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"The eleventh of December, departure from Nashville. The
further we advance toward the South the more bitter the cold becomes. Never in the memory of man has anything like
it been seen, they say. That's what people always tell travelers who come only once. ..."
Beaumont was mistaken. They were indeed in the grip of
extraordinary weather. It was beginning to be colder all over the United States than Americans had known it for a long
generation. That very month was to prove the coldest December since 1776. On the fifteenth of the month, or four days
after Tocqueville and Beaumont's passage through the Tennessee capital, a Nashville newspaper was to announce that
the Cumberland had been so thickly frozen over only twice before in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, the winters
being those of 1787-88 and 1795-96.
Not since the winter of '96 had passengers been able to cross
on the ice. On the sixteenth the thermometer was to stand at "14 degrees below zero!!" [source: Nashville
Republican 12/15 and the State Gazette, 12/17] And at the end of the month a Nashville correspondent
would write to President Andrew Jackson [Nichol to A. Jackson, Jackson Papers, Library of Congress] that "we
have a continuation of the most cold and severe weather ever known in this Country -- Our river is frozen over and has
been so for more than twenty days past -- sufficiently so to bear any weight."
Nor was this all. In far-away New York, on the twenty-sixth
of December, Beaumont's friend Philip Hone was to notice an extraordinary thing: "The East River was closed by ice
this morning and two or three hundred persons walked across from Fulton Street to Brooklyn. On the turn of the tide
the Ice went out, and the Steam Boats were again plying." [source: Hone diaries, NY Historical Society]
And in Cincinnati, on the fifteenth of January, Tocqueville's
intelligent young lawyer, Timothy Walker, would be writing to George Bancroft: "So stern a winter has never been
known here -- The river closed when there was but little coal in the city, and what there was soon rose to 50 cts per
bushel. ..." [source: Society George Bancroft papers, Massachusetts Historical]
But much of this was still in the future as Tocqueville and
Beaumont set out from Nashville toward Memphis on the far western frontier of the State. It was the eleventh of
December and the two friends were beginning the second leg of their journey, the stretch on which they were to become
stranded because (so Beaumont would inform his family) their carriage broke down. Tocqueville was never to describe
what happened at all, but Beaumont was one day to publish some notes that would show how much he failed to tell his
family at the time. These stenographic jottings, from which quotations have already been made, went as follows:
"... Cold of ten degrees below freezing. The cold increases
steadily. Our stage changes to an open charabanc." (It was a demonstration of how little prepared they were in Tennessee
for zero weather.) "Frightful roads. Perpendicular descents. Way not banked; the route is but a passage made through
the forest. The trunks of badly cut trees form as it were so many guard-stones against which one is always bumping.
Only ten leagues a day.
"- You have some very bad roads in France, haven't you? an
American says to me. - Yes, Sir, and you have some really fine ones in America, haven't you? He doesn't understand
me. American conceit.
"After Nashville, not a town on the way. Nothing but a few
villages, scattered here and there, all the way to Memphis. The eleventh of December, the braces and a wheel, then the
axle-tree broken. Half the journey covered on foot. We blame our bad luck. Go ahead and complain, we are told; day
before yesterday two travellers on the road broke, one an arm, the other a leg."
Here were the three accidents of Beaumont's letter home. But
did the charabanc stop for any time? It did not.
(Pierson, p. 577)
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