New Year's Retrospective: 200 Years Ago
1809 Events Overshadowed by the Napoleonic Wars
Dec 27, 2008
European countries could only gain new territory by either conquering each other or colonizing in such faraway places as India, Africa and South America. The other side of the Atlantic, Canadians were moving westward to settle in lands explored by fur trappers and Indian traders.
An example of the expansion of the United States is the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne negotiated by Gen. William Henry Harrison. It gave to the United States three million acres of Indiana Territory land on the Wabash River that had belonged to Indians.
This was the year James Madison succeeded Thomas Jefferson, making some minor inauguration history by being the first U. S. president sworn in wearing American –made clothes. That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government's power was greater than that of any individual state.
No Safety Pins or Toilet Paper
The following things had not yet been invented, but would be during the following century: The sewing machine, candy bar, graham cracker, colt revolver, rotary printing press, safety pin, paper bag, elevator, escalator, can opener, safety pin, paper clip, Jell-O and aspirin.
The list is long and includes: the vacuum cleaner, Yale lock, dynamite, Schwinn bicycle, baby formula, typewriter, chewing gum, motorcycle, blue jeans, earmuffs, telephone, toilet paper, nutcracker, light bulb, Ivory soap, Christmas lights, coca-cola, matches, Swiss army knife and Kellogg’s corn flakes. Add the automobile!
In 1809 Joseph Haydn died and Felix Mendelssohn was born. Beethoven was popular and this is the year he composed his Piano Concerto No. 5. There was no popular music as we know it today. Lurking way in the background were the Scottish folk songs sung in Appalachian communities and the negro spirituals and gospel music being born among slaves that would wait two more generations to taste the freedom America was supposed to offer everyone.
1809 Births Include Lincoln and Darwin
Here’s who was born 1809: English scientist Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., American physician and poet,and Kit Carson, American trapper, scout, and Indian agent.
Headlines from 1809 were:
- Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.
- Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine are divorced by an act of the French Senate.
- Wearing masks at balls forbidden in Boston
- The first US steamboat to a make an ocean voyage leaves New York City for Philadelphia
- Napoleon annexes the Papal States
- Pope Pius VII is taken prisoner July 5 (and will remain in custody until 1814)
- Ecuador declares independence from Spain.
- Severe earthquakes strike the Azores and sink the village of São Miguel.
- Explorer Meriwether Lewis, age 35, dies under mysterious circumstances (probably by his own hand) near Nashville at an inn called Grinder's Stand while en route to Washington.
- The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) recommissioned as flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron.
- The 2,000 Guineas Stakes horse race has its first run in England.
- Nicolas François Appert develops a method to preserve food by means of canning.
People have been introduced to writer Washington Irving’s characters Rip Van Winkle and Diedrich Knickerbocker, but readers of things more serious enjoy the morality verses and tracts of English writer Hannah More. Internationally, it is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who is penning the dramas of lasting significance.
A companion article gives news of people, trends and inventions 100 years ago.
SOURCES: World Book Encyclopedia and these websites: Hisdates; ideafinder; enotes; ancestry.
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