Late-eighteenth-century Precipitation Reconstructions from James Madison’s Montpelier Plantation

JANUARY 2003 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | A s early colonialists crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to North America, they carried preconceived notions on the variation of climate with latitude. Perhaps not surprisingly, they expected to encounter the same climatic conditions at the same latitudes in the New World as they had experienced in the Old World (Kupperman 1982). While the Gulf Stream’s moderating effect on the climate of Europe is now well known, the greater seasonal extremes of eastern North America frustrated early attempts to grow Mediterranean crops such as citrus trees within Virginia and were viewed as a shortcoming of an untamed continent that had not yet felt the salubrious and tempering influence of European cultivation (Kupperman 1982, 1984). Especially after the revolution of 1776, the capacity of North America to support a vigorous and prosperous society represented an important component of success for this political experiment (Chinard 1947). However, in the late eighteenth century, European scientists espoused a hypothesis claiming that the climate of North America was inherently inferior and deleterious, and would remain so despite any efforts to improve it through habitation (Chinard 1947). Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison recognized that this hypothesis had to be refuted for this nation to be viewed as a peer to those in Europe. This study presents their scientific endeavors to demonstrate that the climate of North America was not inferior to that of Europe. Comparing meteorological diary data collected by Madison and dendroclimatic reconstructions from Montpelier, this study is also able to investigate new hypotheses regarding the seasonality of precipitation since the late eighteenth century. The focus is not centered as intently on the validity of these methods, LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRECIPITATION RECONSTRUCTIONS FROM JAMES MADISON’S MONTPELIER PLANTATION