Free The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman

temperatures returned on May 19, but only briefly. Nine days later,
     another front swept down upon Quebec from the northwest, bringing more snow and leaving
     ice a quarter of an inch thick. As the cold advanced through New England, it killed
     corn in the fields in central Maine. Snow fell in Vermont; the “remarkable cold” froze
     the ground an inch deep. Cattle could not forage in the pastures, and farmers had
     to use part of their corn supplies as fodder. “The last spring and the present,” noted
     the New England Palladium , “are certainly the most backward of any for the last 25 years.” Again the frost
     reached as far south as Richmond, and as far west as Cincinnati, where blossoms shriveled
     on the fruit trees.
    David Thomas, a farmer in Cayuga County, New York, left his home on May 21 on a journey
     to explore the lands along the Wabash River in the territory of Indiana, which had
     recently applied to Congress for admission as a state. As he departed, Thomas wrote
     in his journal that “the season has been unusually cold, and vegetation proportionally
     retarded.” Two days later, he noted that “the morning was rainy, cold, and uncomfortable,
     with wind from the north,” the sort of wind by which “our deepest snows have been
     borne along.” As he approached the town of Buffalo, he felt a breeze “so damp and
     chill that instantly we stopt, and put on our great coats.” The following morning
     (May 25), “was so cold that we shivered in a winter dress, with great coats and gloves.”
     According to local residents, the spring had been so frigid that the ice along the
     shore of Lake Erie had disappeared only five days earlier.
    Conditions did not improve as Thomas continued westward. He found Chautauqua Lake
     “wrapt in the drapery of winter,” and a cold rain delayed him for three hours as he
     neared the border with Pennsylvania on May 28. “This morning was very frosty,” he
     wrote in his journal on May 29, “and ice covered the water one-fourth of an inch thick.”
     A brisk breeze from the northeast convinced Thomas to don his great coat again. The
     next morning he observed “a severe frost”; then “the clouds rolled on heavily to the
     eastward, and portentously to those who have neither home nor shelter.”
    “When the last of May arrived,” wrote a Maine chronicler, “everything had been killed
     by the cold,” although not much had been planted anyway. “The whole of the month has
     been so cold and wet,” complained New Hampshire farmer Adino Brackett, “that wheat
     could not be sown ’til late and then the ground could not be well prepared.” “Everybody
     complains of the present ‘strange weather; this unnatural weather; this unseasonable
     weather,’” noted the Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] Democratic Republican . Spring was “at least a month later than usual.” Instead of the usual warm, nourishing
     showers of April and May, the Eastern United States was experiencing “general aridity,
     the mountains are covered with snow, the valleys with ice, and the fruits of the earth
     are stunted and withered. Weather-wise people are at a loss to account for this ‘strange
     weather.’”
    *   *   *
    P ARIS, too, shivered through a cold and wet springtime, but in May 1816 Louis XVIII appeared
     to face considerably more pressing problems than the dreary weather. Following Napoléon’s
     defeat at Waterloo, the Allied sovereigns had reinstalled the corpulent Louis on the
     throne of France; critics jibed that he had been “brought back in the baggage of the
     Allies.” But they also had imposed upon Louis the stringent terms of the second Treaty
     of Paris. France was reduced to its borders of January 1790, which meant the loss
     of about 5,000 square kilometers and 300,000 citizens; the French people would also
     have to repay all foreign debts incurred by previous French governments—including,
     of course, Napoléon’s. Far more damaging