Valentines Written in Ink, Faith, and Endurance
In the early nineteenth century, love was shaped as much by circumstance as by feeling. Distance, weather, illness, and war were not occasional interruptions to daily life—they were its conditions.
Between 1812 and 1830, Americans lived through overlapping disruptions. The War of 1812 separated couples and scattered families, while travel remained slow and uncertain. In rural communities—where farms sat far apart and winters could cut people off for weeks—“being together” often depended on weather as much as intention. Add unpredictable sickness (a “terrible sickness in 1815, and a “plague” in 1826) and the volatile weather, and you get a period in which affection was frequently practiced at a distance.
That distance is one reason letters mattered so much. They weren’t casual communications; they were events. A single page could carry reassurance, instruction, devotion, and the steadying knowledge that someone was still there.
One War of 1812 soldier, Chase Clough, begins a letter to his wife with a sentence so plain it’s almost painful in its restraint: he writes that he is well and hopes his words “Reach you and find you the same.” In a world without instant news, that simple claim—I am alive, I am thinking of you—was the emotional infrastructure of marriage.
Weather, too, shaped love in tangible ways. The year 1816—after Mount Tambora’s 1815 eruption—brought the “Year Without a Summer.” The hardship wasn’t only discomfort; it was food, fuel, and the slow anxiety of uncertainty.
Whether flood or drought, arctic cold winters or summers’ extreme heat, climate conditions played a significant role in molding relationships.
And when the natural world refused to cooperate, many communities turned toward the structures that held them together: church, congregation, and shared ritual. In Connecticut, one contemporary diary record describes a local “fast” day held “on account of the season”—a glimpse of how people interpreted abnormal weather not as trivia, but as a communal crisis requiring communal response.
That’s the context we can easily forget. In this period, love often meant endurance through long silences. It meant trusting character more than constant reassurance. It meant building a life sturdy enough to withstand distance, disease, and winters that closed the roads.
For readers—and especially for writers of historical fiction—this matters. If we give early nineteenth-century characters modern expectations of immediacy, we flatten the lived reality of the era. In a world where separation was ordinary and nature could reorder plans overnight, love was not less felt. It was simply carried differently: patiently, deliberately, and often on paper.
