Historical Events During an Imagined Life

My fictional character Gideon Stoltz was born on April 1, 1813. I picked April because that’s my birth month, April Fools’ Day for no reason other than whimsy. 

When Gideon came into the world on his family’s southeastern Pennsylvania farm, the United States was 35 years old. It had 19 states, with Louisiana admitted to the Union the year before. The Louisiana Territory, which the U.S. had bought from France in 1803, stretched north from Louisiana to what is now Montana. To the west lay New Spain, part of a huge Spanish empire that, in the New World, also took in Mexico, Central America, and much of South America. 

The Napoleonic Wars were raging in Europe. In a North American offshoot of that conflict, the U.S. was fighting Great Britain, one of the world’s great military powers, albeit stretched thin by its decade-long struggle with Napoleon and his allies. 

british troops invade washington, d.c. wikimedia commons.

In August 1814, when Gideon was taking toddling steps, British forces invaded Washington, D.C., held the city (population 8,000) for 26 hours, and burned many buildings, including the Capitol. Four days later, a fortuitous heavy rainfall, possibly a hurricane, helped put the fires out. 

In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic event in recorded history. It sent so much ash into the atmosphere that the world’s climate cooled rapidly: the following year, 1816, became known as the “Year Without a Summer” and “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” In parts of the northern hemisphere, frosts in every month led to crop failure and famine. 

In 1819 and 1820, the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., by Washington Irving, was published serially and then in book form. This collection of essays and stories included “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Gideon, a farm boy speaking Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch (Pennsylvania Dutch), wouldn’t have noticed. 

In March 1820 Congress passed the controversial Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. The new law prohibited slavery in new states north of the 36° 30' parallel of longitude and made it forever legal in states south of that line. Thomas Jefferson predicted that this schism would someday tear the nation apart. 

In summer 1823, a momentous event took place in the life of 10-year-old Gideon when his mother was murdered in their farmhouse, and he found her body. 

On March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams became the sixth U.S. president. He was the son of John Adams, the nation’s second president, and Abigail Adams. A Massachusetts native and a Whig party member, Adams took the oath of office after placing his hand on a book of constitutional law rather than the more traditional Bible. In his address, he asked Congress to authorize many new roads, ports, and canals to help the nation grow. 

The Erie Canal opened in 1825 after eight years of construction. New York governor DeWitt Clinton and friends boarded the packet boat Seneca Chief in Buffalo with two barrels of Lake Erie water and journeyed east. Eight days and 363 miles later, Clinton ceremoniously poured the water into the Atlantic. Now freight and passengers could travel by canal from Lake Erie, to Albany, then down the Hudson River to New York City, soon to become the country’s main trading and commercial center. The canal also opened the Midwest to immigration. 

On July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of our nation’s independence, the former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within four hours of each other, in Virginia and Massachusetts respectively. One newspaper called their near-simultaneous deaths “a coincidence so remarkable that the mind readily ascribes it to the decrees of Divine Wisdom.” Thirteen-year-old Gideon would have learned about presidents and elections in school through lessons taught in Pennsylvania Dutch. 

That same year, cholera broke out in India. Over the next decade it spread to Europe, Britain, and the western hemisphere, a bacterial pandemic caused by human fecal contamination of food and water. In 1832, 57 Irish immigrants died of the disease; they had been laying railroad track 30 miles west of Philadelphia. Some people accused the Irish of bringing cholera to America, providing an excuse to marginalize and discriminate against them. 

In March 1829, Andrew Jackson became the country’s seventh president after soundly defeating the incumbent John Quincy Adams the previous autumn. Historians widely consider Jackson the most influential figure in the U.S. in the 1830s. During his life he led armies, killed a man in a duel, enslaved other human beings, forcibly separated Native Americans from their land, and became a born-again Christian. While president he organized his political allies into the new Democratic Party and promoted individual liberty and the rights of the common man (assuming that man was white). One biographer described the contradictory Jackson as “dictator or democrat, ignoramus or genius, Satan or saint.” 

The Gideon Stoltz mysteries take place during the span of U.S. history known as the Jacksonian Era. They offer glimpses of the period’s technology, politics, historical events, and people’s day-to-day lives. (See my blog post Gideon Stoltz’s America for more information.)