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Reactionary German journalist August von Kotzebue, 58, is murdered March 23, at Mannheim by Jena University student Karl Ludwig Sand, 23, who calls Kotzebue a Russian spy and an enemy of liberty. Austria's Prince Metternich takes alarm and persuades Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm III to issue the repressive Carlsbad Decrees that establish an inquisition at Mainz in July to look into secret societies, impose strict censorship on all publications, and place German universities under the control of commissioners appointed by German sovereigns.
The Peterloo Massacre August 16 at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, kills at least 11 unarmed men, women, and children, badly injuring more than 600 others after local magistrates order yeomanry (part-time cavalry) to break up a crowd of at least 80,000 gathered to hear radicals such as Henry "Orator" Hunt, 45, and Richard Carlile, 28, urge parliamentary reform and repeal of the Corn Laws that have been held responsible in large part for the Luddite riots earlier in this decade. A landowner with 20,000 acres near East Grinstead, Hunt has advocated annual parliaments, repeal of the Corn Laws, a secret ballot, and universal suffrage; the allegedly drunken yeomen charge before he has had a chance to speak and he is not injured, but the white hat he has worn is staved in by a sword and will become a symbol of reform; he is charged along with others with holding an "unlawful and seditious assembling for the purpose of exciting discontent," found guilty, and sentenced to 2½ years' imprisonment in Ilchester Gaol. Carlile begins publishing a newspaper (The Republican) August 27, describes the massacre, and writes, "Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform, should never go unarmed—retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice." Found guilty of blasphemy and seditious libel in October, he is sentenced to 3 years in Dorchester Gaol and fined £1,500; when he refuses to pay, authorities raid his Fleet Street offices and confiscate his stocks. The Six Acts passed by Parliament in December comprise a repressive code that curtails public meetings, forbids training in the use of firearm, empowers magistrates to search citizens for arms and seize any that may be found, provides for speedy trial in "cases of misdemeanor," increases the penalties for seditious libel, and limits radical journalism by imposing a 4d. tax on cheap newspapers and stipulating that no paper may be sold for less than 7d. at a time when most working people earn less than 10 shillings per week. Carlile will continue publishing from prison and in the early 1820s some 150 men and women will be imprisoned for selling The Republican.
Prussian field marshal G. B. Librecht Blücher von Wahlstadt, hero of Waterloo, dies at Krieblowitz, near Kanth, in Silesia September 12 at age 76.
The Ottoman sultan Mahmud II determines to centralize his government and gives his commanders in the Balkans permission to assassinate the Albanian brigand Tepelenë, now 75, who as governor (pasha) of Janina has been trying to make that province an independent sea power (see 1788; 1822)
Spain cedes eastern Florida and all its possessions east of the Mississippi to the United States February 22 after months of effort by Andrew Jackson, who has occupied Pensacola and executed some Seminole chiefs along with two white sympathizers—British traders Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot (see 1818). Evidence against the Britons has been uncovered by Charleston-born Lieut. James Gadsden, 30. Spain agrees to relinquish all claims to Pacific Coast territory north of the 42nd parallel; the United States agrees to pay Floridians $5 million for their claims against Spain (see Key West, 1821; Seminole, 1832; statehood, 1845).
The Arkansas Territory is established March 2 (see statehood, 1836).
Maine is separated from Massachusetts (see statehood, 1820).
Alabama enters the Union December 14, becoming the 22nd state as Eli Whitney's cotton gin encourages the spread of cotton cultivation westward (see Mississippi, 1817).
Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, U.S. Navy, contracts malaria (or yellow fever) on Venezuela's Orinoco River, dies August 23 on his 34th birthday, and is buried in Trinidad.
Simón Bolívar moves up the Orinoco River, crosses the Andes, and with help from British volunteers defeats a superior Spanish force under the command of Pablo Morillo, conde de Cartagena, August 7 at the Boyaca River (see 1818). Bolívar occupies Bogotá August 10 and liberates New Granada from Spain. His brigadier general Francisco de Paula Santander, 27, becomes vice president of New Granada and sends representatives to the Congress of Angostura, which proclaims the independence of Gran Colombia December 17 (it is comprised of New Granada, Venezuela, and Quito, with its capital at Bogotá) and establishes Bolívar as president and military dictator. Santander will serve as acting president during Bolívar's absences (see 1821).
Portuguese forces from Brazil take over the Banda Oriental from Uruguayan revolutionist José Gervasio Artigas and force him into exile (see 1814). Artigas's egalitarian views and growing power have not endeared him to the authorities at Buenos Aires, and they do not resist the Portuguese takeover (see 1825).
Burma's king Bodawpaya dies at Amarapura at age 78 (or 79) after an oppressive 37-year reign in which he has warred with his neighbors, proclaimed himself the messianic Buddha destined to conquer the world, come into conflict with Britain, persecuted heterodox sects, and made drinking, opium smoking, and animal killing capital offenses.
Singapore comes under British occupation February 6 as the East India Company's Stamford Raffles brings in troops to defend a muddy fishing village on a diamond-shaped island off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Now 37 and governor of Benkuilen in Sumatra, Raffles has recognized Singapore's value as a deep-water port on the sea route between China and India, he has set up a free trading post January 29, and he wants to keep out the Dutch. The island has an area of about 222 square miles, 60 additional small islets bring the total to about 240 square miles, its magnificent harbor has made it an important trading center since early in the 14th century, and it will grow to be the world's largest port (see 1823).
British explorer John Franklin, 33, undertakes a new expedition to locate the Northwest Passage (see Ross, 1818). Sent by the second secretary of the Admiralty Sir John Barrow, the Arctic expedition is poorly prepared, its boats are too heavy to be portaged and too small to hold all the necessary supplies, the sailors know nothing about survival techniques and resort to cannibalism when their food runs out. Franklin is one of the few to survive, and he is lionized at home as "the man who ate his boots" (see Ross, 1831).
Memphis is laid out on the Mississippi River at Fort Adams. It takes its name from the Egyptian city famous for its cotton.
Minneapolis has its beginnings in Fort Snelling, built by U.S. Army engineers some 900 miles up the Mississippi from Memphis near St. Anthony's Falls (see Hennepin, 1680; Minneapolis, 1847).
"The power to tax is the power to destroy," says John Marshall March 6 in his Supreme Court ruling that no state may tax any instrumentality of the federal government (McCulloch v. Maryland). The court rules unanimously that taxation of the Bank of the United States and its Baltimore branch by the state of Maryland is unconstitutional, and its decision establishes the supremacy of the federal government over state governments (see 1818).
The U.S. economic depression that began last year brings appeals from manufacturers for higher protective tariffs (see 1816). The country has a financial panic that some will blame on a tightening of credit by the Second Bank of the United States but is more likely the result of falling agricultural prices.
Britain's prime minister Lord Liverpool bolsters his country's monetary system by restoring the gold standard.
William Cobbett comments on the recent Luddite movement September 11 in his Political Register, saying, "Society ought not to exist, if not for the benefit of the whole. It is and must be against the law of nature if it exists for the benefit of the few and for the misery of the many. I say, then, distinctly, that a society in which the common labourer . . . cannot secure a sufficiency of food and raiment is a society which ought not to exist; a society contrary to the law of nature; a society whose compact is dissolved."
Steam engine inventor James Watt dies at Heathfield Hall, near Birmingham, August 19 at age 83, having retired in 1800 after a career in which he coined the word horsepower to denote a unit of power equal to 747.5 watts. His son and namesake carries on the Boulton & Watt foundry at Soho in partnership with the late Matthew Boulton's son and namesake.
London gas mains extend 288 miles, and some 51,000 houses in the city are equipped with gas burners (see 1812). National Light and Heat Co. has become Gas Light and Coke Co., a firm that will continue for nearly 150 years (see Welsbach, 1885).
The whaling industry expands to new grounds off Japan as demand increases for the whale oil used in lamps worldwide. Many whaling ships will obtain supplies from Japanese ports.
The first stretch of the Erie Canal opens after 2 years of construction to connect Utica and Rome, New York (see 1817). Yankee engineers have devised an endless screw linked to a roller, a cable, and a crank to pull down tall trees, they have improvised a horse-drawn crane to lift rock debris out of the cut, but most of the work is done by Irish immigrants who are paid 37½¢ per day (plus as much as a quart of whiskey per day in periodic work breaks) and die by the thousands of malaria, pneumonia, and snakebite (see 1825; White, 1820).
The 350-ton U.S. merchant ship Savannah sails from the Georgia port May 22 and arrives June 30 at Liverpool—the first transatlantic crossing assisted by steam propulsion. Her commander is Moses Rogers, who piloted the Phoenix in 1809, persuaded the Savannah shipping firm Scarborough & Isaacs to buy the paddlewheeler after seeing her under construction last year at New York, and has superintended construction of her engines, paddle wheels, and accompanying machinery. The Savannah has one inclined direct-acting, low-pressure steam engine to power the side-wheels that supplement her sails, but she proceeds on steam for only 80 hours (her crew members break up furniture to fuel her boilers), and while she has 32 staterooms, the perils of her 90-horsepower engine have discouraged passengers and she carries none. She proceeds to Stockholm and St. Petersburg, receiving visitors who include the Russian czar Aleksandr I (see 1826).
Balloonist-physician John Jeffries dies at his native Boston September 16 at age 74.
Vacheron-Constantin watches get their name as Barthélémy Vacheron goes into partnership with François Constantin (see 1755). Constantin writes to Vacheron from Turin July 5, "Do better if possible and that is always possible." Watches made by the Geneva firm will bear the name Vacheron-Constantin beginning in 1832.
Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted, 42, at Copenhagen advances knowledge of electromagnetic energy. He notices that a compass needle located close to a wire carrying an electric current will swing wildly but will finally settle at right angles to the wire. Oersted suspects that the current in the wire must set up a magnetic field around it, and his observation will be the starting point for others (see Romagnosi, 1802; Ampère, 1820; Faraday, 1821; electromagnet, 1823).
French scientists make it possible to determine atomic weights. Pierre-Louis Dulong and Alexis-Thérèse Petit enunciate the Dulong-Petit law stating that the product of the relative atomic weight and the specific heat (the gram-atomic capacity) of any solid element is constant—about six calories per gram atom (see 1817). Petit will die next year at age 31, and the law that he helped to establish will later be modified, at first to make it applicable only to metallic elements. The atomic weights of many elements will be determined by using the Dulong-Petit law, but later tests will relegate it to use only for approximating atomic weights at intermediately high temperatures.
German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich, 25, advises the Berlin Academy in December that he has discovered from a study of arsenates, arsenites, phosphates, and phosphites that compounds with similar composition tend to have the same crystalline structure, a finding that he will develop into a theory of isomorphism. Mitscherlich receives a government grant that enables him to study at Stockholm under Jöns Berzelius. He will return to Berlin in 1821 and in 1823 will discover the monoclinic crystal form of sulfur (see 1825).
The stethoscope invented by French physician Théophile René Hyacinthe Laënnec, 38, avoids the indelicacy of having to place the physician's ear to the heaving bosom of a female patient with heart disease (see 1818). A man only five foot three in height who has been tubercular since age 17, Laënnec has been writing prolifically and lecturing since age 21, he uses the Greek words stethos (chest) and skopos (observer) to name the new instrument that began as a roll of paper, and introduces the practice of auscultation (see von Auenbrügg, 1761).
Elements of Medical Logick by physician Sir Gilbert Blane encourages reforms in hygiene and medicine. Now 70, Blane was knighted in 1812.
Sumatra has a cholera epidemic (see 1820).
Unitarianism is founded by Boston Congregationalist pastor William Ellery Channing, 30, who becomes the leader of a group that denies the holiness of the Trinity and believes in only one Divine Being. Channing will organize the American Unitarian Association in 1825.
Religious leader Jemima Wilkinson dies near what later will be Penn Yan, New York, July 1 at age 66, having been proclaimed a messiah by her followers.
The charter of a benevolent institution is a contract and therefore inviolate, rules Chief Justice John Marshall February 2 in the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward.
The University of Virginia is chartered at Charlottesville, three miles west of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate. The ex-president has been instrumental in obtaining the charter and is planning the grounds, buildings, and curriculum of the new university, which has no religious affiliation; students will begin classes March 27, 1825.
Middlebury, Vermont, educator Emma (Hart) Willard, 32, presents her "Plan for Improving Female Education" to Governor De Witt Clinton and sends copies to prominent men throughout America. Printed at her own expense, it argues that the current system of privately-financed education is inadequate because most schools are operated by their proprietors only as commercial ventures, many (especially those for girls) have no entrance requirements, they have few regulations, and their curricula are shallow. Since women give society its moral tone, Willard concludes, the country will benefit from quality female education. The New York State Legislature rejects her plan, but Governor Clinton is more receptive (see 1821).
A "night writing" system invented by French Army officer Captain Charles Barbier for communicating in the battlefield after dark is based on raised dots and finds immediate use in schools for blind children (see Haüy, 1784; Braille, 1834).
Journalist William Cobbett returns to England late in the year after 2 years in which he has edited and written for his Political Register from a rented Long Island farm (see 1816). His agents at home have continued to publish the weekly, but its influence has waned and he has become insolvent, and although he will try several times in the 1820s to gain election to Parliament he will not succeed.
Nonfiction: The World as Will and Idea (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) by Arthur Schopenhauer, now 30, who has studied the mystical literature of India as well as the writings of Plato and Immanuel Kant. He expounds a philosophy of pessimism that will be generally ignored for a generation but will have great influence in the latter part of the century; A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri by Albany County, New York-born explorer and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 26, who has traveled through the northwest with Michigan Territory governor Lewis Cass and found the source of the Mississippi.
Philosopher Friedrich H. Jacobi dies at Munich March 10 at age 76.
Fiction: Ivanhoe and The Legend of Montrose by Walter Scott, whose heroine in Ivanhoe, Rebecca, is modeled on Philadelphia philanthropist Rebecca Gratz, now 39, who 10 years ago nursed Washington Irving's dying fiancée (see 1801). Irving met Scott 2 years ago on a visit to Britain and spoke about Gratz, who joins with two other Philadelphia women this year to found the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society.
Poetry: "Ode to a Nightingale," "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Ode on Melancholy," and other odes by John Keats, who has his most productive year, using opium to assuage the pain of his tuberculosis; "Mazeppa" by Lord Byron; Poetic Attempts (Skaldeförsök) by the late Anna Maria Lenngren; Divan of West and East (West-östlicher Divan) by J. W. von Goethe.
Painting: The White Horse by John Constable who is elected an associate of the Royal Academy; George IV and Pope Pius VII by Sir Thomas Lawrence; The Raft of the 'Medusa' by Théodore Géricault (see transportation, 1816); Young Boy Near an Apple with a Fistful of Sticks by Jeanne Philiberte Ledoux, now 52; The Dream of Happiness by Constance Mayer; Passage of the Delaware by Thomas Sully; The Forge and Portrait of Don Juan Antonio Cuervo by Francisco de Goya.
Madrid's Prado Museum opens to the public as the Royal Museum of Painting after 34 years of construction that was interrupted by the Napoleonic wars; Ferdinand VII brings together in the neoclassical structure the paintings and sculpture acquired by his predecessors since Carlos I, including the most complete collections of works by El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, José de Ribera, and Francisco de Zurbarán as well as major works by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, Anthony Van Dyke, Paolo Veronese, and Watteau.
Theater: Altorf by Scottish heiress and social reformer Frances "Fanny" Wright, 24, 2/6 at New York. Having inherited a fortune at age 2 when her parents died, Wright arrived last year in America with her sister Camilla, now 22, and toured the northern and eastern states. She has written a tragedy about the Swiss struggle for independence (starring James Wallach in the title role, it closes after three performances). The Wright sisters will return next year to Britain after a winter in Philadelphia (see 1824; Nonfiction, 1821).
Opera: Olympic 12/15 at the Paris Opéra, with music by Gasparo Spontini, who will revise it for a February 1826 performance that will be successful where the first performance was not.
First performances: Stabat Mater by Franz Schubert in July at Steyr in Upper Austria.
Hymn: "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" by English prelate Reginald Heber, 36, who will be bishop of Calcutta from 1822 to 1826: "What though the spicy breezes/ Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle;/ Though every prospect pleases,/ And only man is vile."
St. Paul's Church is completed at Boston to Greek Revival designs by architect Alexander Parris (see 1816; Quincy Market, 1826).
Singapore becomes a prosperous trading post, but founder Stamford Raffles holds his nose in July and runs the other way whenever he encounters the overpoweringly foul smell of the durian fruit (from the Durio zibethinus tree), whose sweet, custardy yellow flesh is prized by the locals above all other fruit but whose odor is unbearable to Europeans (see Raffles Hotel, 1886).
Salmon, lobster meat, and oysters are packed in tin cans at New York by Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett (see Donkin-Hall, 1814; Kensett's patent, 1825).
U.S. diplomats in foreign posts receive instructions to send home any valuable new seeds and plants.
Cayuga County, New York, farmer Jethro Wood, 45, patents an improved plow, constructed in several major pieces so that a farmer who breaks one part can replace it without having to buy a whole new plow. Other plow makers will infringe on Wood's patent, and many farmers will insist that cast-iron plows poison the soil and will refuse to give up their old wooden plows (see 1784; Deere, 1837).
Automated flour-mill inventor Oliver Evans dies at New York April 21 at age 63.
Vermont inventor John Conant patents an iron cooking stove, but U.S. cooks and housewives spurn his stove, preferring the traditional practice of hearthside cooking (see 1795; 1850).
The world's first eating chocolate to be produced commercially goes on sale at Vevey, Switzerland; François-Louis Cailler, 23, introduces the first chocolate to be prepared and sold in blocks made by machine. (Chocolate for beverage use has long been sold in cakes, made with a cornstarch binder, and often containing sugar and spices.) Cailler starts a company that will specialize in fondants, but his chocolate is not candy (see Van Houten, 1828).
The population of the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands falls to 150,000 as a consequence of diseases introduced by Europeans and Americans since the landing of Captain Cook in 1778 and the arrival of occasional visitors in the past 41 years. Some 60 Caucasians live on the island of Oahu.
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