ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612020026
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM H. HONAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
TWO CLIMATOLOGICAL HISTORIANS say bad weather, which led to poor crops and food shortages, was at the heart of the American Revolution.
Forget what you learned about the American Revolution being caused by the hated Stamp Act, tea taxes and the quartering of British troops in the homes of the colonists. All that may have a minor place in history, but what really sparked the shot heard round the world was poor crops.
So say a couple of academicians who call themselves climatological historians. Others disagree. Vehemently.
``My guess is there would not have been a revolution if the weather had been different,'' said David C. Smith, 67, an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Maine in Orono. ``There were other things exercising an influence on colonists and events, but when you look at the weather, it makes a compelling statement.''
After 20 years of quiet, largely unpublished research, Smith and a colleague, William R. Baron, a professor of historic climatology at the University of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff, broke their silence last week.
They published their research in a pair of paperback volumes, ``Growing Season Parameter Reconstructions for New England Using Killing Frost Records, 1697 to 1947.''
While the books are not exactly out-selling cranberry sauce, they have attracted considerable scholarly interest. The publisher is the University of Maine Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
What the climatologists have done, Smith explained in an interview Wednesday, is record killing frosts all across New England dating back to 1697. They found that in most of the 37 years before the Revolution the weather was ``terrible for the New England colonies.''
There were 15 short and poor crop seasons and 15 that were average, while seven longer seasons favored good harvests.
The short crop seasons, Smith said, were experienced in Massachusetts, southern Maine, and southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island and costal Connecticut.
He said that while their study was concentrated in those areas, other data from the East Coast, including the Virginia diaries of Thomas Jefferson, who almost invariably included entries on temperatures and other weather information, supported their conclusions.
Coming on top of the already short growing seasons in New England, the poorer years made the corn and hay crops vulnerable to ruin and led some farmers to switch to growing faster-maturing grains such as buckwheat, barley, oats or rye, as well as carrots. These years also covered the time after 1765 when Britain stationed a standing army of 6,000 in the colonies and required the colonists to provide for units in settled areas.
``When the British sent troops to New England, where there was an insufficient food supply, that created a terrible problem,'' Smith said. ``There were even more mouths to feed.''
The Stamp Tax and the other conventional explanations for the American Revolution were only ``irritants'' compared with the devastating effect of persistent crop failures and the presence of hungry British soldiers, Smith said.
``It's like if you want to start a riot, you go to a barroom because a lot of the people in there are already angry,'' he said.
The study was begun after Smith and Baron discovered that Jonathan Winthrop, a distinguished professor of moral philosophy at Harvard in the late 18th century, had instructed his students to keep fastidious records on weather conditions throughout their lives because, he believed, prophetically, that they would be valuable to future historians.
Working at first at the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society and eventually at 65 other institutions throughout New England, Smith and Baron found more than 2,000 diaries replete with the sort of weather reports inspired by Winthrop.
After feeding this mass of data into a computer, they decided to test its usefulness by extracting information about weather conditions in the years just before 1776.
These findings were confirmed by weather reports they found in farm journals, newspapers and weather-station records in each of the New England states.
They were deprived of the possibility of another source of confirmation, Smith said, when they discovered that the trees in New England are not sufficiently long-lived to be used for the study of tree rings. ``You can do that in the Southwest, but not in New England,'' Smith said. ``The trees just don't live long enough.''
Over the years, Smith said, their research was supported by nearly $900,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation. The money went for such things as maintenance, energy, administrative costs for more than a dozen staff members, travel, housing and computer costs.
The leap from poor crops to revolutionary ardor troubles some historians.
``I'm not impressed,'' said Paul R. Gross, an emeritus professor of life sciences at the University of Virginia and co-author with Norman Levitt of ``Higher Superstition,'' a study of irrationality in academe.
``If the mercantilists, who started the revolution, had noticed that the food supply was declining,'' Gross said, ``the first thing they would have done would be to visit or send letters to the mother country asking for help. The last thing they would do is think of revolution.''
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