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Marshal André Masséna, duc de Rivoli and Prince d'Essling, dies at Paris April 4 at age 58, having played a leading role as general in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
The Austrian princess Maria Leopoldina, 20, is married by proxy May 13 at Vienna to Portugal's Crown Prince Pedro, 18, whose father, João VI, has ruled by proxy from Brazil since 1807. Pedro's real father may be the courtly marquês of Marialva, a middle-aged bachelor who was for many years the lover of Queen Carlota Joaquina, and it is the marquês who came to Vienna as João's emissary last year to make the match with Maria Leopoldina. She leaves Vienna June 21 with a large entourage, makes her way to Livorno (Leghorn), and embarks on a Portuguese frigate for Rio de Janeiro, which she reaches after an 82-day voyage (see 1819).
The Obrenovic dynasty that will rule Serbia until 1842 (and then again from 1858 until 1903) is founded by Milos Obrenovic, 37, who leads a second insurrection against the Ottoman Turks and gains recognition as prince of Serbia over the objections of the Karageorgevic family (see 1739). The rival family's illiterate 54-year-old peasant leader George Petrovic (Karageorge, or Black George) returns from exile in Austria, but the Obrenovics murder him at Radvoanje July 13, beginning a long blood feud between the two families (see 1829).
Soldier Thaddeus Kosciusko dies at Solothurn, Switzerland, October 15 at age 71. Mourned as a Polish national hero, he has freed the serfs on his Polish estates earlier in the year. His remains are taken to Kraków for interment in the national cathedral, and his will directs that the money realized from the sale of his lands in Ohio be used to free as many slaves as possible and to establish a school for blacks at Newark, New Jersey.
A third Anglo-Maratha War begins as the British governor general Warren Hastings sends troops into Maratha territory while conducting operations against Pindari robber bands (see 1805). Forces of the peshwa Baji Rao II rebel against the British, those of the Bhonsie and Holkar families follow suit (Daulat Rao Sindhia remains neutral), but the British quickly prevail. The Treaty of Surji-Arjungaon that was signed at the end of 1803 and revised in November 1805 is revised again November 5 under British pressure; Daulat Rao Sindhia surrenders his rights in Rajasthan and pledges his support to the British against the Pindari marauders; British diplomats soon conclude treaties of protection with the 19 Rajput states (see 1818).
Madagascar's east-coast peoples submit with little or no resistance to the 35,000-man army of Radama I, who has modernized his military with the help of Britain, whose government wants a strong kingdom to offset French influence on the African island (see 1810). While ignoring areas (mostly in the extreme south) that are either barren or densely forested, Radama will soon conquer the southeast as far as Tolagnaro and by 1828 will have almost all of Madagascar under Merina rule (see 1828).
Chile wins her liberation from Spain February 12 at the Battle of Chacabuco near Santiago and will proclaim independence early next year (see 1812). Bernardo O'Higgins has enlisted the support of Argentine military commander José de San Martín, now 39, who has raised and trained a small army of Chilean and Argentine volunteers, crossed the high Andes with O'Higgins in 20 days, lost 2,000 of his 5,000 men to cold and altitude sickness, and surprised a 1,500-man royalist army under the command of Gen. Rafael Maroto. The Spanish infantry drive O'Higgins back at first, but San Martín leads a grenadier charge against the Spanish cavlary, giving O'Higgins time to recover, attack Maroto's flank, and rout the royalist forces. San Martín helps make O'Higgins supreme dictator of Chile.
Mexican patriot Gertrudis Bocanegra is tried by the Spaniards, sentenced to death, and executed October 10 at age 52 (see 1810). Her husband has been killed in battle, she has been sent to her native Pátzcuaro to obtain military information and persuade royalist troops to come over to the rebel side, the Spaniards have caught her, and they have imprisoned her along with her daughters (see Morelos, 1815; Iturbide, 1821).
A Spanish firing squad executes Colombian patriot La Pola (Policarpa Salavarrieta), 22, in mid-November at Santafé, east of Bogotá. She has worked since age 15 in the cause of independence for New Granada, which will achieve that independence in 2 years through the efforts of Simón Bolívar and others.
The Alabama Territory is organized March 3 as Eli Whitney's cotton gin encourages slave-owning planters to take up lands to the west (see statehood, 1819).
The Rush-Bagot Treaty signed April 28 limits U.S. and British naval forces on the Great Lakes. U.S. Secretary of State Richard Rush, 37, has negotiated the treaty with British minister to Washington Sir Charles Bagot, 36.
Boston's Columbian Centinel makes reference July 12 to the "era of good feelings" that has actually existed between Britain and the United States since 1815 and will continue until 1825, although some critics will describe the period rather as one of complacency and isolationism, with one party (the Democratic-Republicans) dominating domestic politics on the national level and sectional disputes relatively innocuous.
Mississippi enters the Union December 10 as the 20th state.
Ohio Indians sign a treaty ceding their remaining 4 million acres of land to the United States.
The Seminole War begins as Georgia backwoodsmen attack Indians just north of the Florida Territory border in retaliation for depredations by tribesmen (see 1818).
The Coercion Acts passed by Britain's Parliament in March extend the 1798 act against seditious meetings to suppress civil disturbances. Put through by the prime minister Lord Liverpool, they suspend temporarily the Habeas Corpus Act, renew an act punishing attempts to undermine the allegiance of soldiers and sailors, give the prince regent the same safeguards against treason as the king himself, and have the effect of stimulating activity by extremists in the radical movement (see 1819; Ireland, 1822).
Jena students organize the Wartburg Festival to celebrate the Reformation and Battle of Leipzig. They burn emblems of reaction October 18 (see 1819).
The American Colonization Society is founded with the aim of relocating contraband slaves and other blacks to Liberia, a colony to be established in Africa. Congress will provide funding for the society in 1819 (see politics, 1820).
Vasily M. Golovnin embarks on a new Russian naval expedition to circumnavigate the world (see 1811). Acting on orders from St. Petersburg, he takes his sloop Kamchatka among the Kuril islands and along the Kamchatka coasts, improving and extending the charts that he began before his capture by the Japanese 6 years ago (see Wrangel, 1824).
Admiral William Bligh, Royal Navy, dies at London December 7 at age 63. He was given the rank of admiral upon his retirement 6 years ago following service as governor of New South Wales.
Principles of Political Economy by economist David Ricardo contributes to Adam Smith's free trade theory of 1776 with a doctrine of "comparative costs" and a "labor theory of value." Ricardo postulates a basic antagonism between the landlords of England's "establishment" and the rising lords of English industry (see 1809).
The New York Stock and Exchange Board established February 25 to bring order to securities trading begins operations March 8 (see Buttonwood agreement, 1791), but New York remains a financial backwater by contrast to Philadelphia or London (see 1825).
John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company takes over the trade south of the Canadian border from British interests and gains a monopoly in the Mississippi Valley trade (see 1814; Juneau, 1818).
Economist Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours helps to fight a fire at his son Eleuthère Irènée's Delaware gunpowder mills, falls ill from overexertion, and dies at Irènée's house August 7 at age 77, having returned to America following the return of Napoleon from exile in 1814; industrialist Francis Cabot Lowell dies at Boston August 10 at age 42. His partner (and brother-in-law) Patrick Tracy Jackson will acquire mill sites on the Merrimack River, and two of these will become the cities of Lowell and Lawrence (see 1834).
Boston-born chemist and entrepreneur Deming Jarves, 25, and some associates buy the Boston Crown Glass Co. of East Cambridge, Massachusetts, at public auction. Jarves controls the company's stock and will build it into the New England Glass Co., receiving charter rights to manufacture "Flint and Crown Glass of all kinds in the towns of Boston and Cambridge" (see flint glass, 1808). English companies continue to control the U.S. trade through possession of secret formulas for metal compounding related to making red lead and litharge (lead monoxide), but Jarves will construct experimental furnaces and succeed on his first attempt to compound litharge and hold a U.S. monopoly on galena, or painters' red lead, enabling American companies to bring in expert glass cutters from abroad and compete with their British counterparts (see Bakewell, 1825; Sandwich glass, 1827).
The Bank of Montreal is founded in Quebec and will survive as Canada's oldest financial institution.
Johnson Matthey is founded at London with a gold refinery in Hatton Garden. The Johnson family has been engaged in assaying precious metals since the 1750s, they will win approval as assayers and refiners to the Bank of England in 1852, and the family concern will grow by the 21st century to control refineries in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States.
New Bedford, Massachusetts, entrepreneur Isaac Howland Jr. establishes an agency to finance whaling expeditions as demand increases for sperm oil for lamps and whalebone for corsets. Howland's ancestors came to America on the Mayflower in 1620. Half of all U.S. whaling ships sail out of New Bedford, the agencies that underwrite their voyages take about one-third of the profits, the town will be the richest per capita in Massachusetts by 1850, and although the diminutive Howland (he weighs less than 100 pounds) will die in 1834, his partners will make his firm the richest agency in town.
The sternwheeler paddle steamboat Washington leaves Louisville March 3 for a round-trip voyage to New Orleans and completes the first such voyage (see Shreve, 1816). By year's end, a dozen steamboats have gone up the Mississippi and penetrated into the Ohio and other western rivers (see Lake Erie, 1818).
The first steam ferry between Manhattan and Staten islands goes into service. The Nautilus is owned by U.S. Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, 43.
The Cumberland Road reaches west from Cumberland on the Potomac River to Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio (see 1811). The road has a 30-foot wide gravel center on a stone base (see 1852).
The Conestoga wagon covers the 90 miles between Philadelphia and New York in 3 days; people call it "the Flying Machine" (see 1753; 1840).
Governor De Witt Clinton of New York orders construction of a 363-mile canal that will connect Buffalo on Lake Erie with Troy on the Hudson River (see 1815). The state legislature authorizes state funds for the Erie Canal, and ground is broken July 4 (see 1815; 1819).
The first Waterloo Bridge is completed across the Thames at London by Scottish civil engineer John Rennie, 56, whose son John will complete his London Bridge in 1831.
Welsh inventor Richard Roberts, 28, devises a screw-cutting lathe and a machine for planing metal. He will also invent weaving improvements, advanced steam locomotives, railway cars, and steamships.
German chemist Friedrich Strohmeyer, 41, discovers cadmium.
Swedish chemist A. Arfvedson discovers lithium.
Chemist Jöns Berzelius discovers selenium.
French chemist-physicists Pierre-Louis Dulong and Alexis-Thérèse Petit, 27, at the Elysée Bonaparte in Paris show that Newton's law of cooling is true only for small differences in temperature. Now 33, Dulong lost the sight in one eye and nearly lost one hand 4 years ago while working on the highly explosive compound nitrogen trichloride he discovered in 1811 (see 1819).
French chemists Pierre-Joseph Pelletier, 29, and Joseph-Bienaimé Caventou, 22, at the Ecole de Pharmacie in Paris isolate chlorophyll, the green pigment essential to photosynthesis in plants (see Ingenhousz, 1779; Senebier, 1800; Dutrochet, 1837).
Pure Analytic Proof (Rein analytischer Beweis) by mathematician Bernhard Bolzano at Prague breaks new ground. Bolzano will be dismissed from his professorship in 1819 and devote himself thereafter to writing on social, religious, philosophical, and mathematical subjects.
Chemist Martin Klaproth dies at Berlin January 1 at age 73, having been involved in the discovery of at least six new elements; astronomer Charles Messier dies at Paris the night of April 11 at age 86, having compiled a list of more than 100 blurry objects that he determined were not comets and that later will prove to be nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters that will often be referred to by their Messier numbers; geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner dies at Freiberg June 30 at age 66, having rejected the uniformitarian belief that evolution was a uniform, continuous process and the Vulcanist (or Plutonist) belief that granite and many other rocks are of igneous origin. Believing that the Earth was once completely covered by oceans, he has founded the Neptunist school of thought that all rocks are of aqueous origin, but his theories are not universally accepted.
Parkinson's disease gets its name from a description by English surgeon-paleontologist James Parkinson, 62. A chronic nervous condition characterized by slowly spreading tremor, muscular weakness and rigidity, and a peculiar gait, it generally begins in a hand or foot and may spread until it involves other parts of the body, making the face expressionless and producing a slowness of speech; recovery is rare (see 1967).
Ismaelis (progressive Muslims) begin contributing the zakat (12 percent of their income) to the Aga Khan, a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed. He and future Aga Khans will become immensely rich.
The Fulani Muslim mystic, philosopher, and reformer Usman dan Fodio dies at Sokoto at age 62.
The tuition-free Connecticut Asylum opened at Hartford by Philadelphia-born Yale graduate Thomas H. (Hopkins) Gallaudet, 39, is the first U.S. school for deaf-mutes. Sent to Europe by the father of a deaf-mute girl to whom he tried to teach a few words, Gallaudet has studied at Paris in the Institut Royal des Sourds-Muets and returned with Laurent Clerc, a teacher at that school. Gallaudet will rename his school the American Asylum and gradually enlarge it with help from a congressional land grant, continuing to teach until his retirement in 1830 (see Clarke School, 1867).
The University of Michigan has its beginnings in a Detroit preparatory school that will move to Ann Arbor in 1837 and begin offering postsecondary courses in 1841.
Harvard Law School is established at Cambridge, Massachusetts (see Eliot, Langdell, 1869).
Massachusetts-born U.S. Army engineer Sylvanus Thayer, 32, returns from a 2-year study of European military-school methods and is appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York (see 1812). A harsh disciplinarian, Thayer will build up the academy's academic departments in the next 16 years, emphasizing engineering and science to make the Point into a top-ranking 4-year college with an engineering department second to none (see 1818).
Yale president Timothy Dwight dies at New Haven, Connecticut, January 11 at age 64; educator Richard Edgeworth at Edgeworthstown June 13 at age 73, having sired 22 children by four wives.
The Scotsman begins publication January 25 as a weekly Edinburgh newspaper that will become a daily in 1855.
Blackwood's Magazine has its beginnings in the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, started by Scottish bookseller-publisher William Blackwood, 41, as a Conservative rival to the Whig quarterly Edinburgh Review.
The Black Dwarf begins weekly publication at London with help from Devonshire-born shoemaker's son and freethinker Richard Carlile, 26, who often walks 30 miles per day through the city to disseminate the paper edited by Jonathan Wooler (see Fiction [Scott novel], 1816). Influenced by Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man," Carlile has become radicalized and later in the year prints and sells 25,000 copies of Southey's "Wat Tyler," reprints other suppressed works, and draws an 18-week prison sentence.
The Friend of India begins publication on the subcontinent under British colonial management.
Nonfiction: The Round Table and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by essayist William Hazlitt.
Madame de Staël dies at her native Paris July 14 at age 51 after a career in which she has struggled to assert women's right to individualism and exercised a strong influence on the literary figures and statesmen of her time.
Fiction: Rob Roy by Walter Scott; Ormond by Maria Edgeworth. Like her 1809 novel The Absentee, this novel is about Irish life; Melincourt by Thomas Love Peacock.
Novelist Jane Austen dies at Winchester July 18 at age 41, probably of Addison's disease; she is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Poetry: Poems by John Keats, who has been helped by his friend Percy Shelley; "Beppo: A Venetian Story" by Lord Byron; Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore; "Thanatopsis" by Great Barrington, Massachusetts, lawyer-poet William Cullen Bryant, 23, whose "view of death" in the September issue of North American Review will appear in an expanded version in 1821.
Painting: Flatford Mill by John Constable; Enée racontant à Didon les malheurs de la ville de Troie by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin; Still Life with a Lobster by Anne Vallayer-Coster, now 73.
Theater: The Ancestress (Die Ahnfrau) by Viennese playwright Franz Grillparzer, 26, 1/31 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien; The Scarlet Princess of Edo (Sakura hime Azuma Bunshō) by kabuki playwright Manbokou Tsuruya IV and collaborators in March at Tokyo's Kawarazaki Theater.
Opera: Giuditta Pasta sings the role of Telemachus in the Cimarosa opera Penelope 1/11 at the King's Theatre, London, and goes on to sing the roles of Cherubino in the 1786 Mozart opera Le Nozze di Figaro, Fiordiligi in the 1790 Mozart opera Cosi Fan Tutte, and Servlia in the 1790 Mozart opera La Clemenza di Tito; Cinderella (La Cenerentola) 11/25 at Rome's Teatro Valle, with music by Gioacchino Rossini.
The kaleidoscope patented by physicist David Brewster, now 35, goes on sale as a toy but will later prove valuable to pattern designers (see science, 1811). Brewster's simple optical device consists of a tube containing two thin, wedge-shaped mirror strips that touch along a common edge of metal bent to an angle, with a viewer which is revolved to reveal symmetrical patterns in endless variations, each created by the reflected images of bits of colored glass.
The British secretary for Ireland Robert Peel, 29, establishes a regular constabulary for Ireland, which is seething with discontent and on the verge of rebellion. The Irish will call the constables "Peelers" (see "Bobbies," 1829). Son of a rich Lancashire textile manufacturer, Peel will become home secretary in 1822 and prime minister in 1841.
The "Grand Architect of all the Russias" Giacomo Quaranghi dies at St. Petersburg February 18 at age 72, having designed the city's imposing neoclassical Hermitage Theater, St. George's Hall in the Winter Palace, the Academy of Sciences, the Catherine Institute, the Smolny Institute, several bridges on the Neva, and some structures at the royal residence of Tsarskoye Selo.
Boston architect Charles Bulfinch takes over from Benjamin Latrobe as architect of the Capitol building at Washington (see 1803). Within 10 years he will have joined the two wings and built the Capitol's first (wooden) dome, conforming to the original 1792 design of William Thornton (see Walter, 1850).
Haiti's Citadelle La Ferrière is completed for Henri I (Henri Christophe) atop a 3,100-foot peak outside Cap Haitien, where 200,000 former slaves have worked for 13 years at a cost of 2,000 lives to build the impregnable fortress that can hold 15,000 men with enough food and water to withstand a 1-year siege.
"The hunter or savage state," writes President Monroe, "requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with progress and just claims of civilized life . . . and must yield to it."
U.S. farm prices fall as Europe's peace ends the foreign markets that have taken some of America's farm surpluses.
Hereford cattle arrive in the United States for the first time to be raised in Virginia. The English breed will become the dominant cattle breed on the western plains (see Corning, Sotham, 1840).
The Bartlett pear gets its name by some accounts from Massachusetts farmer Enoch Bartlett, 38, who buys the orchard in which Stairs pears, similar to the bon Chrétien grown in Europe, were planted in 1798 by Roxbury farmer-sea captain Thomas Brewer (see 1769; 1848).
Russian colonists at Fort Ross plant the first grape vines seen in northern California (see 1814; Vallejo, 1841).
Ireland has famine following the failure of last year's potato crop; thousands starve (see 1821).
Irish emigration begins on a large scale as thousands die in the potato famine. Potatoes have provided a cheap source of food that has helped the country's population reach 6.5 million, up from just over 5 million in 1801.
Thomas Malthus rejects artificial contraceptive devices in a fifth edition of his 1798 Essay. The misery of overpopulation is necessary to "stimulate industry" and discourage "indolence," writes Malthus (see Place, 1822).
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