost his nose to disease at Constantinople, his wife has left him, and he has asked Parliament to purchase the works—a caraytid from the Erectheum, 17 figures from the Parthenon pediments, and 15 metopes. Calculating that he has spent £74,240 dismantling the works, packing them, salvaging them at sea, building a gallery to house them in Park Lane, and paying to guard them, he has offered the priceless pieces at £74,240. The government has offered £35,000, pointing out that the works were shipped home in British warships. Elgin protests that £35,000 would not even cover his original outlay, much less the interest that sum would have earned. A parliamentary committee convenes to consider the issue, it concludes that £35,000 is a fair price, Elgin has no recourse but to accept, and he sues his wife's lover for a high sum, and he will marry an even younger woman with whom he will move to the Continent (see 1937).
Theater: Bertram by Dublin-born playwright-novelist Charles R. (Robert) Maturin, 34, at London's Drury Lane Theatre. The tragedy enjoys considerable success.
Actress Dorothea Jordan dies at Saint-Cloud outside Paris July 3 at age 54; playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan at London July 7 at age 64 (a former member of Parliament, he is buried in Westminster Abbey).
Opera: The Barber of Seville (Il Barbiere de Siviglia) 2/5 at Rome's Teatro Argentina, with Spanish tenor-composer Manuel del Popolo García, 41, singing the title role, music by Gioacchino Rossini. Based on the Beaumarchais drama of 1775 and initially titled Almaviva, Rossini's opera creates a furor; Italian soprano Giuditta (Maria Costanza) Pasta (née Negri) Italian soprano, 18, makes her Paris debut at the Théâtre des Italiens in Baer's Il Principe di Taranto and goes on to sing the role of Donna Elvira in the 1787 Mozart opera Don Giovanni; Othello, or the Moor ofVenice (Otello, o Il Moro di Venezia) 12/4 at the Teatro Fondo, Naples, with music by Rossini.
Choreographer Vincenzo Galeotti dies at Copenhagen December 16 at age 83, having directed the Royal Danish Ballet since 1775.
English dandy George Bryan "Beau" Brummell, 38, flees to Calais to escape creditors hounding him for gambling debts. A friend of the prince regent, Brummell will serve as British consul at Caen from 1832 to 1840 but die in a French insane asylum in 1840.
Providence, Rhode Island, gets a gray stone Unitarian church with the largest belfry ever cast by Bostonian Paul Revere, now 81.
Boston's David Sears House is completed on Beacon Street to designs by Alexander Parris, now 35, who commanded a company of engineers during the War of 1812 and has relocated from his native Maine (see St. Paul's Church, 1819).
The newly-incorporated city of Pittsburgh is known even now as a "smoky city" because of all its coal-burning houses and factories (see 1947).
Cold weather persists through summer in much of the world's temperate zones, apparently as a result of dust in the atmosphere following last year's volcanic eruption in the East Indies. Frost occurs from Canada to Virginia every night from June 6 to June 9, laundry laid out to dry on the grass at Plymouth, Connecticut, June 10 is found frozen stiff, heavy snows fall in the Northeast in June and July, and frost kills crops in what farmers will call "eighteen hundred and froze to death."
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, cranberry production gets a boost from the discovery that cranberry vines grow more vigorously in places where the wind has blown sand over a mat of wild vines. The observation by Henry Hall at Dennis will lead to draining of swampy wastelands and development of commercial cranberry bogs.
Ireland's potato crop fails in August; excessive rain is blamed and many go hungry in the resulting famine.
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