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war had sent the federal debt soaring to nearly $124 million, Congress
     hesitated to slash taxes and decrease revenue too rapidly. It did repeal all duties
     on domestic manufactures, but it retained several other minor taxes, including those
     on carriages and postage. Administration officials estimated that the new, higher
     tariff rates would bring in at least $25 million per year, which they claimed would
     be sufficient to pay the government’s routine civil and military expenses, fund annual
     increases in the size of the navy (which had proven woefully inadequate during the
     recent hostilities), and pay off the remaining debt in about twelve years.
    Before Congress adjourned, it also voted itself a pay raise. Since the first Congress
     convened in 1790, legislators had received six dollars per diem in lieu of a regular
     salary. Although the cost of living had increased by at least 75 percent over the
     past twenty-six years, their remuneration had not changed. Hence congressmen felt
     justified in approving the Compensation Act, which granted them an annual salary of
     $1,500. Few realized at that time that this measure would destroy many members’ political
     careers.
    As lawmakers departed Washington at the end of April, they congratulated themselves
     on accomplishing their tasks in an unusual display of good feelings. “Among the most
     auspicious appearances of the times, is the obliteration of party spirit,” declared
     a Southern representative. “No question at the present session of congress has been
     discussed or determined on the ground of party.… Let us then cherish these feelings;
     let us emulate each other only in serving our country with the more zeal, and the
     more fidelity.”
    *   *   *
    O N April 29, Americans noticed a large, irregular spot on the surface of the sun when
     they glanced skyward. One observer compared it to “a spider, having parts extending
     from the main body,” while another claimed that “its general appearance is not unlike
     that of a cluster of islands … surrounded by a belt of rocks.” A representative of
     the National Mathematical Academy in Philadelphia estimated the length of the spot
     at just under 40,000 miles, with a breadth of nearly 3,000 miles. It lay just north
     of the center of the sun’s surface, and its stationary nature over the course of a
     week led a group of American astronomers to dismiss their initial hypothesis that
     it might simply have been the planet Mercury moving across the face of the sun. Instead,
     they decided it was probably a wandering comet pulled in by the sun’s gravitational
     force.
    In its May 1816 issue, the North American Review cited the theories of Sir Frederick William Herschel, a British astronomer, who argued
     that the spots were “chasms in the [sun’s] atmosphere, occasioned by ascending currents
     of gaseous fuel.” Since there appeared to be “a variable emission of light and heat,
     intimately connected with the appearance and disappearance of spots,” Herschel theorized
     that “seasons of uncommon heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness, so far as they
     depend upon the supply of heat, are to be traced not so much to accidental causes
     near at hand, as to the inconstancy of the fountain.” (Herschel, a legendary figure
     in the history of astronomy, made numerous important discoveries, including Uranus
     and its two moons, but also believed the sun was inhabited, along with all the other
     planets and stars. He speculated that the sun’s surface was actually cool enough to
     support life; only the outer solar atmosphere was hot.)
    Others suggested that the sunspots were volcanoes on the surface of the sun, or “burning
     mountains of immense size; so that when the eruption is nearly ended and the smoke
     dissipated, the fierce flames are exposed, and appear as luminous spots.” Yet another
     explanation proposed the spots to be “a kind of excavation of the luminous fluid