Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America

By Susan Schulten

“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History).
 
In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation.
 
By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map.
 
Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226740706

Book preview

SUSAN SCHULTEN is professor of history at the University of Denver. In 2010 she was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12          1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74068-3 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-74068-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74070-6 (e-book)

Portions of chapter 1 first appeared in Emma Willard and the Graphic Foundations of American History, Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007). © 2006 Elsevier, Ltd. Reprinted with permission. Portions of chapter 4 first appeared in The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics, Civil War History 56, no. 1 (March 2010). © 2010 The Kent State University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulten, Susan.

Mapping the nation: history and cartography in nineteenth-century America / Susan Schulten.

pages: illustrations, maps; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74068-3 (cloth: alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-74068-4 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Thematic maps—United States—History—19th century. 2. Cartography—United States—History—19th century. 3. United States—Maps—History—19th century. I. Title.

GA405.5.S38 2012

526.0973'09034—dc23

2011046239

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

MAPPING THE NATION

History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America

SUSAN SCHULTEN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE: MAPPING THE PAST

1. The Graphic Foundations of American History

2. Capturing the Past through Maps

PART TWO: MAPPING THE PRESENT

3. Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

4. Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

5. The Cartographic Consolidation of America

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustrations discussed in this book can be viewed at high resolution at mappingthenation.com.

0.1 Map of contributors to California’s Proposition 8 (2008)

1.1 Emma Willard’s picture of world history (1835)

1.2 Emma Willard’s American Temple of Time (1860)

1.3 Emma Willard’s tree of time (1864)

2.1 Detail from Johann Georg Kohl’s map of exploration of the West Coast (1857)

2.2 Detail from US Coast Survey’s Historical Sketch of the Rebellion (1864)

2.3 Detail of legend from US Coast Survey’s Historical Sketch of the Rebellion (1864)

2.4 Detail from Rufus Blanchard’s Historical Map of the United States (1876)

2.5 Albert Bushnell Hart’s map of territorial growth in the United States (1891)

2.6 John F. Smith’s map of American historical geography (1888)

2.7 Detail from Smith’s map

2.8 Maps of land use from Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932)

3.1 Alexander von Humboldt’s chart of equal temperatures (1817)

3.2 Legend from William Woodbridge’s Chart of the Inhabited World (1821)

3.3 Detail of William Woodbridge’s isothermal and agricultural chart of the world (1823)

3.4 Detail from Amariah Brigham’s world map of cholera (1832)

3.5 Detail of Thomas Buckler’s map of the 1849 cholera epidemic in Baltimore (1851)

3.6 Edward Barton’s map of the 1854 yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans (1855)

3.7 Detail from Barton’s map of yellow fever

3.8 Detail from Samuel Forry’s map of climate patterns in the United States (1842)

3.9 The US Army Surgeon General’s map of average summer temperatures (1855)

3.10 The US Army Surgeon General’s map of annual rainfall (1855)

3.11 Joseph Henry’s map of agricultural potential (ca. 1856)

3.12 William Gilpin’s map of the isothermal zodiac, or zone of equal temperature (1860)

4.1 Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (1864)

4.2 The US Coast Survey’s map of Southern slavery (1861)

4.3 August Petermann’s map of slavery (1855)

4.4 John Jay’s map of slavery in the territories (ca. 1856)

4.5 Presidential campaign map comparing the free and slave states (1856)

4.6 The US Coast Survey’s map of slavery in Virginia (1861)

4.7 Detail of Kanawha (West Virginia), from US Coast Survey map of slavery (1861)

4.8 Legend from Frederick Law Olmsted’s map of slavery and cotton production (1861)

4.9 Detail from Olmsted’s map of cotton production

4.10 Legend from John Mallet’s map of cotton production (1862)

4.11 Detail from Edward Atkinson’s map of cotton production (1863)

5.1 US Census Office’s map of foreign population (1872)

5.2 US Census Office’s map of colored population (1872)

5.3 US Census Office’s map of population density (1872)

5.4 Francis Amasa Walker’s proportional map of foreign population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874)

5.5 Detail from Walker’s map of foreign population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874)

5.6 Francis Amasa Walker’s map of illiteracy from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874)

5.7 Detail from Francis Amasa Walker’s map of white population and Indian reservations (1874)

5.8 Detail from Adolph von Steinwehr’s map of river systems (1874)

5.9 US Provost Marshal General Bureau’s map of syphilis among drafted men (1875)

5.10 Julius Hilgard’s map of the shifting center of population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874)

5.11 Jedediah Hotchkiss’s map of population in Virginia

5.12 Jedediah Hotchkiss’s map of the black population in Virginia, with annotations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have incurred many debts with this project, and am happy to acknowledge them. Archival assistance was provided by Bob Karrow, Pat Morris, and John Powell at the Newberry Library; Wendel Cox, Bruce Hanson, and Coi Drummond-Gehrig at the Denver Public Library; Jovanka Ristic and Chris Baruth at the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee; Alan Jutzi at the Henry E. Huntington Library; Kelly Spring at Johns Hopkins University Special Collections Library; Ron Grim at the Boston Public Library; Emily Epstein at the Rare Book Department of the University of Colorado Medical Library; John Cloud and Albert Skip Theberge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Arlene Shaner at the New York Academy of Medicine; and Annie Brogan at the Philadelphia College of Physicians.

Michelle Kyner and the staff at the Interlibrary Loan Office at the University of Denver tirelessly procured materials for me. With its digital archive, the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress has made it infinitely easier to conduct research, and I thank Ed Redmond, John Hebert, Jim Flatnes, and Ralph Ehrenberg for sharing their considerable knowledge of the collection. At the Newberry Library in Chicago, I especially thank Jim Akerman, Bob Karrow, and Diane Dillon for their support over many years and research visits.

I presented specific aspects of the project to the C. V. Starr Center at Washington College, the Program in American Studies at Vanderbilt University, the Colorado Historical Society, the Rocky Mountain Map Society, the Chicago Map Society, the Colorado Regional Environmental History Working Group, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the Social Science History Association, the University of Texas at Arlington, the Library of Congress, the University of Denver Geography Colloquium, and at several Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and Seminars. Art and Jan Holzheimer graciously invited me to speak in the Maps and America series at the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee.

I am grateful for the financial and institutional support of the Henry Huntington Library, the University of Denver, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. For helping me navigate the meaning of maps I thank Cameron Bertron, Wendel Cox, Greg Hobbs, Wes Brown, Abby Smith Rumsey, Don McGuirk, Tom Overton, Curtis Bird, Steve Hoffenberg, Clay Risen, Bert Melcher, Katherine Schulten, Judy Schulten, Catherine Murdock, and Chris Lane. This project could not have been realized without David Rumsey, who has been remarkably generous with both his ideas and his collection.

Many historians shaped this project, most notably Elliott Gorn, Aaron Sachs, Ray Craib, Charles Rosenberg, Dan Crofts, Margo Anderson, Ted Widmer, Syd Nathans, Daniel Rosenberg, Thomas Andrews, Bill Philpott, Jim Grossman, Michael Robinson, Caleb McDaniel, and Paul Sutter. I also benefited greatly from exchanges with geographers, including Brian Page, Jeremy Crampton, Matt hew Edney, Mark Monmonier, Imre Demhardt, Neil Smith, Mike Heffernan, Karen Morin, Tom Koch, John Cloud, and those named above.

The digital component of this book was supported by the University of Denver’s Penrose Library, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Office of the Vice-Provost for Research, and created with the help of Dresha Schaden, Greg Colati, Jacob Ratliff, Betty Meagher, John Adams, Chet Rebman, and Fernando Reyes. Alexander Karklins has been part of this project from the beginning, well suited to the task with his combination of historical training and technological expertise.

My colleagues at the university deserve special mention. Andy Goetz and the members of the geography department avidly responded to my ideas, while my students and fellow historians created an exceedingly hospitable place to teach and work. For their camaraderie and counsel I thank Ingrid Tague, Carol Helstosky, Seth Masket, Bin Ramke, Liz Escobedo, Jen Karas, Gregg Kvistad, and Sam Kamin.

Once again, Robert Devens has edited my work with patience and good judgment, while Jeffrey Waxman, Russell Damian, and Mark Reschke carefully shepherded it through production. My sincere appreciation to Bruce Kuklick, Robert Anderson, and the anonymous reviewers at the Press, all of whom offered enormously useful appraisals of the entire manuscript at several stages. My parents, siblings, and in-laws have been unfailing in their support, and I am especially grateful to Robert for his encouragement and interest in my work. I dedicate this book to my sons, who give me so much.

INTRODUCTION

In November 2008, California voters passed a statewide initiative that made same-sex marriage illegal. Proposition 8 dominated the state’s political season, with opponents denouncing outside groups such as the Mormon Church for funneling funds into California to back the initiative. Several weeks after the election, a group advocating gay marriage used the online program Google Maps to locate the homes and businesses of those who had financially supported Proposition 8 (fig. 0.1). Many of these supporters were surprised and outraged to find themselves identified on maps that circulated widely online. Technically speaking, their anger was misplaced, for those who donated more than one hundred dollars had already been required to publicly disclose their names, addresses, and occupations. Yet it was the act of being mapped that shocked supporters of Proposition 8 and prompted them to respond. The map had the odd power to reveal what was already public information.¹

This incident illustrates the ability of a map to give data meaning by translating it into visual form. These are oft en referred to as thematic or weighted maps, for they identify particular types of information or relationships and are less about location and navigation than analysis or distribution. By contrast, traditional maps generally represent waterways, topography, locations, and borders without emphasizing any one aspect in particular.² The technique of thematic mapping began in the 1830s when Europeans started to compile maps of crime, disease, and temperature. Soon thereafter, American elites were excitedly discussing this approach. No longer just way-finding or location aids, maps could be designed as tools of spatial analysis, inquiry, administration, and control. The enthusiasm for this cartographic experimentation exploded at midcentury, particularly because Americans had accumulated so much data that could be profitably mapped. By the end of the century, thematic mapping had become a language all its own, but one where the logic of the traditional map was reversed: topography and borders were secondary to hypotheses, problems, or themes, such as the distribution of disease, illiteracy, or rainfall. In the process, the very purpose of a map had shifted. If traditional topographic maps were akin to description, thematic maps functioned more like an argument, and this made them particularly relevant for science, social science, education, and governance.³

0.1 Map of contributors to Proposition 8 in California’s 2008 election. From www.eightmaps.com.

The term thematic map is problematic, for it was coined in the twentieth century to describe something that emerged earlier. Moreover, all cartography is in some sense thematic, for maps always include—and exclude—certain information. In this regard, some consider thematic cartography a misleading term, perhaps even a false category, for all maps represent reality through the arrangement of symbols. The term also fails to do justice to other graphic information that flourished in the nineteenth century, such as timelines. And since these maps predate the rise of professional cartography, they were seldom made by trained mapmakers. Yet whether created by amateurs or professionals, scientists or social scientists, the emergence of a new kind of map in the nineteenth century is undeniable, one that focused on the distribution of phenomena rather than the landscape itself.

The collective importance of these maps has yet to be recognized. In part, this is because they developed as tools within specific fields, such as medicine, science, education, and governance. For the same reason, they are not found cataloged together in the archives as a particular type but are scattered in treatises, journals, reports, and textbooks. In other words, some of these maps are easily overlooked for precisely the reason that they are distinct: they were adopted as tools to make sense of particular kinds of information. Only in retrospect can we see a pattern where maps began to go beyond descriptions of the landscape in order to synthesize and analyze information. We know much about the role of maps in exploration, for scholars have been captivated by the drive to represent topography and political boundaries with increasing precision. Yet despite the attention given to physical maps of the West, the frontier, settlement, and land use, comparatively little has been paid to the equally monumental shift in cartographic thought. Simply put, in the nineteenth century, Americans discovered that maps could organize and analyze information. While historians routinely characterize this as an era of expanding knowledge, my concern is the cartographic form that this knowledge took.⁴

This is not to say that earlier maps of information did not exist, but these were occasional ventures. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, maps became common tools of inquiry and began to appear in new fields. The intellectual inspiration for this shift came from Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist and explorer who widened the purpose for cartography by making it a scientific tool to identify spatial patterns and relationships. The proliferation of these maps was also linked to the growth of the nation, for political independence widened the very purpose of geography and history. Geographical knowledge framed the country as territorially coherent—even destined—while history projected its development back in time and gave it depth. The creation of the American Republic made certain kinds of geographical and historical knowledge both possible and necessary.⁵

Americans began to use maps for several new purposes in the nineteenth century. History writers designed maps of the past to foster national unity. Medical men mapped cholera and yellow fever to control—and hopefully prevent—these outbreaks. Natural scientists used maps to make sense of the ongoing threats from disease and severe weather throughout the country. Northern partisans, publishers, and federal agencies mapped slavery to generate opposition to that institution and later to defeat the Confederacy. After the war, federal bureaucrats mapped the census returns in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, occupational, and physical attributes of the population. And throughout the century, expansion endowed cartography with a responsibility to demystify the West. New print and cartographic techniques made mapmaking quicker and less expensive, but the exigencies of history fueled the need for these new maps.

This turn toward cartography is also attributable to the sizable accumulation of data about the human and natural world. In other words, without information to map, cartography could not have become a tool of analysis and administration. Finally, this type of cartographic experimentation spread because it suited—and advanced—the emerging disciplines, which pursued knowledge by asking questions that could be answered through statistical, graphic, and cartographic means. While federal bureaucrats were concerned with administrative control, scientists sought to discover patterns of distribution and laws of behavior. Much of this experimentation was initiated by the Coast Survey, the Naval Observatory, the army, the Smithsonian, and the Census Bureau. In an era when the government was a fraction of its present size, it is striking to see these agencies using maps in unconventional ways. This is not a comprehensive history of thematic mapping in American life, but a study of the new kind of thinking that these maps represent.

When and how did Americans begin to map their past? To what extent was national identity predicated on geographical knowledge? Chapters 1 and 2 investigate these questions by examining historical mapping from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Maps and atlases of the past became common after the French and American Revolutions unleashed a new sentiment of nationalism. For much of the eighteenth century, history was understood as an annalistic and providential account of events and men, but the American Revolution transformed history into a story that culminated in independence. The subject now had the purpose not just of documenting the past, but of fostering loyalty and love of country by explaining the path to nationhood. The Revolution also transformed the purpose of school geography, which could serve civic needs by describing the nation’s boundaries and contours as natural. Thus, the very existence of historical maps reveals an intimate relationship between knowledge and nationalism. Along with other timelines and other graphic representations, historical maps gave form and substance to the nation by visualizing its past.

This powerful relationship between historical knowledge and the nation is exemplified by the career of Emma Willard, one of the most influential educators in nineteenth-century America. Willard authored some of the nation’s first geography and history textbooks, but what set her apart was her keen desire to visualize information for students. For decades she experimented with maps and charts to communicate abstract concepts of history and nationhood. In the process, she created one of the first historical atlases of the United States. As chapter 1 details, in both metaphorical and literal ways, she mapped the past to integrate the nation and, in the process, emphasized the territorial dimension of nationhood.

A zealous nationalist, Willard was one of several who pressed for the creation of a national map archive at midcentury. This was an uphill battle, for old maps were still the arcane province of antiquarians, ignored by most Americans. Yet this began to change when Congress authorized funding to copy maps related to the history of America in the 1850s. Over the next several decades, old maps came to be seen as historical evidence, culminating in the creation of a separate division of maps at the Library of Congress in 1897. At the same time, John Franklin Jameson spearheaded an effort to create a massive historical atlas of the United States, which marked the maturation of a genre that began with Willard’s atlas of American history a century earlier. Chapter 2 discusses these related trends: the rising appreciation for old maps, the growing market for maps from the past, and the campaign to create a national map archive. Each of these reveals an awareness of the spatial, geographical dimension of history that was new to nineteenth-century America.

The use of maps to understand the past was part of an experimental phase of cartography that extended across American culture, as European innovations in design and production rapidly crossed the Atlantic. As explained in chapter 3, Humboldt’s approach to science was one of several factors that opened new applications for cartography. For instance, to improve the health of its soldiers, the army began to record rain, wind, temperature, and disease at its forts and posts in 1819. By the 1850s, these efforts had yielded an enormous amount of unwieldy information that could only be accessed and understood through cartography. While federal scientists developed climate and weather maps to study the behavior of storms and the nature of disease, medical men turned to maps to explain and contain mortal epidemics. In an era when disease was believed to be rooted in the environment, maps held great power.

In the 1830s and 1840s, Europeans began to map urban problems such as the incidence of disease, crime, illiteracy, poverty, and sanitation. The greatest problem facing Americans—slavery—invited similar cartographic experimentation. Chapter 4 explains that the most consequential of these maps came from the US Coast Survey, the leading scientific agency of the antebellum era. In 1861, the survey created two groundbreaking maps depicting the density of slavery. By meeting the demand for more nuanced renderings of the slave population, the survey executed the first statistical maps in the United States. These were a revelation, for they featured not political boundaries or topography but the distribution of information. More important, they inaugurated a tradition of statistical mapping that flourished after the war.

The intellectual models of Humboldt and the cartographic innovations brought by Europeans made thematic mapping a thoroughly transatlantic venture. Yet it was Americans who developed the census, and, as the data collected grew with each decade, so did attention to vital statistics. By the late antebellum period, economic growth, immigration, the tariff, mortality, and slavery were increasingly debated in statistical terms. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in 1860,

The two dominant words of our time are law and average, both pointing to the uniformity of the order of being in which we live. Statistics have tabulated everything,—population, growth, wealth, crime, disease. We have shaded maps showing the geographical distribution of larceny and suicide. Analysis and classification have been at work upon all tangible and visible objects.⁶

This drive to aggregate and abstract the population was further realized in the 1870s, when Census Superintendent Francis Amasa Walker began to exploit cartography as a tool of governance. Chapter 5 explains how he created maps to investigate population dynamics by incorporating layers of information. Walker believed that maps could further social progress by facilitating inquiry and analysis. In making these maps, he established a model that would be emulated worldwide in the twentieth century: an atlas that inventoried the nation not just in terms of its physical and territorial expanse, but its resources and population.

Statistical maps are now so ubiquitous that we simply assume data will be arranged graphically and cartographically. This thinking drives geographic information systems (GIS), which refers to any system that correlates data to geography to facilitate decision making. The term originated with the advent of computer technology, which made it possible to rapidly and easily organize data in spatial form. But the idea behind GIS is that information can be mapped for urban planning, politics, marketing, or a host of other problems of social organization, governance, and economics. The literature on the meaning and the politics of GIS is extensive and need not be engaged here. The point is simply that modern mapping techniques are all predicated on a form of spatial analysis that is rooted in the nineteenth century.

An ongoing debate now animates the history of cartography: some see maps producing increasingly accurate representations of the world, while others consider them expressions of particular agendas and thus look skeptically at claims of progress. I concentrate on these maps as historical sources asking why they were created and how they were used.⁷ Arthur Robinson’s Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography alluded to American developments but focused on Europe as the source of innovation. More recently, Anne Godlewska, Gilles Palsky, and Michael Friendly have traced the growth of graphic information, though they also concentrate on Europe. Others cover particular fields, such as Tom Koch’s studies of disease maps or Simon Winchester’s chronicle of geological mapping. My concern is the rise of graphic forms of knowledge across American culture, and I cast my net broadly to explore its meaning.⁸

Some may argue that maps of history, climate, disease, and the census should be treated as discrete enterprises. Yet by considering them together, we see a change not just in cartographic techniques, but in thinking: the shift toward graphic information was both a cause and a consequence of modernization. These maps and charts were devised because they conveyed what words and statistics could not. They captured complexity and concretized the abstract. They met the needs of a society concerned with national identity, efficiency, organization, governance, and development. Once created, the maps themselves raised other questions. In other words, this form of knowledge shaped the substance of knowledge. When the Coast Surveyors mapped the density of slavery, they could not have anticipated that these same techniques would later be used to suggest a relationship between race and disease or immigration and birth rates.

The role of these maps in governance is especially fertile ground for investigation. Above all else, state formation involved the bounding of territories and populations into social units. The quest for government control transformed national space by placing a premium on the articulation of territory. In other words, administration was a spatial process. Maps facilitated this task by enabling leaders to measure and organize the population and its resources in spatial terms. The primary concerns of the federal government in the nineteenth century—the mail, railroads, tariffs, taxation, and control of Native Americans—all necessitated geographical knowledge.⁹

In a similar vein, Thomas Bender has argued that a new understanding of unity, freedom, and territory unfolded around the world in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848, it was unclear that the nation-state would define the political future of Europe and the Americas, yet, within a few decades, the United States had become a distinctly national society. Relationships between local and federal authority were recalibrated, and maps made it possible to see, evaluate, and administer the territory, its population, and its resources.¹⁰ Brian Balogh has unveiled a nineteenth-century state that was vigorous and active, yet most effective when it operated out of sight. The maps made in federal agencies bear this out, for they were quiet yet necessary instruments of governance that spread over the course of the century. Equally remarkable, many of these maps originated in a government that scholars have characterized as skeletal and reactive. The energy devoted to mapping the population reveals a level of governance that historians commonly associate with the Progressive Era rather than the nineteenth century.¹¹

The rise of thematic maps affected life outside government as well, especially in social science. This form of cartography fueled social science by spatially representing problems, isolating geographical variables, and advancing hypotheses and explanations. Thematic maps shaped disciplines by facilitating the observation of patterns that might go unnoticed and the communication of ideas that might remain unarticulated. Social scientists quickly noticed that maps had the capacity to advance public knowledge as well as knowledge about the public.

When considered together, these maps mark a shift toward a more argumentative concept of cartography. This may sound odd, for recent studies have taught us that all maps are a type of argument. Each requires the arrangement of selected information, and no map can be understood apart from its purpose. Yet the maps discussed here—whether of history, slavery, ethnicity, rainfall, or disease—were specifically designed for inquiry, analysis, and interpretation. They grew not just from the accumulation of data, but from the realization that maps were visual tools, uniquely capable of conveying complex ideas. As Humboldt wrote, statistical maps could speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind. The world we inhabit today—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew from this sea change in spatial thought and representation.¹²

All maps discussed in this book can be viewed in high resolution at www.mappingthenation.com

PART ONE

Mapping the Past

CHAPTER 1

The Graphic Foundations of American History

The American colonists rarely used maps to make sense of the past. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that maps of the past were not common until the Revolution made them relevant. After the creation of the Republic, maps became an important way to document a national past that extended back to the fifteenth century, most notably with David Ramsay’s attempt to chart and map history in the 1810s. Thereafter, historical maps spread widely as a result of several trends. First, the capacity to design maps grew alongside thematic mapping and other graphic forms of knowledge. Second, these maps proliferated with the advent of inexpensive print technologies. Third, writers of history began to define the study of American history as that which explained the emergence of the United States, particularly in political and territorial terms. This made the historical atlases an appealing way to document national development in terms of territorial growth. Finally, the spread of education created a demand for atlases centered on the nation’s history. Thus, maps of the past flourished because they were uniquely capable of visualizing the country’s territorial growth and political development. In fact, historical cartography presented a self-fulfilling prophecy: by explaining the rise of the nation, maps and atlases ordered the past around this narrative. As a result, maps structured American history as territorial growth, and, because the colonies and the nation never shrank in size (secession notwithstanding), its history was well suited to mapping. For the United States, unlike France or Germany, history was synonymous with growth, and the present could be framed as the fulfillment of past struggles. The past was never the story of loss, only gain. Historical maps, timelines, graphs, and charts transformed the unpredictable and contingent past into orderly stages of inevitable growth.

The Concept of Historical Cartography

The historical atlas has a complicated origin. The earliest document that can be called a historical atlas was the Parergon of Abraham Ortelius, first issued in 1579, which included a series of maps of both the classical and biblical world. By our own standards, this was not historical, for it lacked chronological organization and did not use maps to explain history; instead, it reprinted a series of maps from Claudius Ptolemy, the ancient geographer whose maps were rediscovered in the fifteenth century. The Ortelius atlas established a pattern that would remain for centuries. Atlases that attempted to document change over time appeared only intermittently well into the eighteenth century, which indicates that the understanding of history as a story had yet to be assumed. Contemporary atlases gestured toward history by including maps of ancient and biblical lands, occasionally juxtaposed with modern maps of the same terrain or Europe. Yet the absence of chronological order in these atlases indicates that they were not created to illustrate change.¹

Thus, as a document that purports to relate history through maps, historical