The Common Era Year of 1819, part of the 19th Century

1818 1819 1820

Born in 1819:

• January 1: Arthur Hugh Clough, agnostic and experimental poet, is born in Liverpool, England. (d. November 13 1861, aged 42)
• February 8: John Ruskin, art critic, writer, poet, environmentalist, philosopher, social reformer, and author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, is born in London, England. (d. January 20 1900, aged 80)
• February 12: William Wetmore Story, American poet and sculptor, active in Italy, is born in Salem, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. October 8 1895, aged 76)
• February 14: Christopher L. Sholes, American inventor behind the typewriter, an invention that will be perfected and marketed by Remington in 1874, is born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. (d. February 17 1890, aged 71)
• February 22: James Russell Lowell, American essayist and poet, is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. August 12 1891, aged 72)
• March 29: Edwin Drake, a railroad conductor who, after retiring, will drill the first productive oil well at a site near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is born in Greenville, New York, U.S. (d. January 12 1880, aged 60)
• April 11: Joseph Beckham Cobb, newspaper editor, politician and author of Mississippi Scenes, influenced by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, is born near Lexington, Georgia, U.S. (d. September 1858, aged 39)
• April 18: Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Cuban revolutionist, is born in Bayamo, Cuba. (d. February 27, 1874, aged 54)
• May 24: Victoria, who will become Queen Victoria of England in 1837 at the age of 18, is born in London, England. (d. January 22 1901, aged 81)
• May 27: Julia Ward Howe, American writer, reformer and writer of the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is born in New York City, U.S. (d. October 16 1910, aged 91)
• May 31: Walt Whitman, who will become America's national poet with works including Leaves of Grass, and volunteer during the American Civil War at a Washington, D.C. hospital, is born in West Hill, New York. (d. March 26 1892, aged 72)
• June 10: Gustave Courbet, realist painter, is born in Ornans, France. (d. December 31 1877, aged 58)
• June 12: Charles Kingsley (occasional pseud. Parson Lot), novelist and founder of the Christian Socialist movement, arguing together with Frederick Denison Maurice that religion and politics are inseparable, is born in Dartmore, England. (d. January 23 1875, aged 55)
• June 20: Jacques Offenbach, operetta composer, is born in Cologne, France. (d. October 5 1880, aged 61)
• June 26: Abner Doubleday, prominent Union General in the American Civil War and incorrectly alleged inventor of baseball, is born in Ballston Spa, New York, U.S. (d. January 26 1893, aged 73)
• June 29: Thomas Dunn English, medical doctor, lawyer, congressman of the Democratic party, and writer of the poem Ben Bolt, is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. (d. April 1 1902, aged 82)
• July 9: Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, is born in Spencer, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. October 3 1867, aged 48)
• July 24: Josiah Gilbert Holland, poet, novelist and Republican newspaper editor, is born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. October 12 1881, aged 62)
• August 1: Herman Melville, American novelist, author of Moby Dick and alleged relative of music artist Richard Melville "Moby" Hall, is born in New York City, U.S. (d. September 28 1891, aged 72)
• August 9 (or 19): William Morton, dentist who would be the first to successfully administer general anaesthesia by using sulfuric ether, is born in Charlton, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. July 15 1868, aged 48)
• August 25: Allan Pinkerton, said to be the first private detective, is born in Glasgow, Scotland, and would later emigrate to Canada and then the U.S. (d. July 1 1884, aged 64)
• August 26: Prince Albert of Britain, Queen Victoria's husband from 1850 as well as her cousin, is born at Schloss Rosenau, near Sachsen, present-day Germany. (d. December 14 1861, aged 42)
• September 6: William Rosecrans, Union General in the American Civil War, is born in Delaware City, Ohio. (d. March 11 1898, aged 78)
• September 13: Clara Schumann, pianist and husband of composer Robert Schumann, is born in Leipzig, present-day Germany. (d. May 20 1896, aged 76)
• September 18: Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, physicist investigating the speed of light, gyroscope inventor and creator of Foucault's pendulum is born in Paris, France. (d. February 11 1868, aged 48)
• November 22: Mary Ann Evans (pseud. George Eliot), novelist and writer of Adam Bede, is born in Warwickshire, England. (d. December 22 1880, aged 61)
• November 30: Cyrus West Field, American merchant and telegraph pioneer, who will arrange for England's Queen Victoria to send the first transatlantic message to U.S. President James Buchanan, is born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S. (d. July 12 1892, aged 72)
• December 30: Theodor Fontane, German guide book and realist novel writer, critic, correspondent, and author of Effi Briest and L'Adultera, is born in Neuruppin, Prussia, present-day Germany. (d. September 28 1898, aged 78)

Passed away in 1819:

• January 14: John Wolcot (pseud. Peter Pindar), satirical poet, dies in London, England. (b. May 9 1738, aged 80)
• January 20: King Charles IV de Bourbon of Spain, dies in exile in Rome, Italy. (b. November 11 1748, aged 70)
• April 15: Oliver Evans, American high-pressure steam engine inventor, dies in New York City, U.S. (b. September 13 1755, aged 63)
• August 19: James Watt, Scottish steam engine inventor, dies in Heathfield, England. (b. January 19 1736, aged 83)
• August 23: Oliver Hazard Perry, American naval officer in the War of 1812, dies at sea near Trinidad returning from Venezuela. (b. August 20 1785, aged 34)

These (and other) things happened in 1819:

Africa:

• An obelisk called Cleopatra's Needle is presented to Britain by Egypt's Pasha Mohammad Ali, but it will not be moved to London until 1878.

Asia:

• On February 6, Singapore is established by Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company.
• On December 9, the British begin a military campaign to eliminate alleged pirating by Arabs. The town of Ras al-Khaimah is subjected to a siege and captured and its port burned.
• A tiger hunting party from the British East India Company rediscovers cave paintings at Ajanta, India, dating from around 200 B.C.E. to 650 C.E. and known only to the local Bhil tribe.

Europe:

• On January 8, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal publishes a paper by German-born astronomer Sir John Herschel, explaining the solubility of silver chloride (known at the time as muriate of silver) in hyposulphite. This will prove essential to create a fixing agent for use in photography.
• Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, living in Dresden, present-day Germany, publishes the first part of The World as Will and Representation in January, after having completed it the year before. The second part will not come until 1844.
• English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, residing in Italy, publishes Rosalind and Helen in the spring and writes The Cenci during the summer (published in England the following year) and Ode to the West Wind in October.
• On June 20, the USS Savannah arrives in Liverpool, England, and becomes the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean after just under a month at see after its departure from Savannah, Georgia. Because the new technology was not trusted, she carried no passengers or cargo. (More below under North America.)
• Irritated by the wealth of some Jewish families, anti-Semites organize Hep Hep Riots, beginning in Würtzburg on August 2, spreading through Bavaria in present-day Germany and on to Denmark, protesting the civil rights given to the Jewish people by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807.
• On August 16, the Peterloo Massacre takes place in Manchester, England, as militia breaks up a demonstration calling for governmental and socioeconomic reform in the wake of industrialization. Eleven people are killed, and five hundred are wounded.
• In August, Prince Metternich pushes the ministers of the German states to adopt the Carlsbad Decrees, allowing for press censorship, disbanding the student organizations and calling for close monitoring of universities, where there had been a boiling criticism of the conservative government.
• English poet John Keats gets tuberculosis, and his writing reaches a climactic end with some of his greatest poems, including To Autumn, written on September 19 and published the following year. In the same month, he abandons The Fall of Hyperion.
• On October 24, composer Gioacchino Rossini's opera La Donna del Lago, based on Sir Walter Scott's The lady of the Lake, opens at Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Italy.
• In France, the tenth issue of Annales de Chimie et de Physique features a paper by Aléxis Thérèse Petit and Pierre Louis Dulong on research of certain points important to the theory of heat. The empirical Law of Dulong and Petit concludes that the specific heat per atom is the same for (most) elements.
• English poet Lord Byron, residing in Venice, Italy, and having an affair with Countess Teresa Guiccioli, publishes Mazeppa in June and Canto I and II of Don Juan in July.
• German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes the collection West-Eastern Divan], heavily influenced by the religion and culture of Islam.
• French painter Théodore Gèricault completes his Raft of the Medusa, inspired by a marine disaster off the coast of Africa in 1816.
• Austrian composer Franz Schubert writes "The Trout" Quintet, Opus 114 for a friend.
• In England, factory work is outlawed for children under the age of nine, and a maximum twelve-hour working day is established for other children.
• English poet William Wordsworth publishes Peter Bell (written in 1796)and The Waggoner (written in 1805).

North America

• On January 25, the University of Virginia is founded by former President Thomas Jefferson (who also created the building's architecture and chartered the institution, initially known as the Central College) in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.
• On February 22, the U.S. acquires the Florida Territory as the Adams-Onis treaty is signed between Spanish minister Don Luis de Onis, who cedes the territory west of the Mississippi River and U.S. Secretary of State and future President John Quincy Adams, making the border follow the Sabine River, then north from the 32nd parallel to the Red River, following the 100th western longitude to the Arkansas River, along it it to its source and then along the 42nd parallel to the Pacific Ocean.
• On March 2, the Arkansas Territory is organized.
• The same day, the first U.S. law relating to immigration is passed, mainly establishing arrival reports and statistics.
• On March 3, the U.S. Congress passes an Act in addition to the acts prohibiting the slave trade, setting a reward of $50 for information on illegal importation of Negro slaves into the U.S., allowing the President to return such slaves to Africa.
• On March 6, in McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court of the U.S. upholds the power of Congress to establish a federal bank, and overrules a Maryland court decision by barring Maryland from taxing the federal bank, as it had attempted to do in 1818.
• On April 26, the first U.S. Odd Fellow lodge is established in Baltimore, Maryland.
• On May 5, minister William Ellering Channing holds a sermon in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., explaining Unitarianism, which will become a formal denomination in 1825.
• On May 22, Memphis is founded by John Overton, James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson.
• On the same day, the USS Savannah departs from Savannah, Georgia, for Liverpool, England, in an attempt first to be the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In town for the occasion, President James Monroe is served the Chatham Artillery Punch, made of Catawba, rum, gin, brandy, rye whiskey, strong tea, brown sugar, Benedictine, orange and lemon juice, Maraschino cherries and champagne. (More above under Europe.)
• On June 5, Major Josiah Snelling laid the cornerstone of Fort St. Anthony, renamed Fort Snelling in the year of its completion, 1825, from which Minneapolis, Minnesota grew.
• On June 26, the Hobby Horse bicycle was patented by William K. Clarkson, Jr. of New York, U.S.
• On July 3, the Bank of Savings opens in New York City as the first savings bank in the U.S..
• On July 4, the Arkansas County of the Missouri Territory is reorganized as the Arkansas Territory.
• On September 6, Thomas Blanchard of Middlebury, Connecticut, patents his profile lathe, built the previous year. The lathe does the work of thirteen men, thus lowering the price of wood. It was originally intended for gun stocks.
• On December 14, Alabama is admitted as the 22nd state of the United States of America as the 11th slave state, with a constitution that gives its legislature the power to abolish slavery and compensate slave owners.
• American playwright Mordecai Noah's drama She Would Be a Soldier, taking place during the Battle of Chippewa, is produced and published.
• The Panic of 1819, a four-year financial crisis, is caused by wild speculation in western lands, mismanagement of the Second Bank of the United States, the collapse of foreign markets, falling cotton prices, commodity inflation, and failure to compete with foreign industry. Unemployment rises, banks fail, mortgages are foreclosed, and agricultural prices are halved.

Oceania

• King Kamehameha I of Hawaii dies, and his son becomes King Kamehameha II, abolishing the kapu system of laws, which has restricted contact between men and women, and is regarded as brutal.
• King Pomare II converts to Christianity and establishes the first legal system of the Society Islands.

South America

• On January 17, Simón Bolívar proclaims Gran Colombia, a republic free from Spanish New Granada
• On August 7, Gran Colombia is ultimately freed from Spain in the Battle of Boyacá, shortly after Simón Bolívar defeats a Spanish Royalist force north of Bogota, which becomes the Gran Colombian capital, as the Congress of Angostura formally establishes the independence. Gran Colombia will later be divided into Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

1818 1819 1820
19th century