1816
Twenty years of continual warfare had left England with a debt of eight hundred million pounds, with business at a standstill, riots general throughout the country, and hundreds of thousands of discharged sailors and soldiers added to the unemployed. Fouché was expelled from France by the Bourbons, and Talleyrand replaced in the ministry by the Duc de Richelieu. The Inquisition was reestablished in Spain, and stringent measures employed in the effort to put down the revolts in the American colonies. Bolivar, in Venezuela, inflicted serious losses on the Spaniards. Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, declared themselves independent of Spain.
The United States still suffered from a general commercial and industrial depression. First tariff imposed; New England, with Daniel Webster as its leading orator, was at that time for free trade; the South, led by Calhoun, was for protection. New England's shipping trade was practically suspended as a result of the new tariff. Seminole Indian uprising in Florida quelled. First savings-bank in the country opened in Philadelphia. Indiana admitted to the Union. Freemasons expelled from Italy. Goods of English manufacture excluded from Russia. Rebuilding of Moscow begun. First form of the stethoscope invented by Laennec, of Paris.
Gouverneur Morris, American statesman, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, English dramatist and statesman, died.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year.