Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America 9780226740706

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Mapping the Nation

MAPPING THE NATION History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America

SUSAN SCHULTEN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

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 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74068-3 ISBN-10: 0-226-74068-4

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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).

CO N T E N TS

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction

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PART ONE: MAPPING THE PA ST 1. The Graphic Foundations of American History 11 2. Capturing the Past through Maps 41 PART T WO: MAPPING THE PRESENT 3. Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping 79 4. Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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5. The Cartographic Consolidation of America 157 Conclusion 197 Notes 203 Index 237

I L LU ST R AT I O N S

Illustrations discussed in this book can be viewed at high resolution at mappingthenation.com. 0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1

Map of contributors to California’s Proposition 8 (2008) 2 Emma Willard’s “picture” of world history (1835) 32 Emma Willard’s “American Temple of Time” (1860) 35 Emma Willard’s “tree of time” (1864) 36 Detail from Johann Georg Kohl’s map of exploration of the West Coast (1857) 45 Detail from US Coast Survey’s “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion” (1864) 48 Detail of legend from US Coast Survey’s “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion” (1864) 49 Detail from Rufus Blanchard’s “Historical Map of the United States” (1876) 58 Albert Bushnell Hart’s map of territorial growth in the United States (1891) 62 John F. Smith’s map of American “historical geography” (1888) 66 Detail from Smith’s map 67 Maps of land use from Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932) 74 Alexander von Humboldt’s chart of equal temperatures (1817) 82 vii

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

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Legend from William Woodbridge’s “Chart of the Inhabited World” (1821) 84 Detail of William Woodbridge’s isothermal and agricultural chart of the world (1823) 85 Detail from Amariah Brigham’s world map of cholera (1832) 87 Detail of Thomas Buckler’s map of the 1849 cholera epidemic in Baltimore (1851) 91 Edward Barton’s map of the 1854 yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans (1855) 95 Detail from Barton’s map of yellow fever 96 Detail from Samuel Forry’s map of climate patterns in the United States (1842) 100 The US Army Surgeon General’s map of average summer temperatures (1855) 103 The US Army Surgeon General’s map of annual rainfall (1855) 105 Joseph Henry’s map of agricultural potential (ca. 1856) 106 William Gilpin’s map of the “isothermal zodiac,” or zone of equal temperature (1860) 113 Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (1864) 120 The US Coast Survey’s map of Southern slavery (1861) 121 August Petermann’s map of slavery (1855) 128 John Jay’s map of slavery in the territories (ca. 1856) 130 Presidential campaign map comparing the free and slave states (1856) 131 The US Coast Survey’s map of slavery in Virginia (1861) 134 Detail of “Kanawha” (West Virginia), from US Coast Survey map of slavery (1861) 138 Legend from Frederick Law Olmsted’s map of slavery and cotton production (1861) 148 Detail from Olmsted’s map of cotton production 149 Legend from John Mallet’s map of cotton production (1862) 150 Detail from Edward Atkinson’s map of cotton production (1863) 152 US Census Office’s map of “foreign population” (1872) 167 US Census Office’s map of “colored population” (1872) 168 US Census Office’s map of population density (1872) 170 Francis Amasa Walker’s proportional map of foreign population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874) 175 Detail from Walker’s map of foreign population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874) 176 Francis Amasa Walker’s map of illiteracy from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874) 177

List of Illustrations

5.7 5.8 5.9

Detail from Francis Amasa Walker’s map of white population and Indian reservations (1874) 180 Detail from Adolph von Steinwehr’s map of river systems (1874) 181 US Provost Marshal General Bureau’s map of syphilis among drafted men (1875) 183

5.10 Julius Hilgard’s map of the shifting center of population from the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874) 186 5.11 Jedediah Hotchkiss’s map of population in Virginia 190 5.12 Jedediah Hotchkiss’s map of the black population in Virginia, with annotations 191

List of Illustration

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

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, xi

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, Matthew 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. xii

Acknowledgments

I N T RO D U CT I O N

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 often 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 1

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

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 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, scien2

Introduction

tists 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 Introduction

3

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 4

Introduction

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 Introduction

5

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 6

Introduction

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 Introduction

7

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.map pingthenation.com

8

Introduction

PA RT O N E

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, 11

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 atlases date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even by this loose definition, they were an odd collection of texts. They contained much that was not primarily geographic, such as tables and genealogy that were often more prominent than the maps themselves. Most of the maps were general and rarely explained history or geography. They were not drawn on scales large enough (that is, covering small enough regions) to explain development, and for the most part they did not incorporate sufficient geographical detail to illuminate a particular battle or its outcome. In this respect, Walter Goffart is right to term much of what passed for historical cartography in the nineteenth century as “maps for history.” The maps usually depicted a particular political arrangement at a given moment in time but were not designed to shed light on the geographic dimension of the past. Jeremy Black concurs, arguing that geographers were less likely to make historical maps and atlases than historians.2 This distinction between “historical maps” and “maps for history” may seem minor, but it begs a relevant question: if these maps did not explain American historical geography in any useful way, why were they so popular? In fact, it was their lack of detail, depth, and substance— precisely what marks them as nongeographical—that accounts for their appeal. Historical maps and atlases were not used to explain geographical problems, but rather to cultivate a shared identity by offering tangible evidence of the nation’s evolution over time. The purpose was not to explore the nuances of geography, but to document the evolution of the nation as a sovereign territory. 12

Chapter One

The growing popularity of historical atlases also owed something to shifting ideas about time and space. The French Revolution, by separating the past from the present, highlighted the degree to which even the recent past was now “history.” Dorothy Ross argues that the Revolution forced Europeans to see history as a radically contingent force that directly affected their lives; in other words, it effectively brought history into the present. Before the Revolution, historical atlases were primarily classical, such as Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s Ten maps for Rollin’s Ancient history, initially published in the 1730s. By the nineteenth century, these atlases began to consider the modern era, symbolized by Christian Kruse’s decision to replace maps of antiquity in his 1802 atlas with sequential maps of Europe from the close of each century, beginning in 400 AD. Kruse moved through 1700, then drew a map of 1788, and, in subsequent editions, added maps of 1811 and 1816. With these maps, he de-emphasized the ancient world and simultaneously drew history into the present. By arranging a series of maps of the same geographic area at different moments of time, he was among the first to suggest a pattern of historical change in the growth of civilization.3 The French Revolution also brought tangible changes to the measurement of time (with proposed alterations to the modern calendar) and space (with the metric system). Both underscored a rupture between past and present, yet the Revolution also raised interest in the past, for history was now defined as the story of a particular nation. And while historical mapping may have originated in the ancient period, its maturation depended upon the rise of modern states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The French Revolution profoundly elevated the importance of modern history by fueling the general awareness of the present as an outcome of the past. Though we now take it for granted that the past leads to the present, this was a relatively recent conception of history. The American experience was part of this development but differed slightly, for, while the French Revolution showed Europeans that history brought both progress and danger, the American Revolution enhanced American assumptions about their exceptional, predestined place in world history. The Revolution also moved the colonies toward nationhood, which generated a need for a unified past. This desire to see the origins of the nation became the raison d’être of historical atlases and the main reason that they spread so quickly.4 The popularity of historical atlases in the nineteenth century also signaled changing concepts of space. The idea of sovereignty certainly does not date to this period, but its territorial dimension might: medieval understandings of territory were organized in legal and feudal, rather than geographical, terms. A more territorial approach to frontiers developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this change was still incomplete by the time of the French Revolution. Maps were well suited to illustrate territorial forms of sovereignty that developed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. FurtherThe Graphic Foundations of American History

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more, the nationalism unleashed by that revolution raised attention to historical mapping by connecting power with the state as an entity whose success depended on the articulation of boundaries. Territorial integrity was essential to national coherence and stability; as Black writes, “the implementation of firm frontiers was bound up with the existence of more assertive states and growing state bureaucracies, which sought to know where exactly they could impose their demands for resources and where they needed to create their first line of defence.” As nation-states grew, so did their need to mark and delimit their reach. The Revolution and Napoleonic Wars provided rich material for maps and atlases and brought intense attention to the recent past. But this new interest in boundaries also created anachronistic maps. When Christian Kruse emphasized clear borders on his historical maps of Europe, he revealed the concerns of his own day rather than those of the past. By stressing political boundaries, Kruse projected a nineteenth-century preoccupation with territorial control onto the medieval and early modern eras.5 By establishing political borders, historical maps also fostered civic unity by demonstrating a common territorial heritage. The nation could even be said to rely upon geographical and historical knowledge: geography grounds the nation in space, while history roots it in time. National identity depends upon borders, and maps underscored these even when they remained obscure and contested, such as the western limits of the Louisiana Territory and the disputed border between the United States and Mexico. History traced the chronology of the nation and explained it as a logical, ordered process of change. Geographical and historical knowledge substantiated what might otherwise have seemed artificial: a national Union that superseded local, religious, or colonial loyalties.6 But to draw on history to legitimate the United States was difficult, for the nation did not have much history. In response, historical maps appropriated what was now the “colonial era” as part of the nation’s heritage. Texts and atlases frequently began in the fifteenth century to chart the growth of the colonies, the succession of imperial wars, and process of the Revolution and to frame the Union as the culmination of these struggles.

Charts and Maps of Time in the Early Republic Historical atlases and maps were related to the interdependence of geographical and historical knowledge. That is, to learn geography in the early nineteenth century was to learn history. The reverse was equally true, for little separated these two fields. Emma Willard wrote both geography and history texts, as did William Channing Woodbridge. The eminent historian George Bancroft served as the first president of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, and German émigré Francis Lieber relentlessly pointed out the importance of geographic lit14

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eracy to historical knowledge, as did Henry Harisse. In the same vein, school histories relied extensively upon a geographical or, more precisely, a territorial, narrative. Few historical atlases incorporated the immense growth of geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century. Instead, they continued to emphasize the nation’s absolute expansion and internal political borders. That is, historical maps only gestured toward topography, exploration, or the relationship of either of these to historical development. Historical atlases were expressions and assertions of national space rather than geographical explanations of development. The most successful of these was the French atlas of Las Cases, printed in English as the Genealogical, Chronological, Historical and Geographical Atlas (1801) and adapted for an American audience in 1821.7 This influential volume contained fifty-three charts, tables, and maps and an overwhelming degree of detail. The sheer size of the atlas was typical of its time and echoed the title’s assertion of comprehensiveness. Yet little space was devoted to the maps themselves. Only one of these maps engaged historical change and did so in a limited way by attempting to cover English settlements in North America from the sixteenth century forward. Most information was found in the margins and in a table divided along chronological and geographical lines. The atlas contained no sequential maps, nor did it map change over time. It was a catalog and gazetteer that indexed and organized material but made little attempt to illuminate the spatial or geographical dimension of the past. Goffart and Black take a dim view of this atlas, for it contained few maps, relied upon charts and tables, and failed to integrate history and geography in any meaningful way. The maps were unconnected and did not explain how a particular landscape influenced historical development or how human behavior shaped that landscape—what we would call historical geography. Instead the maps in Las Cases were mnemonic devices for assimilating information. As Goffart writes, given the emphasis on memorization in schools, it did not matter much that disparate facts ended up on the same map. In his view, the publication was neither historical nor cartographic and can therefore hardly claim status as one of the first historical atlases. As he put it, the atlas was “a tool for cramming,” full of “useful particles of knowledge,” but hardly designed to convey the sweep of history or its geographical underpinnings.8 Yet the Atlas Lesage was a publishing success and as such established the form for historical atlases. Goffart laments that it paved the way for histories that omitted maps entirely and geography texts that sidestepped history. Ironically, the atlas praised the integration of geography and history, sounding a common theme at the time. The atlas was followed by one devoted entirely to the United States, also issued by Carey, and with maps of each state. Yet it was no more historical than its predecessor, a reminder that historical atlases paid little attention to change over time. Goffart’s frustration with these atlases overlooks the fact The Graphic Foundations of American History

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that they proliferated precisely because they spoke to contemporary needs. They met the pedagogical goal of inculcating geographic memory and cultivated a sense of national identity in a vulnerable young republic. William Darby’s View of the United States (1828) professed to use history and statistics to “develop the present condition of the North American Union” and framed geography as a function of the nation and its history.9 After the War of 1812, geographic education rapidly gained strength as a foundation for national identity, and this stimulated the demand for historical mapping.10 But these maps were also made possible by a growing interest in the graphic representation of knowledge, especially the emergence of timelines to measure change. One of the first attempts to use a line to represent time as a map represents space was made by the French physician Jacques Berneu-Dubourg. Like many after him, Dubourg spoke of chronology and geography as the “eyes” of history and hoped that the visual elements of the latter would enliven the dry, factual character of the former. To this end, his Carte Chronographie (1753) charted the life span of individuals on a chronological grid. The Carte reflected a firm Enlightenment sensibility, especially in its assumption that history could be plotted and measured against an absolute scale of time.11 Though celebrated by contemporaries, Dubourg’s Carte was soon eclipsed by Joseph Priestley, whose Chart of Biography (1765) is mistakenly assumed to be the first representation of human lives as lines on a sheet of paper. Priestley drew from calendars, chronologies, and geographies to chart two thousand lives between 1200 BC and 1750 AD. Though timelines now seem intuitive, they were sufficiently unfamiliar at the time to prompt Priestley’s explanation: the abstract idea of time, though it be not the object of any of our senses, and no image can properly be made of it, yet because it has a relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space of time, it admits of a natural and easy representation in our minds by the idea of a measurable space, and particularly that of a line; which, like time, may be extended in length, without giving any idea of breadth or thickness. And thus a longer or a shorter space of time may be most commodiously and advantageously represented by a longer or a shorter line.

Priestley aimed to give viewers a sense of seeing history in action, not textually but visually. His success allowed later generations to assume that historical time could be represented by graphic space, and this spawned a new era in the organization of information. After Priestley, timelines flourished.12 David Ramsay cited Priestley as a primary influence over his “Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States in 1811” (see website).13 Ramsay used

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the chart to extend back into the colonial period, which gave American history a form and an arc that culminated in the nation’s birth. On the left side of the chart, he mapped the nation’s states and territories, its projected canals, and a recommended “road of health” where invalids and consumptives could avoid extreme climates. To the right, he balanced his map with a complex historical chart. With a timeline, he profiled the evolution of each colony, territory, and subsequent state and identified its type of government as well as the locus of foreign control. He used symbols to mark the founding of colleges, rebellions, and military conflicts with both Indians and Europeans. Below this, he created an extended biographical chart modeled on Priestley’s, which named influential individuals in each of the states and territories: “divines, statesmen and public officers, warriors, [and] eminent persons.” The timeline culminated with political independence, when Ramsay declared the “nation born at once.” On the far right, marking modern history, he adapted William Playfair’s model to chart revenues, exports, and the economic growth since 1789. The chart was dense with data and symbols, but Ramsay insisted it was self-explanatory and intuitive, “giving visibility on a sheet of paper to American History.” Changes of government were marked in color, and across the bottom appeared a brief narrative of the nation’s past. Ramsay hoped to create a “connected” view of American history “through the medium of the eye.”14 By placing the chart alongside the map, he aimed for an interactive, dynamic, and stereoscopic view of the nation’s evolution in space and time. Ramsay was the first American to write a history of the United States, but soon others insisted that the nation’s independence be extended into other areas of knowledge. Noah Webster produced spellers and grammars to train schoolchildren in the particulars of “American” English. Jedediah Morse asserted that American-authored texts of the nation’s geography were a precondition to loyalty and civic identity. His American Universal Geography and Geography Made Easy endured for years in schools, and the former quickly displaced William Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar as the conventional text of its kind. Both Webster and Morse enjoyed great success and unrivaled influence in American schools and transformed grammar and geography into handmaidens of nation building. These texts also connected literacy and geographic knowledge in unprecedented ways. Webster arranged the names of the original thirteen states and Maine geographically, from top to bottom (north to south) on the page, which visually reinforced spatial relationships in the new nation. Morse extended this connection between alphabetic and cartographic literacy by using “word maps,” with nations named and arranged geographically on the page but without a cartographic outline. Through these and other techniques, Morse and Webster embedded the nation into the very structure of knowledge. Similarly, Ramsay paid close attention

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to the presentation of knowledge, and he corresponded extensively with Morse about the history and geography of the new nation. The two even planned a series of maps that might serve as foundations for American geography.15

Emma Willard The publications of Morse, Ramsay, and Webster shaped the worldview of young Americans, none more than Emma Willard. Born in 1787, she matured at a time when national identity was not simply a matter of loyalty or preference, but of the country’s survival. She was trained in the classics and British literature, but the texts that resonated with her were the grammars of Webster and the geographies of Morse. Willard mastered her lessons with discipline and was proud of her ability to commit them to memory. As a teen, she earned a teaching position at a local school, the first of many experiences that convinced her of the need for curricular and pedagogical reform. Willard’s dissatisfaction with teaching methods was heightened by the limitations imposed on female students, and she attributed the inadequacy of her education to the poor quality of teachers and the outdated assumptions about what girls could learn. Yet geography was an exception, for it quickly gained a place in the late eighteenth century as an appropriate subject for girls and an excellent path to literacy. John Pinkerton prefaced his contemporary atlas by arguing that geography was “a study so universally instructive and pleasing, that it has, for nearly a century, been taught even to females.” Both geography and map reading were considered subjects that cultivated literacy as well as preparing women for “the trivial conversations of social circle.”16 Though geography and map reading were appropriate for girls, Willard chafed at the subjects that were kept out of reach and voiced her frustrations in a widely circulated Plan for Improving Female Education (1819). Over a decade earlier, she had taken a position at Middlebury Female Academy in Vermont and, by 1815, founded the Middlebury Female Seminary. The publication of the Plan gave Willard confidence, and, in 1821, with no public assistance and a fair amount of resistance, she founded the Troy Female Seminary, which soon became a preeminent school for future teachers and one of the country’s finest institutions of female education. At Troy, Willard assumed that female students were capable of mastering the same subjects as their male counterparts and incorporated “masculine studies” such as science into the curriculum. Her administration of the school, and her intensive teaching before and after its foundation, convinced her that contemporary education had failed in multiple ways.17 Willard was exasperated by the state of education in part because she was influenced by Johann Pestalozzi, who considered the child a subject to be engaged rather than a blank slate to be inscribed. As she put it, “I should labor to make my pupils by explanation and illustration understand their subject, and get them 18

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warmed to it, by making them see its beauties and its advantages.” She mastered Morse’s geographies but was disappointed that he omitted maps and discussed places only through narrative and reference to longitude and latitude. (To be fair, he did include Abraham Bradley’s innovative postal maps in some of his geographies.) Both Morse and Willard were bent on developing a durable geographic memory, but, for her, this demanded intense engagement with images. She regarded this oversight as symptomatic of a larger problem in American education. As she wrote, When, in 1814, I commenced in Middlebury, Vermont, the school which by enlargement and removal became, in 1821, the Troy Female Seminary, the subjects of Geography and History were difficult of instruction; the books of Geography being closely confined to the order of place, and those of History, as closely to that of time; by which much repetition was made necessary, and comprehensive views of topics, by comparison and classification, were debarred. In Geography, the eye was not made the sole, or the chief medium of teaching the signs of external things, as the forms, proportion, and situation of countries, rivers, &c., for though maps existed, yet they were not required to be used; but the boundary was learned by the words of the book, and the latitude by numbers there set down—as historical dates are now commonly learned. Numbers thus presented, are hard to acquire, difficult to remember, and, standing by themselves, of little value when remembered.18

This passage marks her as part of a generation that embraced mnemonic devices and visual information to engage children and improve memory. Willard defined an educated student as one who could understand, remember, and then communicate, and she was captivated by the power of mnemonics to achieve this goal. She did not take issue with the goal of memorization, as later educators would, but instead faulted existing learning methods and reformulated the presentation of information. The distinction is important, for she believed that the visual preceded the verbal. Information presented spatially and visually would facilitate memory by attaching images to the mind through the eyes.19 This concern with the visual dynamics of learning and the importance of geography fueled Willard’s interest in cartography. She found maps unmatched for their ability to convey complexity, visualize the nation, and help students gain a more holistic view of the past. Maps placed history, she argued, and this physicality and emphasis on location would foster memory. Evidence of this new approach to learning can be seen in a student’s journal that was created at the place and time of Willard’s influence: “Frances A. Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship, Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy, April 29, 1828” (see website). Willard had taught at that academy in the 1810s, before founding Troy in The Graphic Foundations of American History

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1821. Henshaw may have used “Middlebury” as the original name of Troy, or she may have been guided by the models that Willard had designed and popularized throughout the network of female seminaries after she left Middlebury.20 In either case, the student’s handwritten journal exemplifies Willard’s approach to learning, for Henshaw practiced grammar, penmanship, geography, astronomy, and history by drawing maps and writing about geography. Henshaw began, in a custom common to geographies of the time, by describing the principles of astronomy, the widest of all spatial categories. She practiced penmanship by copying passages about astronomical systems and definitions of geographical terms such as climate, longitude, and latitude. In each of these exercises, she used different styles of writing and configured sentences into shapes to endow that information with meaning. And by practicing penmanship through the subject of geography, Henshaw was learning to integrate these two fields. After several pages of “drawing” the principles of astronomy and geography in a way that advanced memory, she turned her attention to “America.” She began by narrating the story of Christopher Columbus, who had the “honor of discovering America” after overcoming great obstacles. She then created an atlas of the Union, beginning in the far northeast with the new state of Maine. Henshaw traced each of these state maps from a school atlas and used specific lettering styles to emphasize borders, river systems, and place names (see website). This exercise of tracing maps was typical for female students, but, after each map, Henshaw drew a separate picture of that particular state. Ostensibly, these pictures were a way to practice several different styles of script, but they also reflect contemporary innovations in the teaching of geography. Consider her descriptive pictures of Virginia and Kentucky (see website). In each, she described the state by arranging her narrative into geographical form. Every picture took a different artistic approach. She “drew” Virginia with a calligraphied angel atop the page, then shaped the description and identified the ocean and states that surrounded it. Similarly, she describes Kentucky through text that is arranged in a saltire (diagonal cross), then bounded by the names of other states. Faint lines reveal the care that Henshaw gave to the composition and order of the picture, as do the carefully drawn flowers at the center. The angles of script evoke the form and pattern of quilted piecework. While the angel of Virginia is taken from a contemporary writing manual, the arrangement of Kentucky is original, which indicates that Henshaw either learned this style from her instructor or imagined it herself.21 Her journal suggests that Henshaw was learning geography as the study of locations as well as relationships. By tracing each state map, she recorded the absolute nature of geographical knowledge. By drawing information about that state into an original form that incorporated art, various scripts, shapes, and geographical arrangement, she was practicing more qualitative and contextual 20

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knowledge. The word map was a way of picturing geography and thereby reinforcing the information. Henshaw was also learning geography as a path to literacy, which is unsurprising given that these were closely linked subjects and twin vehicles of national identity in the early Republic. Noah Webster had recently begun to use pronunciation and repetition of place names as “a secular catechism to the nation state,” and his grammar texts often arranged place names in a similar geographical fashion in order to link literacy, geography, and civic identity.22 Henshaw was taught to endow information with permanence and meaning and to use visual stimulation to build memory. She could very well have been Willard’s student, for the latter was convinced of the value of mnemonics and the graphic display of information. Willard’s intense nationalism also led her to place history at the heart of the curriculum. She described her intellectual contributions in nationalistic terms by claiming that the best way for her to serve her country was “by awakening a taste for history.”23 Yet compared to geography, history was an uncommon school subject in the 1810s, usually a path to literacy at the primary level and to classical or sacred history at the secondary level. US history was doubly marginal, for the nation had so little of it. The few published histories of the Republic were generally annals of the Revolution or of individual colonies, such as David Ramsay’s account of South Carolina. Willard insisted, however, that a more fully developed American history was critical to the nation’s survival and urged educators to expand this subject in their schools. This was at least as important for women as for men, for Willard held the common view that fluency in American history would morally elevate women, prepare them to be republican mothers, and inoculate them against the desire for fiction, which she considered a vehicle of “mawkish uniformity” and delusion.24 Ironically, American history emerged first as a subject at newer and less prestigious schools, chiefly female academies where the curriculum was less entrenched. Public schools—more sensitive to external pressures—also adopted the study of American history before their private counterparts. By the 1820s, five states had passed laws requiring national history to be taught at the secondary level in tax-supported institutions. In this context, the Troy Seminary faced few institutional impediments to curriculum reform, and Willard easily introduced subjects that she considered necessary—such as the sciences and American history—alongside more traditional studies of geography and grammar. She even dated one of her early texts not according to the Christian calendar, but “in the forty-sixth year of the Independence of the United States.”25 By the 1830s and 1840s, the popularity of history had surged. The subject gained prominence in schools alongside the creation of historical societies and archives, a growing movement for historic preservation, and a popular demand for historical narrative. George Bancroft’s multivolume work on the United The Graphic Foundations of American History

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States, together with William Hickling Prescott’s history of Spain and John Lothrop Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, sparked a mania for history writing. One-third of the best-selling books of the first half of the century covered historical themes, and, among textbook authors, the undisputed champion was Samuel Goodrich (also known as Peter Parley), whose 170 editions sold approximately seven million copies. His chief competitor was his brother Charles, while Willard, who sold about one million history textbooks from the 1820s through the 1860s, held third place, making her the best-selling female textbook author in nineteenth-century America. Most of these authors held public office at some point in their lives, and all but Willard left their professions to devote themselves to writing. But it was her experience with teaching and her ongoing engagement with pedagogy that shaped her understanding of cartography.26 Few if any of the nation’s contemporary writers were concerned with historical causation, whether human or providential. Instead, they relied on romantic literary techniques to probe the past for larger social and moral truths or to discover the essential characteristics of a given society. The historians of the period envisioned historical reality as a unified whole that integrated the hand of God with human agency. As famously put by Lord Bolingbroke, history was “philosophy teaching by example,” and, in the United States, this meant instilling in the young heroic stories of the aging revolutionary generation. Knowledge of past events would ideally lead students to moral reflection, which might inculcate virtue and strengthen the bonds of citizenship. Willard was weaned on this rigid, didactic conception of the past, but her geographical mindset trained her to think of history in three dimensional terms and to conceive of the nation as a territorial body. She considered geography and chronology the “twin axes of history” but was disappointed to find history texts engaging chronology while ignoring geography and making no effort to visualize change over time.27 Given this engagement with history and geography, we might ask about Willard’s contribution to the field of historical geography. There were no research universities in early nineteenth-century America, which meant there were no professors of geography or others devoted to advancing geographical research as such. Those who cultivated the relationship between geographical and historical thought in this era were educators, Willard first among them. By exploring the geographical dimension of history—using maps and graphs to trace change over time—she practiced a form of historical geography. But she also went beyond this. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, her teaching drove her to consider geographical relationships and problems of comparative geography. As she later recalled: I began a series of improvements in geography—separating and first teaching what could be learned from maps—then treating the various subjects of 22

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population, extent, length of rivers, &c., by comparing country with country, river with river, and city with city,—making out with the assistance of my pupils, those tables which afterwards appeared in Woodbridge and Willard’s Geographies.28

Here she took a cue from Alexander von Humboldt, who published his first chart of comparative temperatures in 1817, and soon after began to describe geography as a comparative and analytical study of different elements of the natural environment. Humboldt’s maps, charts, and other geographical concepts and tools were quickly adopted and adapted by Willard and her collaborator William Woodbridge, for their goal was to stimulate memory by visualizing information. For instance, the authors drew a metaphoric map of the Amazon River and its tributaries to capture the complexity of ancient Roman history. Though the image did not catch on, it exemplifies her interest in mapping time. Other textbook authors quickly adopted the visual techniques pioneered by Humboldt that Willard and Woodbridge popularized throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Their texts enjoyed terrific success and went through multiple editions, which gave Willard the confidence to venture into history and historical mapping.29

Willard’s Historical Atlas Willard’s texts developed out of her needs as a teacher, and she frequently drew maps to help her students envision the past. Over time, her pedagogical views gained a wider audience, and she arranged to publish an American history that would emphasize geography. The result was her most enduring text, reprinted almost every year from 1828 through the 1860s. Willard’s History of the United States, or The Republic of America began by placing history in both a chronological and a geographical context in order to “situate” it in the student’s mind. In both the textbook and her private correspondence, Willard emphasized a more modern pedagogy that would advance memory and, by extension, civic education. She claimed that her text was so revolutionary that it could be used to teach the nation’s geography as well as its history and insisted that she was among the few educators who recognized the interdependence between these two subjects. By teaching the past through place, and teaching geography through the events that occurred in that place, the understanding of both would be dynamically reinforced. As she put it, “the event fixes the recollection of the place, no less than the place of the event.” Even her language was geographical, as she designed her list of questions to bring the most important points “into relief ” for the student. Morse and Webster had drawn on geography to advance literacy, but Willard was the first to invoke its graphic and cartographic dimension so extensively in order to advance national history and identity.30 The Graphic Foundations of American History

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As she prepared her History of the United States, Willard and one of her students drew a sequence of maps to accompany the text. Published in 1828—at the same time that Henshaw drew maps to practice penmanship—Willard’s Series of Maps constitutes the nation’s first historical atlas. As such it established an enduring model for atlases: she used the same base map of the eastern half of North America to illustrate territorial changes from the fifteenth century forward to her own day. This structure may seem self-evident, but Willard was the first to trace the American past through successive maps of the same region.31 She used these maps to document territorial changes, and this created a visual story of settlement as national progress. In the spirit of Ramsay, she also appropriated the long imperial era before the Revolution as part of the national past. Given her preoccupation with nationalism, history, geography, and pedagogy, perhaps it is unsurprising that Willard created the first atlas of American history. Writing geography textbooks trained her to see the nation in spatial terms, but the achievement is notable given her limited exposure to cartography.32 The structure of Willard’s atlas is the key to its power. She arranged a chronological sequence of about a dozen maps (the 1831 edition had slight variations), each depicting roughly the same area—that which would become the United States—at a different moment.33 Each documented an event or traced a movement that led toward, or resulted from, the nation, such as the landing on Plymouth Rock, the creation of the New England Confederacy, the Charter of Massachusetts, the settlement of Georgia, the Peace of Paris, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812. This “series of progressive maps” became a cumulative statement of nationhood, as each moment was chosen for its place in an evolving story of territorial fulfillment. In this respect, cartography was perfectly suited to Willard’s goal, for it enabled her to structure information and tell a particular story. In the process, a contingent and disordered past could be translated into a story of a people struggling to realize a nation. Each map became a “chapter” in a larger narrative that translated chaos into order. From the vantage point of 1828, the atlas projected territorial coherence back over the prior two and a half centuries. This may seem axiomatic now, yet, at the time, it was a conscious and audacious choice to read political sovereignty and national legitimacy back into the pre-Revolutionary era. For Willard, historical cartography was implicitly national. She arranged her maps chronologically, beginning not with a “first” but rather an “introductory” map that charted “aboriginal wandering” in what would become the eastern half of the United States (see website). On the map, she identified the location of tribes through their names and circled them according to size and relative influence. She then represented tribal migration over several centuries through the use of colored arrows. This was an unusual move done to capture the deep and fluid structure of North American aboriginal life rather 24

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than using the map to capture the state of settlement at a particular moment. She identified the Atlantic Ocean as the “salt water lake or great water” in order to render the contemporary worldview and, no doubt, to remind readers of the limited nature of Native knowledge. By naming this an “introductory” map, Willard reinforced the contemporary assumption that Native Americans existed in a timeless space prior to human history. This was an auspicious choice for someone so faithful to chronology. It was reinforced by the arrangement of her textbook, which separated aborigines into prefatory material rather than in the narrative itself, which began with the arrival of Columbus.34 This introductory map extended further west than those that followed, encompassing and perhaps even claiming territory that would be acquired long after the atlas was published and centuries after the aboriginal wanderings it documented. She even drew state boundaries on this “pre-historical” map that would develop hundreds of years later, a cue that the territory would ultimately be occupied and organized by an entirely different civilization. Willard’s map of tribal migrations predated Albert Gallatin’s well-known map of the same by nearly a decade, though the latter is considered more influential and the model for subsequent maps of Native American life (both past and present) by Horatio Hale and John Wesley Powell.35 The next map in her series—designated “first”—was far more circumscribed, shrinking back to the seaboard. Here Willard reached back prior to America’s typical originating moment of Jamestown to locate the voyages of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, followed by the early (though unsuccessful) settlements of Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh (see website). The map highlighted these Atlantic expeditions according to the source of their patronage: French, British, or Spanish. This vividly portrayed both the competition among explorers and the rivalries among their patrons. Willard also used color as she had in the map of tribes, in order to signal the claim of control by each European realm, including the contested track of Sebastian Cabot, up and down the Eastern Seaboard. As detailed on the map’s inset, Gilbert’s was “The First patent granted by an English Sovereign to lands within the territory of the United States.” Even though the voyages left no legacy, she took pains to identify the path of each as well as the extent of each patent along the coast of North America in order to show its potential reach, which suggested a kind of alternative path of history or perhaps the earliest imprint of Anglo civilization upon the continent. Gilbert and Raleigh may have failed, but their plans merited a map because they anticipated Anglo-American developments and because they involved an attempt to inhabit the land through settlement. Hence her emphasis on patents, or authorizations by the Crown to explore, settle, and occupy the land: for her, this was the definition and embodiment of territorial sovereignty. By the same logic, Native Americans, despite their long presence in the territory that would become the nation, were separated into an introductory—rather than a first— The Graphic Foundations of American History

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map because they did not define its trajectory and because they wandered the land. Willard established a pattern replicated by historians throughout the century: mapping Natives as part of the nation’s natural landscape rather than its political history.36 Willard’s “first,” “second,” and “third” maps documented the migration of Europeans to North America in the early sixteenth century. In each, she emphasized the routes across the Atlantic and settlement on the land. But to integrate these migrants, she emptied the interior of the tribes that had densely populated her introductory map. The contrast between the map of Native settlement and those that follow is so stark that they appear to be different regions entirely, for in the latter the tribes have completely vanished. This shift encapsulates a much longer and more gradual erasure of Natives from maps throughout the nineteenth century. While some of the earliest maps of North America acknowledge tribes—and their contribution to cartographic knowledge—over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this changed. This removal of Native life from the map enabled Anglo-Americans to think about the land as free of obstacles and to appropriate it according to their own visions. Ironically, as contact with tribes increased, their presence on the map decreased. Willard projected that dynamic back onto the colonial past. Her atlas included Native Americans at particular moments—for instance, as belligerents on maps of King Philip’s War and the Pequot War—but in general they faded away. In the map of King Philip’s War, she listed both Native and English names of battle sites, an open recognition of the struggle for territorial control and dispossession. In her maps of 1776 and 1789—crucial political moments in the realization of the Republic—natives were absent altogether, traces of their existence apparent only in the place names that remained. In the final map of 1826, westward expansion into the Great Lakes and the addition of several new states introduced new tribes onto the map, and the ongoing troubles in the Southeast prompted her to mark the presence of the “Five Civilized Tribes” as well.37 In this “first map,” Willard also projected time forward by highlighting the imperial European powers that would later vie for control of the continent. She captured this rivalry by marking the European exploratory and settlement voyages followed by maps of increasing British power. Her rendering of tribal wanderings starkly contrasted with these clearly marked borders of the imperial, colonial, and national periods, evoking a tight correlation between Euro-American occupation and territorial control. On several maps, she marked the founding of colleges and the arrival of emigrants, both as claims to civilization and settlement. She carefully marked the “cession” of lands in the Interior West, both by Indian tribes as well as imperial powers. Each map also included a small representative illustration, such as the arrival of an important settler, the death of General Wolfe in the Seven Years’ War, or the writing of the Declaration of Independence. 26

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The larger story of the atlas was of increasing British power, wrestled away by the colonists and confirmed by the American victory in the War of 1812. Schoolchildren could not have missed the message of national growth and settlement. With each map, the continent became progressively more detailed, the territory more settled, and the national outline more familiar. With the final few maps, the story reached a climax in the struggle against British. Willard detailed the seats of war with warships and battles as a testament to the sacrifices made to control the land and achieve independence. The final or “ninth” map of the present day (1826) depicted a nation spreading into the trans-Appalachian west in an orderly fashion, with each new state identified by the date of its entry into the Union (see website). Willard used maps to assert the nation’s sovereignty through its occupation and settlement of the land. This last map gave the reader a satisfying sense of closure, with state borders clearly outlined in a way that projected stability and “filled” the map. With this atlas, Willard concentrated three centuries of change into a handful of maps. Walter Goffart considers it one of the last to employ this sequential mapping structure, but it was the first to do so for the American past and especially for schoolchildren. Even her contemporary rival Marcius Willson conceded that its arrangement was unprecedented, though he criticized it for emphasizing human events and political boundaries at the expense of topographical detail.38 Modern scholars also consider Willard’s maps derivative and dismiss them for their minimal detail. But her goal was to construct an interactive aid for history, a mnemonic exercise that would depict the past on a plane rather than in a narrative. She omitted topography because it was secondary to the story of territorial control and political development. At the same time, her maps portrayed unity and erased local and regional identities that would become counterweights to nationalism in the nineteenth century. Most important, these maps buttressed the nation by visualizing its backstory. Willard was the first to depict American history through maps, and, in tracing the sources of contemporary America, she advanced—perhaps inadvertently—an approach that explained change over time, even as attention to causation was just beginning to emerge in historical thought. As the next chapter explains, her atlas established an enduring model for the historical use of maps.39 The engraver identified in Willard’s atlas, Samuel Maverick, is something of a mystery. His work, if it appears at all elsewhere, is not credited, so little can be said about his role in these maps. The engraved plates were destroyed in a fire after the first printing, but Willard included simplified versions of the maps in subsequent editions of her textbook. She was actually one of the first textbook writers to include maps at all. This was a series of maps in her Geography for Beginners that were conceived by Willard and drawn for the engraver by a former student. A few years later, she created an atlas to supplement her UniThe Graphic Foundations of American History

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versal History that used a series of maps with receding clouds to represent the expanding knowledge of the world through discovery. This technique originated with Edward Quin, whose maps Willard may have seen during her first visit abroad.40 By the 1830s, other atlases claiming to be “historical” began to appear, yet they continued to rely upon chronological tables and maps reprinted from European atlases. T. G. Bradford’s A Comprehensive Atlas (1835), for instance, contained little that illustrated historical conditions or situations. Rather, the atlas listed major historical events, geographical discoveries, and individuals.41 This highlights the degree to which Willard was thinking cartographically about the past, for such thinking was still rare. Some of her maps even attempted to chart change over time. The Revolutionary War map collapsed ten years of history, and the Native American map represented a far longer and much more dynamic period of change. On another note, for someone so interested in the territorial dimension of history, it is curious that Willard paid little attention to the Louisiana Purchase. It appears only briefly in her texts and makes its first serious appearance with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when the question of slavery brought the territory into the center of politics. In this respect, however, she was typical: few textbooks of the time emphasized the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark or the Louisiana Purchase. The journals of Lewis and Clark were “rediscovered” after the Civil War, then given close attention only after the centennial celebration of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Many events that figure only slightly in our own historical narrative—such as the War of 1812 and the visits of Lajos Kossuth and the Marquis de Lafayette—were central to Willard and her contemporaries. In the ebullient decades after that war, her text and atlas won wide acclaim and remained in print through the 1860s. Lydia Sigourney, a respected poet and one of Willard’s closest correspondents, extolled the history and the atlas and was particularly proud that a fellow “country-woman” had produced a work not just of competence and logic but also sentiment and filial piety.42

Maps of Time History and geography textbook authors faced stiff competition in the Jacksonian era, and Willard’s publisher encouraged her to differentiate her texts with illustrations. Marcius Willson—a rival textbook author—complained about the dire state of historical mapping in the 1840s, remarking that “the reader may search in vain, on modern maps, for the names of numerous places, familiar in history, but forgotten in modern topography, because important only in the remembrance of what they have been.” Yet he exempted Willard from this characterization, which was very real praise given their strained relationship.43 This 28

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turn toward visual knowledge was furthered by Willard’s own sense that the experience of time itself had accelerated. She thrilled at the pace of life brought by steam and advised her colleagues to consider the implications of this, for in her mind, it required a more efficient method of learning. Her interest in Pestalozzi led her to approach the student as an individual whose curiosity was to be engaged. Thus, she was drawn to cartography in the 1820s and 1830s in part for its ability to visualize complex historical information. But by the end of that period, she began to recognize that historical maps—as then drawn—were only partially capable of expressing change over time. She wanted more than maps could offer and shared Humboldt’s desire for a graphic language to communicate the vast interdependence that she experienced in the world, but which could not be fully articulated. While continuing to rely on maps, she also began to think of other ways of organizing information in order to cultivate memory: Geography, then, I dissected, and remodelled, according to those laws of mind concerned in acquiring and retaining knowledge. I divided it into two parts: first, that which could be acquired from maps; and second, that which could not;—and for the first, giving my pupils to study nothing but maps and questions on maps. In the remaining part of the science, being no longer bound to any order of place, for no confusion of mind could arise concerning locations after these had been first learned from maps, I was free to expatiate by topics, and give general comparative views, of population, altitude of mountains, length of rivers, &c; and philosophic or general views could now be given of government, religion, commerce, manufactures, and productions.44

This explanation reflects the influence of Priestley and Humboldt. The former paved the way for her to experiment with chronological representation, while the latter led her to emphasize the comparative dimension of geography and to use maps to represent the distribution of information. With these models, she created a series of “chronographers,” or graphic measurements of time. That both historical and thematic cartography developed so rapidly in the nineteenth century—alongside charts of time, graphs, timelines, and other visualizations of information—reflects the aim of Willard and her predecessors to present information that might, as William Playfair put it, “speak to the eyes.” Just after 1800, Priestley had argued that visual measurements of time could be learned more quickly and easily than narrative history or annalistic accounts. As he explained, If a person carries his eye horizontally, he sees, in a very short time, all the revolutions that have taken place in any particular country, and under whose power it is at present; and this is done with more exactness, and in much less The Graphic Foundations of American History

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time, than it could have been by reading. I should not hesitate to say, that a more perfect knowledge of this kind of history may be gained by an hour’s inspection of this chart, than could be acquired by the reading of several weeks.45

Inspired by Priestley’s model, timelines spread rapidly. Azel Lyman compiled a timeline in the 1840s that persisted well into the late nineteenth century, one of many graphic renderings of geography and history that became staples of middle-class consumption and classroom instruction. The popularity of posters of geographical and historical knowledge indicates that Woodbridge and Willard’s graphic and cartographic experimentation resonated with publishers and teachers alike. Consider “The Pictorial View of the World,” an 1847 poster presenting the totality of world geography through a simplified version of Humboldt’s comparative model (see website). At the center was a hemispheric map of the world listing the world’s major nations and religions, taken from Woodbridge’s maps of the 1820s. Flanking the map was a timeline of important men of history, and at the lower right a chronology of world events. Above the hemispheres were landscapes representing the essential flora and fauna of the different regions of the world, to be read across the page from west to east. Across the bottom were statistical tables that enabled students to compare the populations and areas of the world’s nations, the adherents of the major religions, the height of the tallest buildings, and the length of the major rivers.46 An updated edition, “The World at One View,” was also designed to show the world in a synoptic fashion that was easily understood, even intuitive (see website). Like the “Pictorial View,” it used data to characterize the world’s peoples and nations, also represented by typical “female costumes” from all parts of the world. A pictorial strip at the bottom of the poster represented the geographical expanse from Asia westward across Europe to the United States, as seen from a northern perspective looking south and with images that typified the different regions and major nations. The image suggests the playfulness of contemporary graphics designed for teaching, all of which were made possible by the advent of inexpensive printing techniques in the early nineteenth century. A similar poster made a few years earlier by “a professor of geography” was intended for both the home and the school, a complete reference work that needed no explanation. He noted that it was intended to be suspended “like a map,” yet it was not a map but rather a picture of geography, with images substituting for places. Information was ordered and alphabetized, rivers, climates, and productions compared in order to summarize the major aspects of what was understood to be essential geographical knowledge.47 Willard was enthusiastic about this visual arrangement of information and the use of timelines to teach geography and history. But she found that timelines failed to convey a sense of perspective or to signify the most important individu30

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als, events, eras, or civilizations. In other words, they gave little sense of dimension, such as the relative importance of periods or the subjective experience of time. In this respect, Willard observed that Priestley treated time as an absolute, what Walter Benjamin would characterize in the twentieth century as “homogenous, empty time.”48 To express a more relative and “realistic” sense of time, she designed a single image to integrate all of human history (fig. 1.1). She termed this her “Picture of Nations,” first published in 1835 as part of her Universal History. A contemporary term for world history, “universal history” also connoted the philosophy of history and ideas about Western civilization as a series of stages and was an enormously popular subfield of history prior to the Civil War. Willard’s picture captured this wide approach to history through an angled pyramid: at the apex stood divine creation, with time moving forward as the pyramid widened. Thus, ancient history receded in importance while modern history appeared closer and in more detail. As she explained: That events apparently diminish when viewed through the vista of departed years is [a] matter of common place remark. Applying the principle to a practical purpose, we have here brought before the eye, at one glance, a sketch of the whole complicated subject of Universal History. Names of nations and a few distinguished individuals are found in the Ancient; of the most distinguished sovereigns in the Middle; and of all the sovereigns of the principal kingdoms in Modern History.49

Willard divided history into three epochs: the birth of Christ separated ancient from middle history, while the discovery of America separated middle from modern history. At first glance, the chart appears to be an anatomical drawing or a river, metaphors that would have pleased Willard for their organic, vital connotations. Her goal was to capture human history with the modern equivalent of a wide-angle camera lens, where “time is measured by space, and all time since the creation of the world is indicated at once to the eye.” By continuous study, students would gain a fixed and synoptic image of the past, so that any mention of a particular moment, civilization, or individual could be placed in the mind’s eye. This explains her shorthand term for the image, the “map of time,” for she intended it as a device that could explain but also locate different civilizations. The map of time abstracts space and reorganizes geography, for civilizations are situated not according to their physical location but their contributions and relation to other groups in terms of ethnic or national identity, religion, or imperial association. Some societies were permeable, while others—such as China— were demarcated by a firm line that isolated them entirely. The chart encouraged students to trace the “ancestry of nations” through the origin of ideas, racial characteristics, and culture.50 The Graphic Foundations of American History

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1.1 “Picture of Nations or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire,” from Emma Willard, Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History (Hartford, CT: F. J. Huntington, 1836). David Rumsey Collection. 26.5 × 42.5 cm.

Willard’s first attempt to graphically represent time may have simply been too complicated, and other authors did not imitate her methods or pirate the image. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton trace this image to contemporary European graphs of time, but it also derived from the timelines of Priestley. Moreover, it anticipates the slow and fitful reorientation of Americans toward historicism, an understanding of the past as both separate from and causally connected to the present. Eighteenth-century ideas of progress were generally considered a function of a divine plan rather than a result of human action. In the nineteenth century, history began to displace philosophy and religion as an explanatory scheme for the human condition. But historicist thought in the United States was stunted by the continuing power of exceptionalism, especially in the histories of George Bancroft, whose belief that America had transcended historical time hindered more critical appraisals of the past. Because Willard was not an original philosopher of history, contradictions exist within her approach; she happily invoked providence even as she emphasized human agency, and neither she nor her contemporaries were overly curious about causation. Yet the orientation of what she called her chronographer is significant. Time flows forward and widens toward the viewer, as opposed to a timeline’s trajectory across the page in absolute and fixed increments. She recognized the importance of the classical past, but emphasized recent history, where one could seek the origins of the modern era and trace the rise of America. Her framework suggests distance from the ancients and a view of the recent past as encompassing the present. This entailed a shift in emphasis from the morals of the ancients to the civic lessons of the modern nation.51 Willard turned toward graphic forms of information because she felt that innovations in transportation had accelerated the very pace of life and that learning must adapt accordingly. She described her chronographer as, one of the most important improvement[s] of the day in education. At this day a human being seems, by the improvements made in locomotion, to live over four times as much space as formerly. Thus our mind ought to keep pace with his improved condition, and surely it is doing some good to invent a method by which the acquisition of knowledge may be assuredly accelerated, and such a method is this of teaching history.52

Positive reviews of her graphic approach encouraged her to embellish it further.53 Influenced by the Greek revival in architecture, she published a “Temple of Time” that erected a temple with Doric columns and a vast interior ceiling over her existing stream of time (see website). There was more than one purpose to this device. Willard crafted the temple to magnify perspective through a visual convention. Centuries—represented by pillars—diminished in size as The Graphic Foundations of American History

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they receded in time, which turned the viewer’s attention toward recent history. The division of time into centuries was symbolic, as she explained to students and teachers that “All civilized nations divide historic time into periods of a hundred years each, called centuries.”54 But she also intended the “Temple of Time” to approximate cartography by coordinating space and time as a map coordinates longitude and latitude. The ceiling would be filled “with the names of those great men who are to history, as cities are to geography, its luminous points,” such as Milton, Luther, Jonathan Edwards, and Voltaire. The floor work would complement the pillars and ceiling by detailing the aggregate progress of nations that students had seen previously in her chronographer, or “Stream of Time.”55 Individuals could be placed on the chronographer in the same way that cities were plotted on a map. If the entire scheme seemed contrived, Willard reminded them that cartography had the same basic conceit. In a map, great countries made up of plains, mountains, seas, and rivers, are represented by what is altogether unlike them; viz., lines, shades, and letters, on a flat piece of paper; but the divisions of the map enable the mind to comprehend, by proportional space and distance, what is the comparative size of each, and how countries are situated with respect to each other. So this picture made on paper, called a Temple of Time, though unlike duration, represents it by proportional space. It is as scientific and intelligible, to represent time by space, as it is to represent space by space.

Here she grasped the conceptual essence of cartography. A map was an arrangement of symbols into a shared system of meaning, no more a reflection of the landscape than words were the ideas they were taken to represent. Willard recognized that cartography was an invention and applied that insight to other areas of knowledge. The idea of mapping time made sense to her because time could be ordered just as a map represented geography: the key was to use proportional logic to convey relational truths. Full of self-confidence, Willard believed that her “Temple of Time” might even be an improvement on cartography. Such a claim may seem absurd, but it shows that she grappled with two difficult concepts. She understood the metaphorical meaning of cartography, and she recognized that maps had the potential to represent not just landscapes, but information.56 The “Temple of Time” won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in London. Like a map, the temple could be adapted to any period or nation, and she created one devoted to the United States that was reprinted in almost all subsequent editions of the Republic of America (fig. 1.2). Willard conceived the “American Temple of Time” in the 1840s, a portentous moment in the nation’s history when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and compromise with Britain enlarged its territory 34

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1.2 “American Temple of Time,” from Emma Willard, Abridged History of the United States, or Republic of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1860). 10 cm × 17 cm.

by a third. She zealously supported war against Mexico and welcomed territorial expansion.57 Her “Temple of Time” framed a nation unfolding before her eyes, both spatially and historically, in order to give students a “picture of time” to assimilate and reproduce. The temple, like her earlier chronographer, stressed the widening of time as it marched forward and gave students a view that embraced the nation’s most recent history. After drawing an enlarged outline of the temple, students could integrate the geographic and historic dimension of America. Across the ceiling, they could plot the important men—statesmen, theologians, warriors—according to their place across the centuries, then coordinate that with the chronology of the temple’s pillars. She then asked students to draw eight unequal divisions upon the floor to correspond with the eight pieces of American historical geography used in her textbook: the original thirteen colonies, New France, the Northwest Territory, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and the area ceded by Mexico. Students were directed to find a place for each state and territory in the union by shading its existence in the proper chronological area (shading the colonies as they were settled and the states as they joined the union). If the temple were drawn large enough, there would also be sufficient floor space to mark important battles in a particular state’s past. The design is intricate and unwieldy, but the goal is intriguing: an integration of time and space that forced students to acquire both general and particular knowledge The Graphic Foundations of American History

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1.3 “Chronographical Plan of Willard’s History of the United States,” from Emma Willard, Abridged History of the United States, or Republic of America (New York: A. S. Barnes & Burr, 1864). 8.5 cm × 14.5 cm.

of their national past. At left, the student is reminded of General Washington’s importance (through the centennial of his birth in 1732), while the temple as a whole attempts to portray America’s chronology and geography in a single image.58 The same drive to organize the nation spatially and chronologically motivated her to create what she termed a “logical” chronographer, or a timeline rendered as a tree (fig. 1.3). Trees had long been used to embody genealogy, and time had frequently been rendered through images such as Father Time, the muse of Clio, or the wheel of time. Trees also commonly symbolized time in nineteenthcentury painting, but here Willard used the tree not to symbolize but to chart the nation’s history. She took great pride in this illustration and used it to introduce nearly all editions of her textbook. Her publisher hoped images such as the tree and temple would widen her audience, and contemporary reviews suggest that the strategy worked. While the temple foregrounded and emphasized the present, the tree divided time in a “logical” and linear fashion. Both the tree and the temple were images that contained the nation in its entirety. In the tree, the branches made up the whole of American history, which Willard divided first according to centuries (the outermost arc), then according to “parts” that were in turn divided into periods. She imposed a clear chronological framework onto the past in order to give it a meaningful structure.59 36

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The tree was intended as a companion to the temple, so that students could move between the two and plot the names of individuals and events they discovered in the narrative. At left, explorers were welcomed by Native Americans, while, at right, a scene of industry, locomotion, and steam suggested the extent of contemporary American development and progress. Willard arranged the branches of the tree to join together, in ways impossible in nature, at critical moments in the American past. Such placement enhanced the continuity of the nation’s history and divided the past into clear stages that continued to the present. Yet her experience of the past changed over time. For instance, in the 1844 edition of the tree, President Harrison’s death appeared as the last branch, and he was the only individual marked on the chart. By 1864, Willard had replaced Harrison’s death with branches marking the end of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, which were more important. Even though the Civil War was well underway when this edition went to press, Willard marked the last branch “1860.” Her narrative brought American history to Fort Sumter in 1861, but no further. Her publisher extolled Willard’s texts as the standard for school history but actively discouraged her from discussing the war until the Union was restored in sentiment as well as fact.60 A variation on Willard’s chart can be found in William Dalston’s “Chronological Chart of American History” (1881) (see website). This relied on a tree to detail the nation’s history from the arrival of Columbus at its roots to the present day in its branches. The metaphor of organic growth was reinforced by images flanking the tree: at left Natives watch cautiously as pilgrims huddle in a rough wilderness. At right, a tamed and cultivated landscape suggests a serene, settled, and advanced civilization. Like Willard’s own tree of time, this chart aims to contain the entire story in a single image and seamlessly included the colonial era as part of the nation’s history.61 Several concerns converged in Willard’s work: her commitment to female education led her to prepare women for their place in the nation, her nationalism led her to history, her interest in history and pedagogy led her to maps and images. Later educators, eager to earn their own progressive credentials, distanced themselves from Willard and her contemporaries by slighting their texts and criticizing the emphasis on rote. But if her pedagogical techniques have not endured, her “view” of the nation was one of the first to closely integrate geography and history. Willard defined and wrote national history in terms of territory and space. She was unapologetic about American expansion and unreflective about its costs. She thrilled at the battles of the Mexican War and discussed them in exuberant detail. This aggressive nationalism found expression in her insistent depiction of the territory through images that allowed students to “plot” the past on a spatial plane. Willard was adamant about incorporating traditional cartograThe Graphic Foundations of American History

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phy into her histories and geographies, but she also reframed both chronological and geographical representation. As she put it with characteristic self-confidence, “in history I have invented the map.” This begs the question of how others were beginning to narrate history and geography in the nineteenth century. Intellectual historians have paid little attention to the significant overlap between these two fields of knowledge, particularly before the rise of academic disciplines after the Civil War.62 Willard acknowledged that maps were traditional representations of territory as well as abstract symbols of national power. In other words, she thought about the iconographic meaning of maps, especially national maps, in a way that would become common only with the advent of mass-produced cartography in the late nineteenth century. Consider her extended discussion of Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853, which she thought crucial to the extension of American influence abroad. Willard opened this section by stressing the power of cartography to demonstrate American power and carefully quoted the Japanese commissioner’s portentous words to Perry: “We have seen the map of your country.” For Willard, this simple statement was an acknowledgment that America mattered because it had been mapped. This historical event led her to reflect on the power of maps in solidifying, even creating, the nation. This was a striking observation, one that reversed the traditional understanding of a map as reflecting, rather than shaping, history. In the late twentieth century, Thongchai Winichakul and Benedict Anderson made bold claims that maps are agents of and models for what they purport to represent. In other words, maps may appear to be passive records of the landscape around us, but they have the power to shape our identities and to naturalize the political order. Willard confronted essentially the same question over a century earlier: what is the meaning of a map?63 It was this recognition of the map as a political symbol that led her to draw the geographical outline of the United States as the backdrop to the “Temple of Time.” The outline map of the nation suggested—as no other image could— the indivisibility of a nation that had attained continental dimensions only two years earlier. With its spare internal topographic details, this national outline approximates what Anderson identified in the late twentieth century as the “logomap.” Anderson described the logo-map as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, an image removed from its context and identifiable not just as part of a larger geographical whole but as “pure sign, no longer compass to the world.” In other words, the map no longer serves its original purpose as a way-finding aid or depiction of geographical relationships, but instead functions as a symbol of something larger than itself.64 Willard placed this outline map in a textbook of American history and did so for a purpose that would become familiar, even reflexive,

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to future generations. She designed the outline map as a persuasive act and used it to direct the future rather than to document the past. As she explained, The Map of this noble country is assumed as the background of the American Temple of Time. Its name is America; its inhabitants are Americans. If it were divided as Poland is, there would no more be an America for Americans, than there is a Poland for the Poles.65

Here Willard invoked the map as an icon of political unity: “Americans” only existed insofar as the Union was whole. If the territory was divided, sovereignty was lost. This is remarkable, for the Union was only as old as Willard herself, yet she assumed it to be indivisible and assumes it to be the given unit of political organization. In her lifetime, the concept of the nation was seeded, and she herself actively cultivated it through her use of narrative, maps, and graphic images. From multiple perspectives, she drew, measured, and represented the nation in order to make it a tangible entity, much as Webster codified an American language. Notice also her conflation of the territory and its inhabitants: America is a place inhabited by Americans, for the people are defined by their national territory. Ironically, Willard’s insistent refrain of American sovereignty and unity in this passage reflects the seriousness of the sectional crisis and the imminence of civil war. Determined to avert secession, she claimed that the vitriolic politics of the 1850s produced “a healthier tone of public sentiment.” She issued a new edition of her text in 1860, to “stem a downward current, which, if unresisted, would lead our noble Republic to ruinous anarchy, and destructive disunion.” Throughout 1860 and 1861, she gathered hundreds of women’s signatures on a petition for peace that she presented to Congress. When hostilities broke out, she devised an elaborate plan of colonization for blacks in the hopes of ending the war. All of this political activity derived from her self-conscious identity as an American and from her livelihood as one of the nation’s first historians.66 On a deeper level, Willard’s approach indicates the complex nature of historical knowledge. In her mind, writing history was a political act of advancing the nation, and she drew the atlas to give the nation a backstory that stabilized and legitimized its existence. To draw pictures of time gave the nation’s history and geography an indivisible quality, which could not be undone even as the Union dissolved. Willard defined history as thoroughly geographical, which served more than one purpose. First, it made history manifest through its territorial dimension, and the nation undeniable through its sheer physicality. Second, it was a strategy to improve the assimilation of information among the nation’s youngest citizens. But there was also a third, more practical dimension to Willard’s

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close association of historical and geographical knowledge. As an entrepreneur, she used interactive visual images to set her texts apart in an intensely competitive market. By asking students to experiment with the concept of the nation— drawing it in different forms through time and space—she made learning itself an act of nationalism. In more ways than one, it was a profitable strategy.

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Capturing the Past through Maps

Emma Willard was at the height of her influence when she traveled to Europe in the summer of 1854 to share her views on education. As she was about to leave London for Paris in September, she fortuitously met Johann Georg Kohl, the German cartographer and geographer. Kohl had spent years compiling an archive of maps related to the history of North American discovery and was heading to the United States to continue his research. He shared some of these maps with Willard, who was so impressed with his collection that she urged the federal government to support his work. Her advocacy bore fruit: from 1854 to 1858, the State Department paid Kohl to copy nearly five hundred maps related to the discovery of America, and the US Coast Survey simultaneously hired him to map the history of coastal exploration. While working for these agencies in the United States, he encouraged Americans to establish a national cartographic archive where maps might be preserved and organized as uniquely important historical documents. Kohl argued that these documents, if properly collected and organized, constituted authentic evidence of the nation’s territorial legitimacy. His efforts stimulated an awareness of historical mapping in America, both the preservation of existing maps and the creation of maps to represent the past. This growing appreciation of historical mapping in turn fueled the movement to establish a national map archive. Together, these developments reveal an awareness of the spatial, territorial, and geographical dimension of the nation’s past that was new to the nineteenth century.

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The Curious History of Old Maps The exploding market for antique maps today makes it hard to imagine that there was ever a time when these items did not command healthy—sometimes astronomical—prices at auctions and through the trade. The nation’s largest map collection at the Library of Congress occupies ninety thousand square feet, and a staff of thirty-eight adds thousands of maps each year. But the idea that old maps should be preserved, collected, and archived is recent, an outgrowth of the nation’s independence and the growing concern with antiquities in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the first signs of interest in collecting old maps came not from Americans but Germans. In the 1790s, Daniel Christoph Ebeling sought to obtain every map related to America made since 1786 in order to build an archive of the early national period. Ebeling recognized that a new nation demanded a history of its own, and this prompted his search for maps in particular. In 1818, Harvard College purchased his maps to seed its own collection, which later helped to make Boston and Cambridge the hub for the study of American history. Yet after this acquisition, the Harvard map collection grew slowly until the appointment of Justin Winsor as its librarian in 1877. This relative indifference was typical; Americans who studied the past paid little attention to maps.1 Europeans themselves had only recently begun to collect maps in any systematic fashion. The topographical maps of King George III launched the British Museum’s collection in 1828, but the museum did not establish an independent map library until 1867. In the United States, among the few who sought to establish a value for old maps were Peter Force and Henry Stevens (an American who spent much of his life in London). While buying and selling maps and documents that illustrated the past, they also amassed sizable collections for themselves.2 Yet efforts to collect and archive maps remained sporadic because Americans were simply uninterested. Maps were marginal at the Library of Congress, where the collection of seven maps and six atlases gathered in the first two years only grew to fifty items by 1812. Among the first of these were Aaron Arrowsmith’s two maps of America, William Faden’s map of South America, and Joseph Priestley’s charts of chronology and biography. The library was destroyed when the British set the Capitol ablaze during the War of 1812, though ironically most of the volumes were British. This prompted Thomas Jefferson to donate his personal collection to seed its rebirth, yet the slow pace of rebuilding indicates a continued indifference toward maps.3 In the 1840s, the Library of Congress made a halfhearted effort to acquire Peter Force’s collection of eighteenth-century Americana. Force had been acquiring maps for decades, primarily of the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, and Washington, DC. His unique access to State Department records in the 1830s and 1840s enabled him to publish several anthologies re42

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lated to the colonial and revolutionary period. George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, and other prominent writers of American history recognized Force as the unrivaled source for American historical documents, as did the first generation of professional historians in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Force and Henry Stevens, John Carter Brown began to collect books and materials related to the history of America in the 1840s, and Brown’s son actively added maps to his father’s collection in later years.4 Yet most collecting continued to be undertaken privately. The Library of Congress failed to purchase the Force materials in the 1840s, and its own set of maps was so anemic that, in 1842, Daniel Webster was forced to consult Harvard’s collection to negotiate the country’s northeastern boundary with England. Webster’s frustration was shared by Lieutenant Edward Hunt, who had been assigned to supervise the engraving of charts for the Coast Survey in 1851 and was appalled by his inability to find sufficient cartographic material. Speaking before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1853, Hunt asked the Library of Congress to collect and catalog all maps of the nation’s history, and his geographically minded colleagues pressed the case further, especially Alexander Dallas Bache, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Peter Force, and Arnold Guyot. Hunt identified old maps as unique and meaningful documents that merited individual attention and also collective organization. Though his proposal did not succeed, or even gain much attention outside his circle of supporters, it marks an incipient awareness of the nation’s cartographic heritage among scientists and intellectuals.5

Johann Georg Kohl and the History of American Discovery It is not by chance that Edward Hunt asked the Library of Congress to create an archive of maps in 1853. He had become keenly aware of the need for a national map archive while working for the Coast Survey but also lived in a culture where maps were increasingly common. Advances in lithography enabled publishers to print maps more quickly and inexpensively, which boosted their circulation in both Europe and the United States. These advances also introduced facsimiles, or copies of preexisting maps. Thus, print technologies increased the circulation of new maps and also exposed the public to old maps that had generally only been seen by political elites. Among the earliest facsimiles was Edme Francois Jomard’s 1842 publication of a medieval mappa mundi in France. Facsimile maps gained popularity in Europe in part due to the preoccupation with exploration. Napoleon’s operations in Egypt in particular stimulated public interest in the evolution of knowledge about the Middle East, and, while the prohibitive cost of these facsimiles limited their circulation, within decades they transformed the meaning of cartography. Facsimile maps brought rare artifacts back into circulaCapturing the Past through Maps

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tion and placed them within reach of the educated public. What had been seen by only a handful became available to many. In this respect, facsimiles introduced a new artifact into the culture and initiated new conversations about the meaning of old maps.6 By the 1840s, Jomard, as supervisor of the map room at the Bibliotheque Royale, had become France’s most important map collector. This brought him to the attention of Kohl, then a student of geography in Germany. Kohl’s education in the 1840s also exposed him to Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, two of the first natural scientists to treat geography in explanatory rather than descriptive ways. Their influence led some—such as Guyot—to examine the humanenvironment relationship in the present. Kohl was drawn to this same dynamic in the past and sought to reconstruct the evolution of knowledge about the Western Hemisphere. He visited German archives to study and trace maps of exploration and accounts of travel and, through Humboldt, secured access to Jomard’s unrivaled collection. In 1854, after years in the archives, he attempted to chronicle all of North American discovery on a single map; he marked each voyage with dates and colors in order to portray discovery as a historical process rather than concentrating on a particular voyage. He also began to speak to geographical societies in Berlin, Paris, and London, and his mapmaking and archival experience soon made him the continental authority on the history of American discovery.7 This positive reception encouraged Kohl to continue his research in the United States. Humboldt gave him a letter of introduction to Matthew Maury, whose maps of the oceans had made him a celebrity in Europe. In September 1854, after sharing his maps with Willard, Kohl sailed to New York, then traveled to Washington, DC, where he met President Franklin Pierce (who did not impress him) and Alexander Dallas Bache (who did).8 Bache’s own cartographic lineage was undisputed: his great-grandfather was Benjamin Franklin, who made some of the first wind charts of the Atlantic in mid-eighteenth century, and Bache was building a reputation of his own as superintendent of the US Coast Survey. By the time Kohl met Bache, the latter had made the survey a hub of cartographic innovation and the nation’s most important scientific agency. The clout he had built with Congress and within the federal bureaucracy gave Bache the latitude to launch initiatives that were only tangentially related to coastal reconnaissance. He also must have been impressed by Kohl, for no American was so well versed in the history of exploration, and none had been immersed in the European archives. When they met, Kohl probably showed Bache the map of discovery he had compiled earlier that spring, but, even if he did not, Bache quickly recognized his unique talents and expertise and made a place for him at the Coast Survey. Only a few years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Bache hired Kohl to document the history of exploration on the nation’s newly acquired western coast. 44

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2.1 Detail from “A Map Showing the Progress of Discovery on the West Coast of the U.S. and Vancouver Island. Composed by J. G. Kohl. 1857.” US Coast Survey. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See website for entire image.

Kohl immediately set to work compiling an elaborate history that was visualized on his “Map Showing the Progress of Discovery on the West Coast of the U.S. and Vancouver Island”. On the map, Kohl collapsed centuries of history onto a single sheet, with the earliest voyages hugging the coasts and successive arrivals radiating outward in bands of brilliant color (fig. 2.1). He stripped the map of almost all detail save for the contours of inlets and rivers. The only relevant element of the map was the coastline, which Kohl generalized in order to illustrate the progress of discovery through a series of individual explorers drawn as bands along the coast. With this straightforward technique, viewers could apprehend the extent of each voyage, but also its chronological and geographical context. More important explorers were represented in color, but all were listed on the map. Kohl then applied the same technique to the Gulf and the East Coasts (see website).9 Considered together, the three maps showed the history of discovery for the entire nation. In these histories, Kohl also traced several key maps of each region in order to recapture the state of knowledge at different moments from 1492 to 1841. He also compiled a bibliography of maps and other materials and wrote a comprehensive history of exploration for each coastline. The resulting “progress of discovery” was a story still largely unknown to Americans, or Europeans for that matter, and the phrase underscores the shared concerns of Bache and Kohl with the evolution of knowledge. Superintendent Bache wanted a history that followed the crooked path to the present. The same goal inspired Kohl to quote the eighteenth-century Reverend John Blair: “It must be obvious to every Capturing the Past through Maps

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one, that, Arts and Sciences, when represented only in their more ripened state of improvement, can never communicate a full degree of information, unless at the same time, the ruder stages, through which they passed before they arrived at that Degree of Perfection are minutely traced and known.”10 Kohl embraced these “ruder stages” as central to the haphazard course of history, for they revealed the fullness and contingency of the past. This approach is premised on an idea that came to animate the history of cartography in the twentieth century: maps are important not despite their flaws, but because of them. In this same spirit, he wrote a lengthy caveat on his “Map of the Discovery of the East Coast” that acknowledged the problem posed by Sebastian Cabot (see website). Cabot’s voyages were incomplete and impossible to verify, yet his legacy in English and American history was undeniable. What then was the most accurate way to represent him on a map devoted to the history of discovery? Kohl acknowledged the uncertainty of Cabot’s contribution and then accounted for it by marking the mainland along the East Coast with an “indistinct colour” to mark the explorer’s claims. In Kohl’s hands, the map became a tool to explore the partial, contested, and fallible nature of historical knowledge. Henry Stevens praised Kohl’s enterprise as the most comprehensive history of the nation’s geography and discovery. Ultimately, the Coast Survey paid Kohl four thousand dollars to map the history of discovery, a significant sum given that Bache was constantly angling for federal patronage to ensure the survival of the agency. But since the survey’s primary responsibility was to produce charts and maps of the coasts, why was Bache interested in a history of exploration at all? To some degree, the project was pragmatic, for it could settle boundary disputes and formalize place names, which, after 1890, became the charge of the US Board on Geographic Names. But Bache also hired Kohl to undertake this unprecedented compilation because he considered the organization of knowledge central to the advancement of science. Under his direction, the survey published detailed annual reports, compiled extensive indexes, and created many bibliographies to broaden the audience for its varied but little known work. Kohl’s history of discovery was designed by Bache with these two goals in mind. His historical reports constitute original research, for he designed maps that chronicled the history of discovery, but they also included bibliographies and facsimile maps that became materials for future research. This effort of Bache and Kohl extended deep into areas that others considered esoteric history, but which they viewed as essential for a maturing nation and entirely appropriate undertakings for a federal scientific agency.11 Kohl’s approach to the history of exploration had another effect, for his maps of the coastline only occasionally detailed the interior. Though perhaps unintentional, he depicted an empty continent where the absence of settle46

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ment suggested a territory that was not just unexplored, but unknown prior to the arrival of Europeans. The map frames exploration and discovery as an entirely European enterprise. On the map of the West Coast, Kohl used shading to denote the arrival of trappers, hunters, traders, and Franciscan missionaries, while the presence of Native Americans—and by extension their contributions to discovery—was omitted. This was ironic, for Kohl was actually among the first to stress the contribution of Native Americans to European geographic knowledge of North America.12 Just a few years after Kohl returned to Germany, the Coast Survey adapted his technique of illustrating historical change to a far more urgent purpose: mapping the military progress of the Union army during the Civil War. The survey initially designed this “sketch of the rebellion” in the spring of 1862, a remarkable departure from that agency’s traditional responsibilities and areas of expertise (see website). Historically, the survey had focused on facilitating navigation and elaborating knowledge of the coasts. Yet these historical sketches were less about navigation than about relationships, resources, and the shifting fortunes of the Union military. It was an unprecedented mapping challenge for the survey in a war that itself represented an entirely new state of affairs.13 Just as Kohl had used colored lines to identify different voyages of coastal exploration, the survey used color to identify the reach of Union forces at different moments in the first year of the conflict. The notations on this map suggest it was a prototype for a series that would identify battles, the path of military commanders, the conquered coasts, and military headquarters in the field in order to paint a comprehensive picture of an ongoing war. At least six subsequent “historical sketches” of the rebellion were made during the war, most drawn by Henry Lindenkohl, a German immigrant who worked for the survey along with his brother, Adolph (see website). The maps were issued at irregular intervals, with three made in July 1863 alone. Though the manuscript prototype of April 1862 named battles and commanders, later editions removed these references in order to focus on the ebb and flow of Union military control (fig. 2.2). Similarly, while the prototype shaded topography, subsequent editions removed this backdrop and instead marked railroad lines. There were no shortage of war maps made for the Northern public, yet these “historical sketches” recorded the conflict as a story of territorial control rather than a series of individual battles. The survey was trying to capture an overall state of affairs, though the use of these lines of territorial control suggested a degree of clarity and continuity that was hardly discernible in the chaos of the war. The maps were a first draft of history, an attempt to create a story for an evolving war with no known outcome.14 Together, the maps tell a story of movement. As Albert Theberge has observed, when viewed in series the historical sketches evoke a glacier map: the Capturing the Past through Maps

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first region to crack was the Lower Mississippi, with an overwhelming force of Union men and material. Beginning in 1863, Lindenkohl listed population data for the “loyal” and “insurgent” states to assess the resources of each. He also included small ships to mark the Union blockade and the strategy of conquering the Mississippi River in order to divide the Confederacy in two (fig. 2.3). These markings highlighted the Coast Survey’s official responsibilities and were a tacit acknowledgment of its intelligence regarding the coasts and waterways. Lindenkohl’s use of lines to mark the extent of Union control struck a chord, for this technique later proliferated in school atlases and military histories. Kohl, a German of deep Union sympathy and corresponding hostility to slavery, would have applauded this attempt to map change and convey the complex logistics of the war’s grand strategy to an audience with limited cartographic sophistication. Like many other German immigrants, Kohl opposed the Fugitive Slave Law and strongly endorsed the preservation of the Union. These beliefs intensified his conviction that the United States must archive its cartographic past.15

2.2 Detail from US Coast Survey, “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion. Published at the Office of the US Coast Survey. A. D. Bache, Supdt” ( January 1864). Drawn by H. Lindenkohl Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 47 × 45 cm. See website for entire image and other editions.

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2.3 Detail of legend, from US Coast Survey, “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion. Published at the Office of the US Coast Survey. A. D. Bache, Supdt” ( January 1864). Drawn by H. Lindenkohl Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 47 × 45 cm.

A National Archive of Maps During his time in the United States, Kohl met several key figures in the fields of history, geography, and cartography. He grew especially close to Peter Force, for they both believed that a mature national history depended upon historical sources. Yet few Americans at the time shared their view that such materials deserved to be preserved and organized into collections. Kohl had come to this position after spending years in European archives, painstakingly tracing hundreds of maps that related to the exploration of North America. Oddly, these old maps were entirely new and unknown to Americans, and when he brought them to the United States they quickly captured the attention of those few who were sensitive to the nation’s history. Among the most enthusiastic of Kohl’s admirers was Emma Willard, who by this time was not just a leading educator but one of the most successful textbook authors in the country. More to the point, she had for decades emphasized the interdependence of geographical and historical knowledge. Willard was elated to see her own ideas echoed by an educated European, particularly one who was an expert in the geography of American history. Both Kohl and Willard considered maps the sine qua non of national legitimacy: individually they were scientific documents that proved the nation’s territorial existence, and together they laid the groundwork for an authentic national culture. When she met Kohl and saw his collection of maps in September 1854, she was astounded. Animated by their

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shared vision, Willard immediately wrote to Secretary of State William Marcy, whom she had known when he was governor of New York in the 1830s. She insisted that Kohl’s collection was nothing less than “a national matter,” and she urged the federal government to duplicate his collection and distribute copies of the maps to public libraries in every state in the Union. Such an investment in the nation’s history would forever honor the administration wise enough to act, she wrote. Her appeal to Marcy came at a particularly ominous moment, in the midst of a profound sectional crisis sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In fact, the climate of national division may have contributed to her sense of urgency, and to the response. Soon after her letter, Congress paid Kohl six thousand dollars to duplicate hundreds of maps that he had traced in European archives, all of which related to the territorial evolution of America. The individual copies that he created—taken both from printed works and manuscript maps in European archives—were even more valuable given that facsimile atlases were in their infancy and remained cumbersome and expensive. Upon completing his 473 facsimile maps of exploration in 1856, Kohl entrusted them to the Coast Survey; soon after, Marcy brought them to the State Department.16 Kohl’s commission to copy these maps emboldened him to reintroduce Hunt’s proposal for a separate cartographic “depot” within the Library of Congress. These two men probably knew one another briefly, for both worked at the Coast Survey in 1856 and 1857 before Hunt moved to the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Both realized that the need for a national map archive was not self-evident, for few Americans took map collecting seriously and even fewer were concerned with the history of cartographic printing. Maps were rarely seen as worthy artifacts, but Kohl persisted and shared his copies with the American Geographical Society in New York. At the invitation of Joseph Henry, he made a sustained case for such an archive to an audience at the Smithsonian Institution in December 1856. His lecture began with a claim that the history of maps “has scarcely ever been thought of,” for these documents were valued only so long as they were current. Once outdated, they were either discarded or hidden in order to protect sensitive geographical knowledge against imperial or national rivals. Such practices meant that many old maps were simply gone forever or occasionally resurfaced when collections were moved or reorganized. Maps had yet to be “raised to the dignity of historical documents,” yet Kohl argued that they were invaluable sources for recovering the crooked path of progress.17 The general indifference toward old maps, Kohl believed, had begun to change. Historical atlases had become more common; the British Museum had begun to collect and archive maps; the Imperial Library in France had added a branch exclusively devoted to cartographic materials; German collector Daniel Ebeling had accumulated a substantial collection of maps related to the United

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States. Perhaps most revealing, Kohl commented, was that, in the 1840s, two French scholars carried on a bitter public feud over which had invented the idea of a facsimile atlas. Old maps were finally gaining attention. Especially exciting to Kohl was the news from Paris in 1832 that Baron von Walckenaer had stumbled upon a navigational chart from 1500 drawn by a pilot who had accompanied Columbus on his voyages to America. The portolan chart, made by Juan de la Cosa, remained unknown for centuries, and its authenticity was disputed for years after it was discovered. But if genuine, it was the first to identify the land mass that would become America. Alexander von Humboldt brought attention to the chart by reproducing it in his atlas of New Spain, and by the late nineteenth century it was commonly reproduced in school texts and historical atlases as the “inaugural” map of American history. Kohl even noted a change in popular culture, for publishers had begun to adorn travel books with sketches of old maps. This was remarkable, for such ornaments would not have made aesthetic sense to prior generations, but now publishers actively sought an antiquated “look” to enhance their products and feed a perceived interest in maps as relics. Old maps had once been derided for their blunders, if consulted at all; now they had begun to gain cachet in popular culture and respectability among elites as sources of national heritage and historical evidence. Old maps had become fashionable.18 In light of this momentum, Kohl urged his audience to create a repository of maps and charts related to the discovery and settlement of America. His nomenclature was deliberate, for maps of “America” conceivably stretched back to the fifteenth century. He crafted a new purpose for old maps but knew the idea would be greeted skeptically, for Americans had yet to develop a “historical conscience.”19 He stressed that maps demanded attention not as supplements or illustrations, but as artifacts that were capable of revealing contemporary understandings of history and geography in a way that could not be gleaned from narrative texts. The very concept of a cartographic archive is noteworthy here. In a practical sense, a solid collection of old maps allowed Americans to negotiate favorable boundary disputes. But the creation of maps of the past also depends upon access to old maps, which allows historians to compare, check, and validate topographical and geographical information. In this respect, maps of the past and maps from the past are interdependent. In fact, the collection of old maps increased as thematic cartography gained currency. Thematic maps identified more than boundaries and topographical features, and this, in turn, highlighted the degree to which all maps were inventions designed for specific purposes. In other words, thematic mapping may have inadvertently suggested that maps were products of a particular place and time. By extension, old maps were not simply outdated remnants of the past, but grad-

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ually came to be understood as historical evidence. Thus, by the late nineteenth century—when thematic maps had become commonplace—old maps began to be seen not just as relics to be discarded in favor of more accurate versions of the same, but as keys to understanding earlier eras and sensibilities. Though it was a slow process, Kohl’s efforts advanced American appreciation of old maps as documents. Maps from the past—once valued only by antiquarians—began to be appreciated as powerful symbols of the nation’s territorial integrity. Kohl touted the practical advantages of such an archive, which could settle boundary disputes and stand as a source of national geographical knowledge. He proposed a way to arrange such a collection and described how it might be supplemented with other materials. His plan was well received: George Bancroft, president of the American Geographical and Statistical Society and the nation’s foremost historian, encouraged his efforts, as did other ardent nationalists such as Willard, Force, Thomas Hart Benton, and William Winston Seaton, who published Kohl’s research in his newspaper, the National Intelligencer. Kohl’s integration of history and cartography tapped their desire to document the nation’s history and give it territorial form. In this regard, his work was a product of emergent nationalism and the emphasis on territorial control. As Michael Conzen put it, Kohl was part “of one of the most fundamental aspects of the grand American enterprise—the systematizing and ideological ordering of territorial knowledge of an imperial state in the New World at a critical moment in its ascendancy.” He synthesized geographically and chronologically disparate knowledge into a coherent history of discovery. His maps—and his effort to generate a national geographic archive—gave structure, coherence, and depth to the country at a moment of great political instability. Kohl argued for a national map archive just as the country faced the prospect of slavery in the Kansas Territory, and the ensuing chaos—alongside the groundswell of anti-immigrant opinion—might have heightened interest in his proposal. Kohl also recognized the importance of the moment, for the exploration of the American interior, as in the work of John Fremont and Charles Preuss, made such an archive particularly relevant. Unlike Europe, North America was still a continent of discovery, with ongoing expeditions of exploration that continuously expanded geographical knowledge. Kohl sought a repository where that knowledge could be understood not just in absolute, but historical terms.20

The Evolution of Territorial Knowledge In March 1853, Congress appropriated funding for four separate surveys of potential railroad routes through the West to be conducted under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. The resulting Pacific Railway Surveys were published in twelve enormous volumes between 1855 and 1859, at a cost of over one million dollars. 52

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The reports covered western topography, zoology, climate, botany, and ethnography in order to ascertain the best route for the proposed railroad; they were unprecedented in scope and depth. In another respect, of course, the surveys were a failure, or at least a moot issue. Even the most scientific surveys could not overcome the sectional crisis that obstructed—and ultimately determined—the route of the transcontinental railroad. Yet the surveys constitute one of the most impressive feats of geographical science in nineteenth-century America and a clear federal commitment to the nation’s infrastructure. The reports also contained one of the first detailed maps of the entire West, Lieutenant Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s “Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean” (see website). Warren conducted most of his work in 1854, which allowed him to benefit from the extensive reconnaissance knowledge gained from the railroad surveys, as well as his own expeditions through the Dakota Territory. His job in creating this master map was to synthesize this disparate geographical information into a single comprehensive view, and, in the process, he was forced to reconcile conflicting accounts. The initial map appeared in 1855, with several subsequent editions issued thereafter (see website). Warren was compiling this map at the same time that Kohl was creating his maps of coastal discovery. The two projects may seem very different, for the former stressed topographical precision while the latter framed geography as a story of evolving knowledge. But both emphasized the growth of geographical knowledge over time. Warren saw Kohl as a kindred spirit and illustrated his history of western exploration with facsimile maps from the prior half century.21 Others might have simply adopted the latest intelligence, but Warren—influenced by Kohl—acknowledged that his map was a product of history. He took pains to list the dozens of “authorities” that revealed the topography of the West over time, from Lewis and Clark down to the Corps of Topographical Engineers in the 1850s. Almost all were agents of the federal government, and, when listed together, they captured the evolution of territorial knowledge, precisely the enterprise that Kohl was undertaking. Perhaps it is significant, then, that Warren began his list of authorities with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the first agents of the new nation in the American West, rather than with Aaron Arrowsmith, whose British map of the West was the most reliable to that point. Warren’s was a history of official geographical knowledge undertaken in the field and in this respect it was unprecedented.22 Yet for all his attention to the genealogy of exploration, Warren downplayed—even erased—Native American knowledge, even when his AngloAmerican “authorities” relied on it. Such a practice was typical. In 1801, Peter Fidler, a surveyor with the Hudson’s Bay Company, asked the Blackfoot chief Ac ko mok ki to create a map of the Missouri Basin. The result included not just Capturing the Past through Maps

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details of the mountains and rivers in the relatively unknown interior, but elements of its human geography, such as settlements, grasslands, and the location of plants. Fidler transcribed the map in February 1801 and sent it to London, where Arrowsmith incorporated—though did not credit—this information on his “Map of the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains” (1802). Thomas Jefferson used this map to outline the reconnaissance mission for Lewis and Clark. When Warren listed Arrowsmith as one of several authorities decades later, Ac ko mok ki’s geographical knowledge had disappeared.23 Ironically, knowledge of Ac ko mok ki’s map came back to the United States through none other than Kohl, just as Warren was compiling his master map of the West. Kohl was well aware of Native mapping through his immersion in European archives. He came across Ac ko mok ki’s map at the offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company and made a copy for his collection of maps of discovery and exploration. When this collection ultimately landed at the Library of Congress in 1903, Ac ko mok ki’s map was included, having been twice transcribed by Europeans over a span of fifty years before returning to North America. Kohl was the first scholar to identify Indian maps as a distinct category within historical scholarship, perhaps a result of his exposure and sensitivity to such a wide range of mapping practices. In 1855, in the midst of his work for the Coast Survey, Kohl spent six months in the Upper Mississippi Valley and encountered firsthand the extensive cartographic knowledge held by the Ojibwa Indians.24 Yet this was unusual, and Warren was part of a long tradition of both using and failing to acknowledge Native American geographical knowledge. In nineteenth-century reconnaissance maps, tribes also appear only intermittently. Samuel Lewis’s map of 1814 depicting the routes of Lewis and Clark (based on the drawings of Clark) made no mention of Native migration routes and settlements. This map was hailed as a significant improvement over Arrowsmith’s for its rendering of the distances across the mountain chains of the Northwest. Yet while the map reflected tremendous precision and attention to topographical detail, it leaves one with the impression of a landscape that is all but uninhabited. Between 1869 and 1879, the federal government mounted ever more systematic surveys of its western lands. The surveys were ambitious, overlapping enterprises undertaken by Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, Ferdinand Hayden, and George Wheeler, but the reports drew on old maps as well as contemporary science. The Wheeler survey, which eventually embraced the entire region west of the hundredth meridian, featured a retrospective treatment of old maps. Wheeler also acknowledged Kohl’s model for capturing the evolution of territorial knowledge. In fact, Wheeler was so taken with the history of mapping that he reprinted Warren’s memoir from the 1850s and added several more facsimiles. His arrangement of old maps allowed the viewer to “watch” the continent take shape through cartographic knowledge. Warren and Wheeler’s reports were a 54

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crash course in discovery and exploration through maps, a territorial inventory of American history. Prior to 1850, this awareness of past geographical knowledge as relevant to the nation’s future did not exist.25 The Coast Survey also continued to recognize Kohl’s relevance by reprinting his history of coastal discovery in 1884 and comprehensively indexing the maps he copied for Congress. In another revealing move, the survey printed a map of the Chesapeake Bay in 1881 to commemorate the centennial of the battle of Yorktown. The map was based on the latest intelligence in hydrography and topography, yet, oddly, it was printed in a style that imitated the engraved charts of the late eighteenth century. This was a playful wink at the past, but also an acknowledgment that old maps are unique artifacts. And by reprinting old maps, these federal agencies also enabled others to use them. Still, attention to map collecting grew slowly. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, the War Department temporarily took control of Kohl’s facsimiles, but, thereafter, they were returned to the State Department where they remained neglected for some time. The Civil War also delayed acquisition of the Force collection. In 1867, Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford made an aggressive case for Congress to purchase the collection, which now contained over seven hundred maps. His strident plea reflects his belief that it was nothing less than a national embarrassment that the largest collection of material related to America was housed in the British Museum. The failure to act would be a “national misfortune,” for Force had built his collection over decades, through exclusive access and unique documents; such a collection could never be replicated. Spofford’s appeal was successful, and Congress purchased the Force collection for one hundred thousand dollars; it became the largest collection of Americana in the Library of Congress.26 The Force collection illustrated the value of documentary sources and was strong in maps, yet the country still had no official cartographic archive. After the war, the case was pressed most vocally by Daniel Coit Gilman and Justin Winsor. Others had begun to study the history of cartography by compiling lists of old maps and related works. In the 1860s, Henry Harrisse cataloged maps related to the history of American discovery, and Winsor continued these efforts in the 1880s. Winsor was one of the postwar era’s leading historians, and his commitment to the history of exploration prompted him to assemble a guide to the Kohl collection in 1886. As a staff librarian at the Library of Congress, Philip Lee Phillips began to collect map citations in 1878. These seeded his landmark bibliography of maps of America, published in 1901. By the turn of the century, map archives had begun to appear in universities and libraries around the country, boosted in part by the four-hundredth anniversary commemorations of Columbus’s voyage.27 In 1871, Spofford proposed a separate building for the Library of Congress, Capturing the Past through Maps

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which was still housed at the capitol pursuant to its original charge. After several delays, Congress approved funding for the new quarters in 1889. The building was conceived as a true “national” library of America, with dramatic and richly decorated interiors that summoned a sense of pride and national history and a Beaux-Arts exterior style that would dominate the Columbian Exposition in Chicago just a few years later. When it opened in 1897, the building included a separate Hall of Maps and Charts, and Spofford named Phillips as its supervisor. After four decades, Hunt and Kohl’s proposal of a national map library was finally realized. Fitting, then, that Phillips gave the Kohl collection of facsimiles and other cartographic material a permanent home in 1903.28 At about the same time, Phillips published his comprehensive guide to the maps of America held in the Library of Congress. His effort extended the catalogs and bibliographies compiled by Winsor and Henry Harrisse, which, in turn, facilitated the growth of the map trade and the history of cartography as a field of study.29 Perhaps most notable was the pace of institutional map collecting in the early twentieth century, accelerated by the founding of the Newberry Library in Chicago, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library in California. And yet the treatment of maps as a distinctive category within libraries took time. In 1928, Colonel Lawrence Martin, Phillips’s successor at the Library of Congress, visited the Henry Huntington Library in California and wrote an extensive and candid report of its holdings. At that time, the Huntington owned nearly three thousand maps and two hundred atlases, with many more maps in its book collection. With characteristic bluntness, Martin pointed out the gaps and duplications in the collection and recommended that the maps, atlases, and other cartographic materials be united and organized in some coherent fashion. As late as the 1920s, maps were still secondclass citizens in the archives, even at the Huntington, where Frederick Jackson Turner presided. Martin lamented this state of affairs, remarking that “It would take . . . weeks and weeks, I suspect, to produce for Professor Turner all the maps that show the ‘Great American Desert’ in the Great Plains, if he asked for them; yet that’s an easy thing to turn up after a map collection is united and arranged.” Only three decades earlier, the Library of Congress still had no section devoted to maps, nor did any American archive have a system for classifying these materials. Yet by 1928, Martin could write an extensive report detailing the deficiencies of the Huntington’s cartographic collection, which testifies to just how rapidly American institutions began to collect maps after the turn of the century.30

The Growth of National History American attention to maps of and from the past was fueled by both supply and demand. On the supply side, new commercial cartographic publishing firms 56

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such as Rand McNally and George Cram adopted inexpensive print techniques that made maps available for mass consumption. This was matched by increased demand for maps related to the past. The centennial celebrations emphasized (and constructed) the nation’s cultural heritage, and maps, furnishings, and architecture became concrete examples of this. At the Centennial Exposition, Kohl’s maps of discovery were featured as a new way of representing old information. And as the Corliss Engine awed viewers and beckoned a future transformed by technology and mechanization, a new level of interest in the past was evident in a much more modest exhibit devoted to the New England Kitchen. Other centennial celebrations reflected this turn toward the past—both nostalgic and nationalistic—and attention to artifacts. Like old maps, antiques were sought not primarily as aesthetic objects or for the information they imparted, but for their associational value, which gave the viewer a sense of connection to the nation’s storied past. Perhaps the power of the industrial present and future heightened this appreciation of objects that radiated authenticity and strengthened a sense of national heritage.31 The imminent arrival of the centennial also inspired mapmakers to turn their attention to the past. For instance, Rufus Blanchard had produced maps of Chicago since the 1850s and, in 1867, cofounded what would become one of the city’s most successful mapmaking firms. But in January 1876, he tried something new, issuing a large fold-out “Historical Map of the United States” with five facsimile map insets (see website). At the center, he featured a map of North America extending just west of the Mississippi River and incorporating dates and routes of exploration, the creation of forts, biographical information, and the location and migration of important Indian tribes (fig. 2.4). Blanchard used the map to experiment with historical representation. He drew state borders only faintly, so as to foreground prior imperial claims through color. But in shading these spheres of influence, he deliberately blended the colors into one another—and omitted the use of boundary lines altogether— in order to convey the fluidity of imperial control. With this rather simple act, Blanchard highlighted the degree to which most contemporary maps drew clear lines to demarcate borders, though these were ambitions and aspirations rather than observed realities. In North America these boundaries were almost always subject to disagreement. Blanchard also challenged traditional approaches to mapping by drawing rivers according to their historical importance rather than their actual size. He called attention to this practice so the viewer might gain a more dynamic understanding of historical geography. This may seem trivial, but, with it, he implicitly rejected the concept of the map as a transparent reflection of the landscape and instead treated it as an idea. This creativity anticipates the twentieth-century emphasis on perspective and the logic that would accompany the rise of cartograms, where fidelity to Capturing the Past through Maps

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2.4 Detail of Lower Mississippi River, from Rufus Blanchard, Historical Map of the United States, Showing Early Spanish, French, & English Discoveries and Explorations, also Forts, Towns, and Battlefields of Historic Interest (Chicago: Rufus Blanchard, 1876). David Rumsey Collection. 137 × 145 cm. See website for entire image.

geography was secondary to the representation of something else, such as relative influence.32 Blanchard also included five inset facsimiles to mark different moments of American history: two seventeenth-century maps of North America, Marquette’s map of the Mississippi, a mid-eighteenth-century map of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, and a map of the new nation after the Treaty of Paris. Finally, Blanchard designed an inset map marking the territorial expansion across the continent. This type of map would soon become standard fare in American history texts, for it neatly outlined the correspondence between the nation’s maturation in time and expansion in space. On the left side of Blanchard’s large map was a lengthy 58

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“tablet” covering the stages of national history from the era of discovery and exploration. He narrated the nation’s history as the arc from savagery to imperial rivalry, then described the westward march of the Republic as driven by both “the chivalry of Virginia, and the conscience of Plymouth Rock.” He characterized the history of America as unlike any other nation and pointed out that the nation’s centennial coincided with the professionalization of history as a discipline. Blanchard’s commitment to history is apparent in the extensive sources listed on the map, including texts, individual historians, and historical societies. All of this indicates the growing attention to the nation’s history after the Civil War. That a commercial map publisher would issue facsimiles also indicates that they had edged into the mainstream. Similarly, Harper’s Weekly reproduced an ancient map of the world made by Claudius Ptolemy to convey the geographical worldview in the classical era. Henry Stevens, long a collector of Americana, also published a volume of facsimiles so Americans might simulate a firsthand encounter with historical sources. William Cullen Bryant capitalized on the centennial by printing facsimiles in his popular national history and began his story not with the Revolution but much earlier, with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere. He used facsimiles as sources, which anticipated a shift among historians generally. As history became a profession rather than a gentlemanly pursuit, documentary evidence gained an air of scientific authority that was prized by those who emulated the German research model.33 Willard and Kohl had urged the government to collect maps as a statement of nationhood in the 1850s. But beyond the symbolic value of a national archive, it was difficult to see how these documents could materially advance civic identity. Facsimiles maps were unwieldy and rarely delivered a “familiar” picture of the nation. If anything, they testified to the sheer contingency of history: fluid borders, foreign languages, imperial rivalries, and the confused and partial state of geographical knowledge. They were nonlinear pieces of evidence, and did not capture its modern identity. Far more useful to late nineteenth-century historians was the common practice of mapping the march of territorial growth. And since the nation had expanded so rapidly, there was much to map, both in the West and through the acquisition of Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands. The historical atlases that proliferated after the Civil War were essentially elaborations of the structure that Willard established in 1828. Among the first was Townsend MacCoun’s adaptation of Robert Labberton’s 1886 New Historical Atlas, which the latter described as a “truly pictorial history” of the nation’s past.34 MacCoun took Labberton’s maps and organized them into phases that had been established by Bancroft and confirmed by academic historians as the definitive stages of national history: discovery of the continent, development of the colonies, creation of the nation, and rise of the commonwealth. In each of these, MacCoun added maps to elaborate the spatial dimension of the nation’s Capturing the Past through Maps

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past and focused on political divisions. He also sought to locate the roots of US history prior to 1776. Here he took a cue from Jared Sparks, who defined the task of history as tracing the nation’s growth “to the very elements of its origin.” To that same end, he titled his first chapter “Unveiling a New World” and opened it with six outline maps based on historical facsimiles, such as Paolo Toscanelli’s 1474 map and Gerhard Mercator’s 1541 map. These were not true facsimiles, for MacCoun simplified them for classroom use so that students could conjure up the worldview of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This series of maps also enabled students to see the continent taking shape and culminating in a nation. Yet these were new pedagogical tools, for only in MacCoun’s own day could such maps be seen by more than a handful, thanks to the efforts of Kohl and the advances of print technology. Perhaps the most revealing unit in MacCoun’s atlas was “National Growth,” for in it he designed a map of “The Territory of the Present united states during the French-Indian Wars, 1755–1763.” Not only did this predate the nation, but it erased the distinction between the nation and the colonies. He sought to transform the contingency of the past into a coherent story of territorial growth and national fruition. To this end, his maps emphasized political borders, even when these vastly oversimplified the past. A century after Guillaume Delisle famously asserted French control over the Mississippi Valley on a map—much to the anger of the British—MacCoun’s “imperial” map depicted these claims as defined spheres of control marked by clear borders. Historical maps were also mnemonic devices for MacCoun, as they had been for Willard. Both authors repeated the national map through time to connect it in the student’s mind with the nation itself. The most forceful advocate for historical maps in education after the Civil War was Albert Bushnell Hart. After taking a PhD in Germany, he held one of the first university positions in history at Harvard from 1883 to 1926. Throughout this tenure, he emphasized historical methods and became one of the chief architects of history curricula. One of his legacies was the Guide to the Study of American History (1896), coauthored with Edward Channing as the first attempt to formalize and systematize the study of history for the emerging scholarly profession. Hart and Channing used the Guide to establish an approach to research they had honed after a decade of teaching, one that emphasized the review of the extant literature and the clear distinction between primary and secondary sources. They urged students to seek original material and to look skeptically at the received wisdom of old textbooks and folk narratives that aimed for moral stories rather than scientific analysis. To this end, Hart used the Guide to define the chronology and geography of the nation. In this view, American history extended back to the origins of European settlement—but no earlier—for this was first and foremost the story of the growth of English traditions in the new world, 60

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then of a people developing common commitments and values. He considered the creation of a political republic to be the greatest contribution the United States had made to world civilization and used this as the framework to render its history meaningful. His goal was to move American history away from anecdotal stories of uplift. By subjecting national history to “scientific treatment,” he hoped to establish its geographical and chronological limits and to legitimize it as a field of scholarship.35 Hart narrated the nation’s history as free of crisis: the Revolution was peaceful, and the Civil War an inevitable and necessary outgrowth of sectionalism. This treatment of American history as “natural” helps to explain his enthusiasm for cartography. Hart was particularly concerned about the neglect of historical geography in schools, so spent much of his early career developing maps. His Epoch Maps Illustrating American History went through five editions between 1891 and 1917 and became a standard school text. In it, he adopted some of the new statistical maps that illustrated the distribution of slavery and the growth of cities (described in chapters 4 and 5), but most of his maps focused on political and territorial growth. By emphasizing politics and territorial organization, he reinforced those as the main frameworks for American history, themes amplified further in the American Nation series that he edited at the turn of the century.36 Hart used maps to transform the ambiguity of the past into a coherent story of national growth. His school atlas stressed that geographical knowledge prior to the Revolution was partial and that boundaries were “uncertain, disputed, and sometimes impossible to locate.” Yet his map of North American in 1750 marked definite spheres of influence, though neither the French nor the British knew the limits of these “spheres” and may not have wanted to establish that limit with any certainty. National identity abhorred territorial uncertainty, and, thus, Hart’s maps clearly defined their borders. His map of expansion, so familiar to us today, collapses a contested century into a single image that neatly conveys the predestination of national growth (fig. 2.5).37 The spread of maps in history education also stemmed from contemporary disdain for illustration. Pictorial histories had grown in popularity throughout the century, illustrating what would become iconic moments in the nation’s past. These reached the height of their influence with the advent of steel line engraving after 1850 and with the growth of teaching techniques that emphasized the importance of stimulating the student’s curiosity. As a result, the book market was filled with texts aimed at “fixing ideas in the mind” through illustrations as well as words. Advocates of illustration argued that the essential goals of history were the revelation of universal truth and the inculcation of civic virtue in the young, and these goals demanded visualization.38 One of the most vocal defenders of pictorial history in the 1840s and 1850s was William Gilmore Simms, who emphasized that it could teach nationalism to those who might not otherwise be Capturing the Past through Maps

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2.5 “Territorial Growth of the United States,” from Albert Bushnell Hart, Epoch Maps Illustrating American History (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1891). 13.5 × 20 cm.

drawn to history. And because copyright law did not extend to pictures, publishers could easily and inexpensively illustrate texts by simply reproducing images. The result was a proliferation of pictorial histories, time charts, and other graphic measures of history that became fixtures in the classroom.39 The most popular and prolific author of pictorial histories was Benson Lossing, whose Field Book series revolutionized the genre by attaching physical places to the study of American history. Just as Willard stressed the interdependence of history and geography, Lossing visualized the location of events in order to fix lessons of history in the student’s mind. By the middle of the century, his tremendous success had established the dramatic scenes of national history. Though some faded, others persisted well into the twentieth century, such as the death of General Wolfe, the meeting of Pocahontas and John Smith, and William Penn’s encounter with the Indians. These narrative moments were different from those identified in historical atlases, for they formalized particular encounters and created iconic scenes. By contrast, maps conveyed a more abstract picture that reinforced a story of national evolution. Maps were designed not to convey small-scale stories of the past, but large-scale portraits of a nation coming into its own, through routes of exploration, imperial rivalries, land grants, treaties, territorial expansion, and military conflict. By the late nineteenth century, historians such as Hart began to openly criticize illustrated textbooks. Some feared that this “sentimental trope” might ultimately degrade the integrity of historical study. This was no small matter in the nineteenth century when North and South vied for the mantle of the Revolution and tussled over the nation’s true mission. Illustration was a powerful way to depict that mission. The rise of realism also contributed to this suspicion of illustration, as did the growth of scientific history, which prompted the first generation of professionally trained historians to distinguish themselves by rejecting the use of pictures. The distinction, however, was rather artificial, for Lossing considered himself an empiricist and balked at the suggestion that his histories were anything less than true narratives. He noted that his history of the Revolution had only two battle scenes, and he planned a history of the rebellion that would have no pictures at all, “unless I shall find something of the kind necessary to illustrate an important facet.” His goal was to present a “faithful record . . . of facts and not of opinions. . . . a chronicle, not a disquisition.” Lossing also noticed a growing fascination with old maps and planned a magazine of national history that would feature facsimiles.40 By contrast, Hart proudly omitted illustration in the American Nation series that he edited from 1904 to 1918: each volume opened with a portrait but excluded all other pictures. Instead, he fashioned dozens of maps and described them as study tools rather than textual ornaments. Allen Thomas, author of a popular history textbook in the late nineteenth century, welcomed maps but acCapturing the Past through Maps

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cepted only illustrations that were “not imaginative, but realistic” or “portraits from authentic sources.” This insistence on authenticity came with the arrival of halftone engraving in 1880s, which enhanced the sense of realism in illustration by enabling—among other things—the reproduction of photographs through print. Similarly, Alexander Johnston insisted in his History of the United States that maps were the only legitimate embellishment. Even the portraits were “introduced with regret” and as a concession to public expectations for illustration. John Clark Ridpath’s heavily illustrated histories may have sold well, but they also relied on charts of time and extensive maps. His pictorial maps were sold as learning aids and stressed westward growth in a straightforward manner that suited the framework of American national development. By the late nineteenth century, hand-drawn illustrations were rare in history texts, yet maps were readily adopted for their aura of authority and precision.41 While pictorial histories waned, timelines, charts, and diagrams of history spread. As explained above, timelines have a long history, but their popularity grew alongside the nation. David Ramsay first charted American history in the 1810s, and the subsequent time charts of Azel Lyman remained in print through the middle decades of the century. Timelines and time charts had a twofold appeal in the United States. First, they were used to instill national and civic loyalty by framing national history into a visual format where both the story and important details could be located and remembered. But the genre also appealed to a population interested in condensing a body of knowledge—such as American history—into a single “synoptic” view. Charts and timelines allowed the viewer to connect information across space and time and to rationalize information by giving it structure and order. Francis Lieber, the émigré political theorist, spent hours experimenting with charts and tables in order to catalog knowledge about political societies in different eras. Charts and tables allowed him to compare developments around the world and to “contain” wide and disparate developments into a single document. In the same way that maps allowed the viewer to enjoy a synchronized view of the landscape, charts and timelines enabled one to think across time and to measure the past from a position of omniscience. Such a long perspective was entirely lost in traditional narrative accounts that dramatized discrete moments or individual heroics.42 Most of the time charts that appeared after the Civil War were organized around politics, such as Henry Clay Donnell’s “Presidential Elections of the United States” (1877) (see website). Inspired by the centennial, this chart profiled each of the nation’s twenty-three elections through a map of the electoral vote and a profile of each victor. Donnell created chronological continuity by coloring the Federalists as the antecedents to the Whigs and Republicans and the DemocraticRepublicans as precursors to the Democrats. His serial maps included the entire continent in order to describe the exploration of and migration to western lands 64

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even before they became part of the United States. The chart had an animated effect, and, in scanning the maps, one could see not only the progressive territorial fulfillment of the nation but also the give-and-take between political parties. Donnell drew from the 1870 census to profile the expansion of the nation’s territory, population, railroad networks, and immigration. Likewise, the “Diagram of the Rise and Fall of Political Parties in the United States” (1894) collapsed a century of chaotic partisan struggles into a structured chronology (see website). This evokes Willard’s stream of time, where only from the vantage point of the present can the past be endowed with any kind of order or narrative arc. And in the same way the Willard’s chronographer used perspective to convey the relative power of different civilizations, this chart measured the influence of the parties by enlarging their size relative to their rivals over time. The collective effect was to suggest that the political process had a kind of internal order, though this cyclical “pattern” could only be identified in retrospect. In an era of intense political rivalry, some of these charts made no pretense to neutrality, such as the 1888 map by John Smith audaciously titled “Historical Geography” (figs. 2.6 and 2.7). Here the Civil War is framed as a symptom of deeper division rooted in the single decision to import slaves to Jamestown over two centuries earlier. From this moment, “history” moved in two separate moral directions and produced two fundamentally different civilizations. To Plymouth came liberty, “planted by Pilgrims upon the Bible . . . where it received God’s blessing” in the form of intellectual, technical, and educational advantages unblemished by the sin of slavery. This generated thrift, obedience, happiness, sobriety, and a host of other virtues that characterized the nation’s highest ideals. By contrast, mammon generated the sin of slavery, and “nearly every evil which exists in the political economy of our beloved country can be traced back to the pernicious teachings of the Jamestown settlers and their children.” Propped up by the territorial compromises and the Dred Scott decision, slavery produced lust, avarice, ignorance, superstition, sedition, secession, war, and murder. Though the institution had been destroyed, its spirit “still lives in the form of the Democratic Party,” a reference to the intense partisanship of the Gilded Age. The map is more a statement of Republican Party identity than historical geography, but it grows from the sensibility of Willard’s chronographers and other stylized maps of the antebellum era that gave shape to time. But in another significant way, the map departs from Willard’s concept of history, for it depicts an active struggle between two competing and incompatible visions of the nation’s future. Smith’s map reflects a sense of history as contingent rather than providential. These charts and maps suggest that politics lay at the heart of history, a definition shared by professional historians such as Channing and Hart. Their maps emphasized national boundaries and territorial growth in order to ground Capturing the Past through Maps

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2.6 “Historical Geography” of John F. Smith (1888). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 48 × 84 cm.

2.7 Detail from “Historical Geography” (1888).

American history as the study of politics and institutions. These historians were responding to shifts affecting more than just Americans. Thomas Bender has observed that a new definition of unity, freedom, and territory began to take hold around the world in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848, it was entirely unclear that the nation-state would become the dominant unit of political organization in Europe or the Americas, yet, by the 1870s, such an arrangement was uncontested in the United States. Maps had a key role in this reorientation. Along the same lines, Charles Maier has argued that the long century from the 1860s to the 1970s constitutes a peculiarly coherent time in world history, one where a nation’s “decision space” coincided with its physical space and where “the terCapturing the Past through Maps

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ritorial premise of collective life remained fundamental.” In this period, nations drew their power primarily from their territorial unit. President Lincoln articulated this shift in his second annual address to Congress, when he stated that the territory and the nation were inextricable. Thus, secession was not just unacceptable, but impossible. This same belief might explain why Hart and his fellow historians were drawn to cartography: maps were like declarative sentences that documented the nation by emphasizing its territorial sovereignty.43 Channing and Hart influenced this cartographic turn by sanctifying maps as tools to teach, study, and conduct historical research. They even dedicated their Guide to Justin Winsor, one of the first historians of geography and cartography and the Harvard Librarian from 1877 to his death in 1897. They acknowledged Winsor because he had devoted his life to research. His most important achievement was editing the massive Narrative and Critical History of America, an eightvolume work based heavily on historical documents. Winsor conceived of the project as a definitive guide to sources in American history. Gradually, the narrative dimension of the series was gradually expanded in order to widen the audience, but the finished volumes were still largely analytical treatments of evidence and written in an insistently unliterary style that became his trademark. The key element of the History is Winsor’s heavy reliance upon facsimile maps from the past, accompanied by over two dozen essays related to cartography. When criticized for his excessive use of facsimiles, Winsor responded that since geographical conditions were among the primary influences over history, maps were the primary evidence of history.44 In many respects, Winsor was a prototypical academic. He had a critical eye and a research ethic learned at Heidelberg. As Channing wrote, he made “scientific” history possible by recovering previously unknown sources. In the 1880s, his commitment to cartography and the history of exploration was heightened when he came across Kohl’s facsimile maps. Winsor relished the way these maps revealed contemporary geographical knowledge. In other words, he used old maps to solve historical problems. But this approach was too esoteric and unfamiliar to be widely adopted, the maps too complex to be understood without training and too obscure to become routine historical sources.45 Winsor’s use of old maps was also soon displaced by Channing and Hart’s emphasis on new maps of the past. Winsor was primarily concerned with the earliest phases of North American history, from pre-Columbian discoveries to the imperial intrigue of the seventeenth century. It was the history of discovery—a passion fired by Kohl—that dominated his research. He had little interest in the political evolution of the colonies and considered anything after 1776 too recent for historical judgment. This put him at odds with scholarship after the Civil War, which sought to explain the rise of the nation, the genesis of American political institutions, and the causes of the rebellion. Unlike Winsor, Channing and Hart 68

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separated the history of discovery from the history of the nation, and framed American history as that which produced the modern United States. Moreover, ethnocentrism among historians prompted their search for English precedents, rather than French, Dutch, Spanish, or Catholic. Winsor was concerned less with tracing the roots of the modern era than in recapturing the mindset of past actors, especially explorers. These were two very different approaches to history: one was designed to serve the present, while the other was concerned with the past on its own terms, what would soon be derided as “mere” antiquarianism. Winsor’s approach to the history of cartography was fundamentally unlike that of his more academically successful colleagues, who adopted facsimile maps to the extent that they evidenced the nation. Winsor’s position at Harvard enabled him to establish the history of discovery as a field of study. In general, however, the history of cartography did not easily fit the approach to history practiced by the emerging academic elite. Old maps did not vindicate the nation, but instead suggested a past of contingency and complexity. For this reason, old maps became symbolic rather than explanatory documents, and the study of cartography remained a minor enterprise among American historians. Until recently, the history of maps was largely the province of geographers, antiquarians, collectors, and dealers. In twentieth-century scholarship, maps rarely commanded the attention that historians gave to state papers, letters, diaries, or other primary sources. In fact, even Kohl’s facsimile maps were primarily used not for historical research, but instead to settle border disputes.46 Winsor’s most consequential professional contribution might have been his assistance to the Venezuelan Boundary Commission, where his unmatched knowledge of historical geography and antiquated maps was essential. Winsor’s emphasis on the history of discovery was also eclipsed by Turner’s focus on the West and the frontier, which dominated the profession for decades and relegated the history of discovery to a remote corner of the discipline. Winsor was interested in the early era of imperial rivalry on the continent, while Turner wanted to understand American character and institutions. This meant that the two men thought about cartography in very distinct ways. Turner was not concerned with old maps, but with the influence of geographical conditions on the population. He studied statistical maps of westward movement and contour maps from the Geological Survey, not maps of historical explorations and voyages.47 It was Turner, not Winsor, who shaped the historical profession’s attention to cartography. This is apparent in the early doctoral program in history at Johns Hopkins University, the first American institution devoted to the German model of graduate study and research. As the inaugural president of Hopkins, geographer Daniel Coit Gilman hired Herbert Baxter Adams to build the history faculty in 1876. The two men leaned toward each other intellectually, and by collaborating in teachCapturing the Past through Maps

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ing their students were educated in geography as well as history. Adams trained some of the nation’s earliest doctoral students in history, and among the most influential of these were Turner and John Franklin Jameson. When the faculty in history and political science designed their seminar rooms, they devoted one entirely to geographical and statistical studies. The motto in the history seminar room—“History is past Politics and Politics present History”—viewed the past as a precursor to the present. Turner would have been among the first exposed to this approach, which emphasized the geographical dimension of the past.48 If Turner was the dominant intellectual force in the history profession, Jameson was its leading spokesman. Both studied at the intersection of geography and history at Johns Hopkins, where Jameson was the first to be awarded the PhD in 1882. Gilman and Adams fostered his interest in historical geography, and this was furthered when he was asked to organize the university’s map collection and to lecture on the relationship between history and physical geography. Jameson’s training also reflected the model set forth by Channing and Hart. While teaching at the University of Chicago, he emphasized printed documents over popular memory. He also stressed national developments over regional and popular traditions in order to unite a nation facing ethnic and religious tensions, regional disparities, and lingering sectional rivalries in the aftermath of the Civil War. As founder and the first academically trained president of the American Historical Association, editor of the American Historical Review, director of historical research at the Carnegie Institution, and chief of the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress, Jameson led the profession toward a research agenda that privileged the nation and sought to uncover its roots.

Historical Cartography in the Early Twentieth Century While at Chicago, Jameson encountered the Statistical Atlas of 1898, based on the Eleventh Census and modeled on Walker’s census atlas of 1874. This inspired him to envision an equally ambitious atlas for the nation’s past. Hart may have encouraged Jameson, for the former was troubled by the absence of sufficient cartographic material for historical research. Jameson discussed the idea with Gilman as early as 1902, then proposed it to the Carnegie Institution the following year. As he pictured it, a national historical atlas would document the progress of discovery, shifting boundaries, the location of Indian tribes, claims of European powers, land grants and boundary disputes, the formation of states, and territorial acquisitions. But he also wanted to illustrate social development, for he was intrigued by the new census maps he had seen in the decennial atlases. He argued that this social emphasis would distinguish the historical atlas from its European counterparts, especially through closer attention to settlement, population growth, racial and ethnic identity, religion, the distribution of wages and 70

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income, the rise and fall of slavery, the presence of industry, and the extensive changes in transportation and land policy. Ideally, Jameson wrote, this exhaustive inventory of the past would lay the foundation for future historical research.49 The scientific bent of the new Carnegie Institution may have delayed authorization of this national historical atlas, which did not begin until newly minted historian Charles Paullin was hired in 1912. For the next fifteen years, he labored to execute a vision that expanded to enormous proportions. When he struggled to complete the project, the institution transferred it to the Library of Congress, then to the American Geographical Society, where it was published under the supervision of John Kirtland Wright in 1932 as the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.50 The historical contributions were largely made by the Carnegie’s Department of Historical Research, and the geographical contributions by the AGS. Wright and Paullin were the principal authors, but they relied on other geographers and historians, principally Turner, S. Whittemore Boggs, Raymond Whitbeck, Isaiah Bowman, and Lawrence Martin. The atlas included an unprecedented number of facsimiles, which were followed by extensive new maps of physical geography, agriculture and industry, boundary disputes, land use, and population. Nothing like it—either in scope or range of material—yet existed. The atlas began with maps of physical geography, which reinforced Turner’s intellectual emphasis on the diversity of regions and the human interaction with the landscape.51 This focus on the influence of geography over history also explains the inclusion of facsimile maps. Jameson—influenced by Kohl and Winsor—had proposed a series of maps to illustrate the “progress of discovery” in America. Paullin studied Kohl’s facsimiles, then selected forty-eight that would best illustrate the widening of geographical knowledge over time. These facsimiles were chosen not for their cartographic significance, or their aesthetic qualities, but as “landmarks in the history of what is now the United States.” Paullin arranged a canon of maps that documented the advent of the nation, beginning with a fifteenth-century globe made by Martin Behaim to portray the state of geographical knowledge prior to Columbus’s voyage. He reproduced Juan de la Cosa’s portolan chart of 1500 as the earliest map of “America.” He included John Mitchell’s eighteenth-century map of North America at the height of the imperial era and John Melish’s map of the United States after the War of 1812. The decision to end with a map from 1867—more than half a century before the publication of the atlas—confirms that the editors saw facsimile maps primarily in terms of the increase in geographical knowledge and the evolution of a continental nation.52 After this extensive reproduction of maps from the past, Paullin arranged over five hundred new maps of the past, many of which were modeled on earlier experiments. Kohl’s use of color was adapted to identify the stages of imperial Capturing the Past through Maps

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exploration, as in the map titled “French Explorations in the West” (see website). Lindenkohl’s use of lines to mark the military control of the Confederacy was adapted for a map of the “Conquest of the South” and is still used today to depict the stages of that conflict (see website). And, just as Willard had done a century earlier, Paullin placed maps of Native Americans not alongside those of other populations, but rather between the facsimile maps and those of land use. In these atlases, Native tribes continued to exist uneasily between the natural landscape and human history, with “shadowy claims” to the land that were “easily swept aside.”53 Almost all of these newly created maps were designed to advance historical research. Wright extolled the ability of statistical maps—of population, migration, land use, climate, physiography, industry, and agriculture—to investigate the relationship between history and geography. Paullin used them “to visualize the black belt in the South, the manufacturing Northeast, the widely scattered agglomerations of settlement in the West, [and] the political diversities associated with these fundamental regional differences.” Dozens of maps chronicled the expansion of post roads, stage roads, railroads, and airlines. Among the most compelling of these was a series of maps that measured “Transportation and Rates of Travel” at different moments in the past (see website). Other maps tracked the growth of banking, imports, and exports. Julius Hilgard’s innovative illustration of the migrating “center of population” was applied to separate populations: African Americans, whites, immigrants, Native Americans, rural Americans, and urban Americans. The editors conceived of these maps as transparent documents, free of “historical interpretation” and ripe for analysis in geography, history, and especially historical geography.54 To illustrate Turner’s concept of sectionalism, they closely mapped voting behavior: presidential elections formed the first of these series, followed by congressional measures (tariffs and compromises), and reforms (suffrage, prohibition, labor laws, and pensions). Maps of elections and legislation might illustrate the limits of the “solid south” and raise questions about the geographical patterns of party power. Maps of agricultural and industrial production could be compared over time to measure regional development, then integrated with census maps of demographic and migration patterns. The Atlas was hardly free of interpretation, as Wright claimed, but what matters is his use of maps as historical tools. By foregrounding demographic shifts, these maps facilitated the layered spatial analysis that Walker had initially attempted in his Statistical Atlas of 1874. Wright was the most geographically sophisticated of the contributors to the atlas, and he explicitly acknowledged the difficulty of mapping change over time. The ideal maps of history, he mused, would actually be motion pictures that captured fluidity. He tried to approximate this dynamism by mapping land use according to rates of change, rather than at a moment in time (fig. 2.8). Us72

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ing census data, he created maps to show the increase or decrease in acreage of land use for the prior ten years, which captured not only growth, but the rate of change in a way that had not been attempted before. In the process, he made the map a more nuanced, meaningful, and precise statistical measurement. Each decade was mapped according to the increase or decrease of land use. When placed in series, the maps depicted change in a quasi-animated fashion. Wright’s futuristic vision of “motion picture” maps are now routinely undertaken across the disciplines of history and historical geography, most notably by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. In both cartographic style and content, Paullin, Wright, and Jameson distinguished their atlas from the competition, which usually allocated just a few maps to the United States and burdened them with detail. The maps in William Shepherd’s Historical Atlas (1911) were typical, loaded with place names that bore little relationship to the larger story. Paullin and Wright responded by crafting maps with few (if any) locations in order to highlight and measure a specific relationship, geographical situation, or trend. While Shepherd’s maps marked borders and boundaries at a given moment, Paullin and Wright were influenced by Jameson’s emphasis on patterns, Turner’s attention to regionalism and process, Kohl and Winsor’s attention to the progress of discovery, and Walker’s focus on statistics. The final product reflects how these men confronted the thorny problem of representing historical change in graphic terms.55 Paullin’s long-standing commitment to cartography shaped his view that the past was a product of physical and social conditions, ranging from geological formations and temperature to racial composition, customs, and languages. Turner had fired the imagination of geographers and historians at the turn of the century, and his conception of the frontier gave maps a new purpose of gauging the influence of geographical conditions over history. As Paullin brought the Atlas to publication, he proposed another ambitious project to Turner: a series of sectional histories that might investigate these influences.56 Albert Bushnell Hart had stressed the geographical dimension of history even earlier and had encouraged Jameson to propose a comprehensive atlas to this end as early as 1889. As Paullin labored on the Atlas, Hart and Dixon Ryan Fox designed their own extensive (and less expensive) atlas for both popular and educational consumption. Originally, the two conceived of this atlas as a companion to Hart’s American Nation series, but ultimately it was published on its own in 1920. The maps were inspired by the same vision of Jameson and Paullin and included population density maps akin to those designed by the Coast Survey and Francis Amasa Walker in the nineteenth century (detailed in part 2). The atlas also detailed political developments and dynamics, the history of exploration, imperial influences, and boundary disputes. Though many of the maps had a statistical and scientific bent, others were outgrowths of even earlier models, parCapturing the Past through Maps

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2.8 “Improved Land 1850–1860, Increase in Acreage,” and “Improved Land 1850–1860, Decrease in Acreage,” from Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Baltimore: A. Hoen & Co, 1932). Each map 7.6 × 11.4 cm. See website for other maps in this chronological series.

ticularly those of Emma Willard. The map of Americans Indians was patterned after Powell’s map of linguistic stock and detailed the distribution of the tribes. But in subsequent maps the tribes were nearly nonexistent. The map of Virginia in the seventeenth century, for example, listed the founding date of each county but entirely omitted the tribes. Maps of political development removed all traces of tribal settlement.57 74

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Fletcher Hewes, who had coedited the massive Statistical Atlas of 1884, also issued a history text abundantly illustrated with maps after the turn of the century. He applied the sensibility he had learned with Henry Gannett in the 1880s by experimenting with the representation of space. For instance, he manipulated the size of the colonies and subsequent states in order to represent their relative population rather than their absolute area. In this way, the authors adopted a twentieth-century sense of perspective that would become common in the modern era of fragmented space and time.58 Similarly, in the 1920s, Rand McNally began marketing its Histomap series, which continued well into the 1990s. The maps bear a striking resemblance to the early nineteenth-century charts of history designed by Willard and others, where perspective is used to convey relative importance. Power was proportional to width on the diagram, while chronological fidelity remained (see website).59 Historical atlases rose to prominence in the nineteenth century primarily because the growth of the nation demanded coherent representations of territorial integrity and measurements of progress. Just after the Revolution, Jedediah Morse envisioned a body of geographical knowledge that would become a foundation for civic virtue and national identity. Willard was weaned on this assumption and developed a curriculum that would fix a picture of the nation in the student’s mind, then train the student to identify with that nation. The need to cultivate national identity made historical mapping necessary as well as a source of interest and pleasure for its citizens. Simply put, without the nation there would not have been the same drive to map the past. After the Civil War, historical maps were designed not only for civic purposes but also for a profession researching the origins and evolution of the United States. For the same reasons, the reproduction of old maps became more valuable, and, with the centennial, more common. By century’s end, the efforts of Hunt, Kohl, Winsor, and Gilman bore fruit when the Library of Congress established a separate division for maps and atlases. The growth of institutional education and inexpensive printing techniques also stimulated the interest in historical mapping. The representation of time on a map, adapted from European models by David Ramsay and Emma Willard, sparked a century of experimentation that culminated in the ambitious Historical Atlas of the United States. Maps as political tools tended to emphasize sovereignty and the clarity of borders and were well suited to a nation that achieved continental proportions in less than a century. The coincident growth of the United States geographically and nationally could be depicted on a map in a way that buttressed its strength. Finally, the creation of the nation transformed the very meaning of geography and history. The United States only made sense if it was bounded and identified as a discrete territory. While a geographical atlas codified a nation through the Capturing the Past through Maps

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formalization of borders, a historical atlas legitimated it by asserting its evolution in time and telling a story that culminated in nationhood. Fitting, then, that the final map of the Historical Atlas of the United States placed the nation at the center of the world and shaded the territories under its control. Historical atlases and maps gave the nation stability and the claim to territorial integrity. As the next three chapters demonstrate, this ferment around mapping the past was one aspect of a larger shift in spatial thinking.

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PA RT T W O

Mapping the Present

CHAPTER 3

Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

Historical mapping did not flourish by accident. Maps depicting the past were sought for their ability to demonstrate the nation’s territorial legitimacy and coherence, especially for American students. The advent of the nation, and more specifically an administrative apparatus, also stimulated other cartographic experiments that are discussed in the next three chapters. First among these was the effort to map climate and weather. Meteorology (the study of short-term weather) was prompted by the need to understand the origin and development of storms. The related field of climatology (the study of long-term patterns) was advanced by the intense need to understand epidemic disease. Climatology and meteorology were both essentially cartographic endeavors, for they sought to correlate and identify patterns in the distribution of rainfall, temperature, pressure, and winds. Furthermore, prior to the advent of germ theory, many believed that the key to understanding disease lay in the environment, and this created a demand for measurement that maps were uniquely capable of providing. Medical men turned to maps in a frantic quest to make sense of cholera and yellow fever, but their belief in the environmental causes also fueled the more general pursuit of weather and climate mapping. These developments made for a particularly fertile period of cartographic experimentation. None of this experimentation would have been possible without improvements in lithography, which made it possible to produce and revise maps quickly and cheaply. This in turn allowed maps to become a responsive tool of inquiry. Federal agencies and an evolving medical bureaucracy facilitated this experi79

mentation further by collecting the data on which these maps were based. In the Far West, the need to master a vast and relatively unknown territory gave cartography particular relevance. Maps of climate, weather, and disease both reflected and animated a shift in thinking and governing that had everything to do with the advent of the nation.

The Cartographic Influence of Alexander von Humboldt The conceptual power of thematic mapping has been well stated by Arthur Robinson: The use of a reduced, substitute space for that of reality, even when both can be seen, is an impressive act in itself; but the really awesome event was the similar representation of distant, out of sight, features. The combination of the reduction of reality and the construction of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed, for it enables one to discover structures that would remain unknown if not mapped.1

The final point bears repeating: thematic maps revealed patterns that might otherwise remain invisible. To be sure, there are examples of maps that organized information prior to this point, as in geological maps, charts of sea currents, or postal maps.2 Yet the use of maps to identify the distribution of data exploded after Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt began to reconsider the meaning of geography in the early nineteenth century. In 1806, Ritter designed an atlas of six maps showing the distribution of plants, trees, animals, and mountains. This may sound rather elementary, but his decision to isolate these categories enabled him to study the relationship between physical geography, animal life, and vegetation.3 Ritter’s influence over cartography was exceeded only by that of Humboldt, who enlarged the definition and purpose of geography. Contemporary natural scientists were preoccupied with description and classification and strove to capture the myriad nuances of the earth’s surface. Humboldt pushed geography from this emphasis on description toward the study of distribution, relationships, and laws of operation. This search for patterns and relationships became the guiding principle of natural science in the United States by the 1830s. The challenge was how to communicate this interdependence. Humboldt turned to cartography not to recreate the landscape but to represent data that might facilitate analysis. Ritter and Humboldt were among the first to systematically use maps as analytical rather than descriptive tools: hypotheses rather than summaries.4 Their search for patterns both fueled and was made possible by cartographic experimentation. Increased observation of the natural world generated a growing body of information about wind currents, rainfall, and the dis80

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tribution of animals and plants. This allowed naturalists to map data in order to seek patterns, which raised further questions and opened other paths of inquiry. Humboldt’s emphasis on the relationships between phenomena—articulated with flair and eloquence—nudged geography from classification toward a comparative study of the human and natural realms. One of Europe’s leading cartographers, August Petermann, opened his monumental Physical Atlas (1850) by quoting Humboldt’s elusive and ambitious goal. After passing through different levels of development, man would inevitably seek to “trace phenomena to the causes from which they spring.” It was this search for relationships that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century natural science.5 Humboldt gave natural scientists an analytical goal, and maps had an instrumental role in this pursuit. There are indications that others were simultaneously expanding the use of maps, as in John Wyld’s “Chart of the World Shewing the Religion, Population and Civilization of Each Country” (London, 1815). Wyld did not attempt to map the distribution of religious practice, yet his map is notable for removing extraneous information—even political boundaries—in order to map and correlate three classes of information: the number of inhabitants of different “population groups,” their prevailing religion, and his corresponding judgment on “degree of civilization.”6 Such experimentation developed slowly in the United States, in part because the information on which these maps could be based was limited. Humboldt not only framed science in a way that foregrounded maps, but also developed a new system of representing average temperature. The effort to establish patterns of climate began with Edmund Halley, who published the first meteorological chart in 1686. In 1817, Humboldt elaborated this technique of using lines to identify patterns of identical average temperatures (fig. 3.1). He termed these “isolines” and with them took the first step toward depicting patterns of temperature over time and space. Humboldt had long shown an interest in graphic knowledge for its capacity to “speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind,” and developed the chart in that spirit. These charts of temperature suggested important differences between the eastern and western sides of the Eurasian continent. Humboldt’s isolines also separated temperature from latitude, which enabled natural scientists to think about the correspondence between climate and other phenomena. Finally, isolines had the potential to reveal patterns that might otherwise remain unknown. They were a revelation to contemporaries, for they opened entirely new areas of inquiry concerning the influence of climate over the human and natural world.7 We might expect scientists to be the earliest adopters of Humboldt’s isotherms, but they first appeared in the school texts of William Channing Woodbridge and Emma Willard. Woodbridge had studied the sciences at Yale before a religious conversion led him to concentrate on theology with Timothy Dwight Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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3.1 “Carte des lignes Isotherms par M. A. de Humboldt,” from Alexander von Humboldt, Annales de chimie et de physique, second series, vol. 5 (1817), opposite 448. 17.5 × 23 cm.

in 1815. Like many of his contemporaries, Dwight was intensely concerned about the outbreak of disease and speculated that this was a function of the natural environment. As early as 1800, he noted that consumption was virtually nonexistent in upstate New York even while other illnesses flourished. Newcomers fell ill more often than longtime residents, and certain conditions appeared to exacerbate sickness in everyone. These clues suggested that geography, understood as the distribution of particular elements of the environment, was the source of disease and perhaps other problems. This essential dynamic was precisely what Humboldt would identify as the main goal of science: discerning the specific relationships between the natural and human world. Dwight used census reports, geographies, and histories as inventories of place, and he passed this practice of observation and the search for patterns on to Woodbridge.8 When Dwight died in 1817, Woodbridge accepted an invitation to join Thomas Gallaudet at the new American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford. Teaching the deaf may have encouraged Woodbridge’s interest in maps and graphs, for he was forced to teach and communicate with his students nonverbally. One method was to arrange chairs to represent the relative positions of various countries, thus teaching children about maps as a form of spatial arrangement. Woodbridge was so satisfied with his work with Gallaudet that he turned down a more lucrative and prestigious position at the College of William and Mary. When his health collapsed in the summer of 1820, he sought recovery in southern Europe and, while there, studied the teaching of local geography in order to improve the curriculum at the asylum. He returned in the summer of 1821 and spent the next three years writing geography texts that relied heavily on maps as mnemonic devices and ways to communicate information.9 This experimentation is evident in his “Chart of the Inhabited World” (fig. 3.2). Like Wyld, Woodbridge designed the map to evaluate and classify populations through three categories: “state of civilization,” religious practices, and forms of government. His map was no doubt Eurocentric, yet it was designed to do more than simply reproduce the landscape. Soon after, Woodbridge drew an “Isothermal Chart, or View of Climates & Productions” to supplement his Rudiments of Geography, on a New Plan, Designed to Assist the Memory by Comparison and Classification (fig. 3.3). The title of the text reflects his goal of using maps not just to record information, but to cultivate memory and convey relationships between variables and places. Woodbridge openly acknowledged his debt to Humboldt, both in the use of isotherms and in the integration of more than one type of information on the map. Here he integrated temperature lines with the limits of agricultural production, thus forging a new purpose for cartography. Notice how much information is absent. Rather than naming political or topographical divisions, the map isolates two classes of information—climate and local products—in order to correlate them. In this regard, Woodbridge transformed the Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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3.2 Legend from “Chart of the Inhabited World, Exhibiting the Prevailing Religion, Form of Government, Degree of Civilization, and Population of Each Country, by W. C. Woodbridge” (1821), from W. C. Woodbridge, School Atlas to Accompany Woodbridge’s Rudiments of Geography (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke & Sons, 1824). David Rumsey Collection. 23 × 29 cm. See website for entire image.

map from a descriptive into an analytical tool.10 The map integrated information and depicted relationships in order to explain problems of distribution, correlation, and causation that could not be fully conveyed—or even discovered— through narrative. Both Woodbridge and his collaborator Emma Willard were well regarded teachers and writers, so it may not surprise us that they were among the early adopters of Humboldt’s dynamic model of geography. In the 1820s and 1830s, this approach to geography spread in American schools, a result of new textbooks and the extension of geography into female academies by Woodbridge, Willard, and other educators.11 This regard for Humboldt was widely shared, for his ambitious goal of capturing the unity of the natural and human worlds made him a hero to scientists. Though he spent little time in the United States, he was the most respected scientist prior to the Civil War and at the center of a wide range of scientific and political networks. He developed a friendship with Albert Gallatin, who made one of the first maps of Indian tribes in North America in 1836, corresponded with Samuel F. B. Morse about the transatlantic cable, and shared his enthusiasm about westward expansion with George Bancroft. 84

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By the late 1840s, Humboldt reached the height of his scientific influence with a long-awaited study of the natural world, Kosmos.12 Humboldt asked Heinrich Berghaus—one of Europe’s leading cartographers—to design an atlas to accompany this magnum opus. He had corresponded with Berghaus since 1825 and was impressed by the latter’s mapmaking talents and his ability to evaluate geographical and statistical information. In 1827, Humboldt had encouraged Berghaus to create a new kind of atlas, one that would represent not only the physical landscape but also the distribution of plants, animals, and the races of man. Nothing came of this idea, but Humboldt approached him again in the 1840s. By that time, shading techniques allowed for increasingly precise depictions of relief and the distribution of natural features. The advent of lithography also made cartographic revision and experimentation significantly easier. After a series of delays, Berghaus produced the Physikalischer Atlas in two volumes, published in 1845 and 1848. It was a stunning achievement that captured physical geography through maps of rainfall, wind, temperature, geological features, animals, and plants, while human life was profiled through maps of race, ethnicity, occupation, and language. Inspired by Humboldt, the atlas set a new standard

3.3 Detail of “Isothermal Chart, or View of Climates & Productions; Drawn from the Accounts of Humboldt & Others, by W. C. Woodbridge” (1823), in Modern Atlas, on a New Plan, to Accompany the System of Universal Geography (Hartford, CT: Belknap & Hammersley, 1837). David Rumsey Collection. 22 × 30 cm. See website for entire image. Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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for depth, coverage, and the very meaning of cartography.13 While Berghaus was preparing this work, Alexander Keith Johnston published an English edition that distilled and revised the maps to create a more uniform and coherent atlas. Johnston cited Humboldt as his primary influence and featured the latter’s isotherms on a Mercator projection of the world, followed by charts of average temperature in various regions and abundant maps of the human and physical world that had been pioneered by Berghaus.14

Epidemics These European atlases showcased new maps at the same time that Americans were beginning to use thematic cartography to address one of the most urgent concerns of antebellum life. Prior to the advent of germ theory, maps figured prominently in the quest to understand epidemics, and “medical geography” reigned as the queen of the medical sciences.15 This interest was heightened by expansion into the relatively unknown lands of the West. The opening of territory for settlement raised questions about the human-environment relationship that maps were well poised to answer. Thus, epidemics generated new purposes for maps, and, in turn, these new maps widened the inquiry around diseases by analyzing their geographical distribution and potential causes. Disease was not new to the nineteenth century, nor was the use of maps in epidemiology. The phrase “medical geography” also predates disease maps, which suggests that attention to the spatial patterns of disease occurred independent of maps. But it was epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, rather than endemic diseases such as tuberculosis, that stimulated mapmaking. Only in the nineteenth century did disease maps constitute a genre, and medical geography a field.16 Yellow fever appeared in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century and, by the 1820s, had become an almost annual event. While northern cities managed to eradicate the disease within a few decades, the South continued to suffer. By the early nineteenth century, it was clear that yellow fever was not passed between people, and this assumption shaped the response to cholera when it swept through the country in 1832, 1849, and 1866.17 It also stimulated the use of maps to sort through the potential environmental causes of epidemic diseases. Doubts about the contagious nature of yellow fever and cholera were actually reinforced by maps, for as these became commonly used to analyze epidemics they strengthened the search for environmental causes. Similarly, as “anticontagionists” became more confident and vocal, maps became the way to prove that these diseases were not transmitted through human contact. So while maps did not always convince medical men that epidemics were rooted in the environment, their spatial logic and precise arrangement of environmental factors seemed to hold great promise for epidemiology in general. Before microbiology 86

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and germ theory fully explained yellow fever and cholera, maps appeared to be the most reliable and revealing ways to represent the range of possible influences in an outbreak. Maps of disease were simultaneously illustrations of data and tools of analysis.18 Among the earliest examples of this was Amariah Brigham’s use of a map to track the path of cholera around the world over a fifteen-year period (fig. 3.4). On first glance, the map appears to mark trade routes rather than a deadly dis-

3.4 Detail of “Chart Shewing the Progress of Spasmodic Cholera,” from Amariah Brigham, M.D., A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera (Hartford, CT: H. and F. J. Huntington, 1832). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 29 × 48 cm. See website for entire image. Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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ease. By drawing a line to connect the outbreaks, Brigham implied that the disease was transmitted along routes between these densely populated cities and regions. In this way, the map fueled the debate over contagion and prompted him to recommend the dispersal of the population and improved sanitary conditions.19 Brigham was one of many who used maps to make sense of cholera in the summer of 1832, and most of them depicted a disease with a clear path of transmission. Such a suggestion greatly irritated Philadelphian Henry Schenck Tanner, the nation’s foremost cartographer. The devastation brought by cholera that summer prompted a slew of medical studies, but he found none that addressed its geographical and statistical dimension with any precision. He reserved his strongest criticism for the likes of Brigham, whose maps implied that cholera had a clear path. Tanner sought to rectify this erroneous cartographic reasoning by creating disease maps of his own.20 Tanner published his short statistical study of cholera in October 1832. In strictly chronological order, he listed each city visited by the outbreak, its duration, and the number afflicted and killed. Where the data was incomplete, he acknowledged as much. He then turned to cartography. Tanner adapted two maps that he had published in 1830, a map of New York State and his well-known “Map of Canals & Railroads of the United States” (see website). On these two maps he applied red dots to towns and cities that had been afflicted in the summer of 1832. This exemplifies the analytical purpose of cartography, for he used them not to illustrate a theory, but to analyze the epidemic. On both, he recorded only the verifiable knowledge—that is, the cities affected—but made a point of not connecting the dots between these outbreaks. In fact, it was this prior error that inspired him to create a world map “exhibiting the progress of epidemic cholera” (see website). He used color to denote four geographical phases of the disease, from its inception in India in 1817 in green to its arrival in the United States in red. In this way, he identified the march of the disease without suggesting a clear path of transmission as Brigham and others had done. Like Brigham, Tanner was also thinking about the map as an instrument of time as well as place, for both men used maps to record the chronology of the disease. And Tanner’s decision to use a railroad and canal map indicates that he also suspected that there was some relationship between transportation routes and cholera.21 Tanner sent copies of his maps to the surgeon general and Samuel Jackson at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. Jackson had taken a leading role in the 1832 outbreak of cholera, and, throughout the summer, he received letters from across the country seeking advice regarding treatment and prevention. He and his colleagues at the college firmly believed that cholera was a function of poor sanitation. These beliefs were actually confirmed by Tanner’s maps, which they took to indicate that the disease was conveyed through miasmas emanating from

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fetid canals and rivers. As John Osborne has noted, this conviction prevented Jackson from seeing that the map suggested another possibility: that the disease was borne by the water itself.22 Not for another twenty years would water be implicated as the source of the disease, and not until 1883 would a waterborne agent be definitively identified. These early maps of cholera marked the incidence and path of disease in order to search for its causes. Among the most ambitious of these was made by Heinrich Berghaus, which marked the several epidemics around the world on a single map. By including Humboldt’s isotherms, Berghaus showed an interest both in the incidence of disease and potential factors, such as climate. In other words, his map was designed as a tool of epidemiology.23 Brigham, Tanner, and Berghaus were mapping disease on a regional, national, and international scale, implicitly arguing that epidemic disease demanded a concerted response. But the most common use of cartography to investigate disease was undertaken in far more circumscribed areas. David Reese marked the locations of the infected in New York City in order to demonstrate that cholera appeared simultaneously in separate locations and therefore could not be not contagious. A few years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes speculated that weather influenced the outbreak of intermittent fever in New England. He examined historical accounts of fever over the prior century to locate their points of origin, then incorporated this data onto a map. He cited Thomas Sydenham, the seventeenth-century physician who emphasized the relationship between air, soil, seasonal cycles, and disease. But his map also reflected his quantitative training in Paris and the model advanced by Humboldt. By locating past outbreaks, Holmes could ask whether the fever concentrated in certain areas, such as streams, lakes, inlets, or coasts. With this modest step, he engaged in a mode of cartographic analysis that was noticed by many, including Lorin Blodget, the leading climatologist of the 1850s.24 In the 1830s and 1840s, these maps of disease remained rare and relatively simple because they depended on the availability of data. The army had begun to record temperature, winds, and rainfall in order to consider the influence of place and weather on the health of soldiers. Yet it would be years before scientists and medical men had enough data to systematically correlate disease with weather and to do so with print technologies that enabled maps to become practical instruments of epidemiology. By the time of the second cholera epidemic in 1849, assumptions about environmental causes within the medical community overshadowed any lingering suspicion that the disease resulted from moral failing. Many cities on the western frontier with inadequate water supplies were hit hardest by this outbreak, and this in turn reaffirmed the belief in environmental causes.25 The persistent mystery as to the origin and transmission of cholera prompted several more geo-

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graphical studies of the disease in the late 1840s and early 1850s. By 1849, it was also clear that sanitation affected cholera, and most physicians believed that its primary cause was atmospheric or “miasmic.” But beyond this, there was no consensus, and only a few suggested the possibility of a “micro” organism within the air or the water. The possible connections between place and health gained currency as epidemics became more common. Here the study of climate was central and referred to daily and hourly temperature, seasonal changes, air moisture, and precipitation. Climate also undergirded the concept of “salubrity,” the elusive quality of a healthful environment that was keenly sought by a population constantly on guard against the next mortal epidemic.26 In this context, maps became one of the most promising ways to hypothesize about contagion and transmission. Most of these were city plans that recorded the incidence of cholera or yellow fever in a discrete area. For instance, in 1849, the panicked leadership of Boston commissioned a report on cholera that located the homes of those admitted to the city’s cholera hospital. By mapping the “course of cholera in Boston,” the city physician was able to determine that the hospital was not the source of the outbreak, but simply located near a cluster where several fatal cases originated (see website). The report also included places of birth and ages of the victims alongside meteorological tables that allowed viewers to investigate the role of climate. By integrating these variables, the map indicated that the best response would be sanitary reforms rather than quarantine. In the wake of the 1849 cholera epidemic, other cities undertook their own “sanitary surveys.”27 What made a place conducive to health or disease was an open-ended problem that involved both the natural and human environment: elevation, river systems, roads, hospitals, and sources of drinking water. Indeed, “salubrity” and “medical topography” were terms that implied the importance of geography and spatial relationships. Consider Thomas Buckler’s study of cholera in Baltimore. As the city physician, Buckler designed a map of the medical topography of the city and also of an almshouse, which he believed to be the source of the disease’s “spontaneous origin” and growth. The map led Buckler to conclude that cholera was miasmic, for it concentrated within a section of the almshouse and improved sanitation seemed to weaken the disease (fig. 3.5). Charged with preventing another outbreak, he turned to cartography in order to discern its causes.28 He suspected a relationship between malaria (fever) and cholera within the almshouse. This prompted him to mark areas of “intermittent and remittent fever” as well as cholera on the map in order to seek connections between the two. Some of his conclusions were mistaken, such as the connection between fever and fishing, agriculture, and digging iron ore. But the map also enabled him to isolate cases near standing water and away from the almshouse, which led him to conclude that impure water “acts as one of the strongest predisposing causes of disease.” Buckler recommended an 90

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3.5 Detail of “Map of the Medical Topography of Baltimore, 1851,” from Th. H. Buckler, A History of Epidemic Cholera (Baltimore: Printed by James Lucas, Corner of Calvert-st. and Lovely Lane, 1851). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 30 × 46 cm. See website for entire image and Buckler’s map of the almshouse.

underground sewage system and the relocation of the city’s drinking water, and it was the map that brought him to these conclusions.29 Three years later, British physicians disproved the miasmic theory by definitively linking cholera to contaminated water. John Snow has long been celebrated as the mastermind of this breakthrough. Yet, as the cholera maps of Boston and Baltimore show, he was one of many on both sides of the Atlantic who used maps to analyze disease, thereby making them instruments of etiology rather than just modes of illustration.30 In the late 1840s, William Farr speculated that cholera was connected to the water supply by using maps, tables, and diagrams to dissect the outbreak in England. Similarly, August Petermann—who had worked with Berghaus and Johnston—used new shading techniques to represent the distribution of cholera in the British Isles in both absolute and relative terms.31 The maps of Farr, Petermann, and Buckler reveal the intense cartographic attention given to cholera, yet it is Snow’s map that is remembered, for it elegantly (if partially) suggested a causal connection between the water supply and the disease. By contrast, Buckler’s map suggested water as one of several possible sources of cholera. Snow actually made several attempts to map cholera prior to 1854. In 1849, he marked the density of cholera cases on a map that also identified elevation relative to the River Thames.32 This implied a relationship between elevation and disease, which reflected the belief that riverbanks generated miasmas. Ironically, however, this map supported two distinct theories: that cholera was caused by water (since dense areas of infection were adjacent to the Thames) and miasma (since dense areas of infection were also areas of low elevation along the river). Another of Snow’s early attempts to trace cholera on a map was overloaded with data, such as administrative districts, parks, buildings, streets, water sources, and afflicted homes. The map included too much information and thus could not define the problem with any clarity. Soon after, Snow studied the densest neighborhood of the epidemic, where he tested this theory by limiting his map to streets, households of mortal infection, and sources of drinking water. In mapping these three variables, he noticed clusters around the Broad Street Pump. His map was not conclusive, and he was not the first to link the disease to the water supply. Yet his name remains familiar because he demonstrated that maps could be used not only to illustrate problems, but to solve them. Snow came to his conclusions through the cartographic arrangement of evidence. The hope that cartography might explain and thereby cure disease was a seductive one. The best-known medical geographer in antebellum America was Daniel Drake, who began his lifelong study of disease with an 1810 account of Cincinnati. Decades later, he planned a medical geography of the entire Ohio Valley, for he believed that environment determined serial outbreaks. His ambition was to create “a picture” of the distribution of disease in the newly settled 92

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interior in order to ask if plague, fever, gout, scurvy, and even mania might be endemic to certain regions. He used maps to investigate why certain diseases appeared in certain climates, elevations, or “states of society.” This interest in the interplay between weather, elevation, and hydrography prompted him to map crops, lowlands, rivers, and settlements for St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and other emerging cities of the West.33 But Drake’s most revealing map is so modest that it might be missed altogether: a small fold-out map of the Mississippi Valley without any civil or political divisions. The map marks only the river systems, for Drake believed that watersheds played a crucial role in salubrity. He used this map to invite “more gifted medical historians” to consider disease as a function of latitude, altitude, climate, and other elements of geography.34 Drake believed that disease was a function of the environment, and he produced the map with this in mind. Yet he drew it to investigate epidemics rather than to illustrate a foregone conclusion. In other words, he included this spare little map to open inquiry and thus stripped it to its most basic elements. This realization that maps could analyze as well as describe the landscape—hypothesize as well as summarize—allowed thematic mapping to flourish. Drake’s task could not have been more urgent, for just as he completed his study in 1849, cholera swept through Cincinnati and killed several friends and family members. His study was well received among medical men as well as those interested in climate and weather. Sir William Osler considered him the most important physician in the American West. The New Orleans physician Edward Barton was equally impressed by Drake’s model of medical geography. Since 1833, Barton had adopted this same approach to the study of yellow fever: he described the city’s topography and geography and measured mortality rates against temperature ranges, the origin of those afflicted, and other potential causes. All of this made for a rich statistical study, but because Barton could not visualize the spatial relationship between these factors, he could not analyze their role in the outbreaks.35 Then, in the 1840s, he turned to maps and graphic knowledge to pinpoint the origin and spread of yellow fever as well as the sources of salubrity. Yellow fever had become an almost annual affliction in New Orleans, compounded by the second national outbreak of cholera in 1849. In response, the newly established American Medical Association asked physicians around the nation to report on public hygiene in their respective cities. Barton took an explicitly geographical approach to this task. He profiled the city’s location, situation, layout, temperature and rainfall averages, and wind patterns. He then integrated these data points with “vital statistics” from the census of 1840. This led him to ask whether New Orleans was unhealthy “by nature,” meaning that its geographical situation— proximity to the river and swamps, poor drainage, humidity—might doom it to Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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recurrent epidemics. He speculated that yellow fever was miasmic, worsened by insufficient trees and intemperance. To test his theory, he drew a cross section of the bayou and Mississippi River drainage systems.36 Two years later, Barton reprised an earlier study for the Louisiana State Medical Society by evaluating the city’s public hygiene through statistics regarding life expectancy and epidemic disease. Barton’s graphs correlated epidemics with other variables by dividing the afflicted along lines of race, sex, month of mortality, and seasonal changes in wind, temperature, and moisture. His increasingly elaborate studies of disease and public health in New Orleans reflected the sense of urgency brought by yellow fever and the damage it inflicted on the city. He insisted that statistical knowledge—of the human and natural environment— could point to the cause of disease, radically improve the city’s health, and restore New Orleans to its rightful place as the commercial heart of the Union.37 By 1852, Barton was translating the returns of the Seventh Census into “Sanitary Maps” of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. On these, he marked and measured deaths attributable to infectious (“zymotic”) disease in an effort to improve public health. These maps were published by the AMA and reflect its early concern with medical geography. Barton also sent his maps to the superintendent of the census to show how enumeration data might be properly exploited and expanded to improve public health.38 Yet despite his efforts, New Orleans experienced its worst outbreak of yellow fever in 1853. Civic and medical leaders were unable to stem, much less cure, the disease, which killed ten thousand that summer, more than three times the number in 1847. Thousands more fled the city to escape a terrifying epidemic that ravaged impoverished and respectable neighborhoods alike. The fear of damage to the city’s commercial life prompted doctors and journalists—the two groups best able to inform the public—to remain quiet or to downplay the crisis. Even worse, as Ari Kelman writes, the epidemic defied previous experience, “leapfrogging” around the city in a way that ignored spatial boundaries and “rendered private spaces public.”39 After the epidemic subsided with the frost of autumn, Barton mounted his most ambitious effort yet to catalog the disease and its potential causes. This study extended his previous research on yellow fever, yet was his first attempt to study the disease through a map in order to discern its origins (fig. 3.6).40 While his 1852 maps measured the rates of death by county, here the map measured affliction in order to investigate the behavior of disease. Perhaps the unpredictability of the outbreak prompted Barton’s turn to cartography. The map is complex, even confusing, for it includes so many potential causes. But his assumption that the disease was miasmic explains why he included all possible sources of the outbreak. For instance, he emphasized drainage as a potential influence, though his map reveals that the outbreaks continued even after extensive efforts were made to rid the city of excess moisture. He also marked a slew of other “nuisances,” 94

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3.6 “Sanitary Map of the City of New Orleans,” from E. H. Barton, The Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, Contained in the Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 41 × 55 cm.

such as soil disturbances, cemeteries, slaughterhouses, livery stables, manufacturing, unfilled lots, crowded boarding houses, and open markets. Nothing escaped his eye as a potential cause of yellow fever. At the same time, a critical mass of environmental data collected by the army and the Smithsonian Institution allowed him to systematically consider climate as an influence, primarily rainfall, air moisture, temperatures, and prevailing winds. Barton’s conclusions were rooted in place, a product of cartographic thinking. He did not believe that yellow fever was spread through human contact, but arose from a combination of bad air and certain conditions of the terrain. Yet he allowed the map to raise other possibilities, such as the arrival of the disease vector through the port. He took pains to map the appearance of two ships— the Northhampton and the Augusta—which coincided with the outbreak on the waterfront in May (fig. 3.7).41 Barton even drew straight lines connecting the ships to the first appearance of the disease and wavy lines to identify the doctors who treated these cases. Here the map opened up inquiry rather than illustrating prior conclusions.

3.7 Detail from Barton, “Sanitary Map of the City of New Orleans” (1855). 96

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Barton also attempted to integrate census statistics onto the map in order to visualize the density of population settlement. This was so important that he designed the map to show the incidence of yellow fever as a ratio of the population in each district and ward rather than as an absolute number. In other words, he aimed to visualize the relative effect of the disease, evaluating its incidence but also the damage it wrought. This step was missed by John Snow, who identified the absolute number of deaths from cholera in south London on his map. Instead, Barton designed the map as a scientific instrument, by accounting for areas where yellow fever had a more devastating proportional impact on the population in different parts of the city. He went further in this statistical approach with his “Chart Exhibiting the Annual Mortality of New Orleans” (see website). This chart followed the incidence of yellow fever in the city from 1787 to 1854, dissecting the disease in time as the map had done in space. He marked the chronology of events in the city in order to search for possible factors: the digging of trenches and canals, exposure of swamps, the arrival of hurricanes and heavy rains, war, upsurge in population, paving of streets, or the construction of railroads. Below this timeline, he placed the mortality data in chronological order to study the seasonal behavior of the disease. Taken together, Barton’s map, chart, and timeline indicate his attempt to study the disease from three angles: spatial, historical, and seasonal. Census Superintendent J. C. G. Kennedy cited Barton’s graphs and maps as prime examples of the relevance of the census and justifications for expanding it into the realm of public health.42 By commissioning and publishing the study, the Louisiana State Medical Society assumed the disease was a social, rather than an individual, problem. And by mapping the disease Barton implied the necessity of governance. To look at his map is to see the disease as a threat to the city’s survival. His nomenclature of “nuisances” implied that threats were a product of human activity rather than a permanent condition. By extension, the effort to map this threat to New Orleans implied that the city could be improved through a collective response.43 Through his maps and graphs, Barton broadened medical inquiry, for maps were visual records that could be understood by nonspecialists. He also relied on graphic knowledge to test theories and generate theories of transmission. His determination to map conditions in New Orleans put him in the anticontagionist school, for those who suspected yellow fever was spread through human contact did not initially see how cartography could aid investigation. The path of disease was known, and, thus, a map could only trace its appearance rather than discern its causes. Conversely, those using maps to study disease believed it was rooted in environmental factors. Some have argued that, in the case of yellow fever, maps were simply illustrations and maps added nothing to epidemiology.44 Strictly speaking, this was true, for the disease vector would not be discovered until the early twentieth century. In other words, maps did not solve the mystery of yellow Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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fever. Yet the proliferation of these maps indicates that they had become a powerful mode of communication and tool of analysis. Drake, Buckler, and Barton believed that cartography could advance epidemiology. Moreover, the prevalence of disease mapping contributed to the belief that epidemics were a social problem, precisely the assumption that undergirds the concept of public health. The timing here is important, for it was prior to the growth of microbiology that climate—and therefore maps—would receive its closest attention in epidemiology. The army’s decision to begin recording weather data in 1814 and to create the Office of the Surgeon General grew out of the quest to combat disease and promote a healthier military. In 1852, the surgeon general commissioned a study on the “medical topography” of military posts in order to discern the local causes of diseases. Just three years later, the AMA followed suit by launching investigations of the relationship between environment and epidemic disease in individual states and territories.45 The relationship between disease and environment—especially climate—was simply assumed. The AMA also began to collaborate with both the surgeon general and the Smithsonian to access the trove of environmental data that those agencies had painstakingly collected.46 As medical geography peaked in the 1850s, so too did the reliance on maps as the most promising methods of discovering the source and behavior of epidemic disease. With the advent of germ theory, this emphasis on medical geography necessarily declined. The widespread attention to sanitary surveys and environmental data also trained medical men to think about the population in terms of its “vital statistics.”47 Given the ubiquity of statistics today and the long history of the census, we might assume that local, state, and federal governments have always collected information about the population. But these efforts were a response to the nineteenth-century optimism about statistics. The military—the first organization to systematically collect weather data—was also the first to gather population data. Soon thereafter, Lemuel Shattuck organized the American Statistical Association in 1839 and, as head of the Massachusetts Sanitary Commission, designed a law mandating the collection of vital statistics that became a model for other states in the 1840s. By the 1850s, the Smithsonian announced its intention to collect and analyze similar information regarding birth, life, and mortality in collaboration with AMA.

The Pursuit of Climatology States and institutions gathered vital statistics for the same reason that they collected environmental data: it promised to explain patterns and uncover laws of health and disease. The assumed connection between environment and disease

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intensified the study of weather in the antebellum era and catalyzed thematic mapping. Meteorology also became a kind of holy grail by the 1840s because it promised to advance expansion and agricultural development and to make life more predictable and productive. The nature and behavior of storms produced an intense debate in the 1840s, one that had clear implications for those who hoped to anticipate severe weather with some reliability. The field of meteorology became especially exciting when Humboldt framed it as a way for geography to make a more analytical contribution to natural science. Yet the study of weather demanded extensive cooperation in amassing data, for temperature and rainfall needed to be observed over long periods of time and across wide distances. This cooperation was in short supply when the agencies involved were themselves competing for congressional support. Ironically, this rivalry between federal agencies accelerated the study of meteorology in the 1850s. The collection of weather data had its origins in the War of 1812, when James Tilton was named chief of the Army Medical Department. In 1814, he ordered surgeons at posts around the country to record rain, wind, and temperature on a daily (sometimes an hourly) basis. Though compliance was irregular, this marks the earliest moment of systematic weather observation. The fact that the military spearheaded the collection of environmental data indicates that this was a national concern involving matters of both governance and security. The military sought to advance its knowledge of the distant reaches of the country and to make these areas healthful outposts for their soldiers and the general population. In 1818, the army regularized these observations within the Office of the Surgeon General. When it began to publish this data in the early 1820s in its Meteorological Register, Humboldt praised it as a model of scientific fieldwork.48 This military’s collection of environmental data was augmented by farmers and private agencies in the 1820s, and, over time, these observations formed a vast—if inconsistent—body of data for the pursuit of meteorology. In 1842, Army Surgeon General Thomas Lawson asked physician Samuel Forry to write a medical geography based on this information. This report was hailed as the first American study of climatology, and, though based on partial data, it established his reputation among medical men and scientists concerned with disease. The report also featured the first isotherm map devoted to the United States (fig. 3.8). Forry drew bold lines to show patterns of temperature across the eastern states, then dotted lines to speculate about the West. The lines integrated the nation into a single entity and connected disparate regions. Elevation was minimized in order to show the clear connections between East and West. Forry also deliberately downplayed state boundaries so as not to detract from patterns of climate. And by lettering forts more prominently than cities, he emphasized the military dimension of climatology as well as the national—rather than local

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3.8 Detail of “Plate 1,” from Samuel Forry, The Climate of the United States and Its Endemic Influences: Based Chiefly on the Records of the Medical Department and Adjutant General’s Office, United States Army (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1842). 12 × 19.5 cm.

or regional—importance of the enterprise. It was the military, after all, that had pioneered the data collection, but Forry was well aware that climatology had implications far beyond the protection of soldiers. He invoked Humboldt to emphasize that isotherms promised to uncover relationships between temperature and other phenomena. These would be used not only by medical men, but political economists as well, for climate “modifies the whole physical organization of man, and consequently influences the progress of civilization.” Countries without summer tended to be “destitute of taste and genius,” while those without winter lacked “true valor, loyalty, and patriotism.”49 Forry quickly found geopolitical applications for Humboldt’s cartographic model. One of the most enthusiastic importers of these isotherms was Arnold Guyot, a Swiss-born scientist trained in Berlin by Karl Ritter and influenced by Humboldt. From them, Guyot learned to conceive of science as the study of divine design and geography in terms of interdependence, as the “strong ties which mutually bind man to nature . . . and those influences which stamp the races and nations each with a character of their own.” Guyot emigrated to the United States 100

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in 1848 and gave a series of lectures in Cambridge that appeared as Earth and Man: Physical Geography in Relation to the History of Mankind. This secured his reputation as one of the nation’s preeminent natural scientists and made him a conduit for Humboldtian ideas, especially the concept of geography as the study, rather than the description, of humans in their environment. This model of geography was not just facilitated by maps, but made possible by it.50 For example, Guyot compiled a physical map of the world that stripped away unnecessary information, even words, in order to “speak to the eye” as a picture might. By using colors—blue for oceans, green for lowlands, white for elevated and table lands, and brown for mountains—he showed the basic features of the earth “at a single glance.” He paired this map with a “Map of the Distribution of Rain” that was taken from Berghaus (see website). This used shading to indicate the quantity of precipitation in a way that quickly caught on. Like Humboldt’s isotherms, the rain map enabled geographers and others to think about the place of humans in the environment. Maps of rainfall and temperature were simultaneously representations of data and instruments of analysis, for they opened questions and suggested causal relationships. Guyot’s work encouraged American scientists to create more detailed versions of the same for their own country. Meteorology was particularly well suited to this type of cartographic experimentation. In 1847, Joseph Henry declared the “problem of American Storms” to be the Smithsonian’s highest priority, particularly hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, and winter storms. When Guyot arrived in the United States the following year, he quickly joined with Henry to advance the Smithsonian’s study of meteorology. Henry immediately began to compile the data collected by the military and civilian farmers around the country. The storm controversy was the primary motivation for this research, and contemporary epidemics and westward expansion further heightened the demand for a national system of meteorology. Yet the project was complicated by dissent within the institution and rivalries with other federal agencies such as the army and the Naval Observatory. In early 1851, Henry hired Lorin Blodget to help Guyot organize the temperature readings that had been gathered over several decades. Blodget had already made several maps of physical geography and also mapped the path of a recent storm in a way that impressed Henry. Perhaps inspired by his approval, Blodget arranged to show these maps to the Cleveland meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1852. A cholera outbreak cancelled the meeting, but Henry enthusiastically forwarded the maps to British scientific agencies, offered Blodget a raise, and widened his responsibilities.51 In 1854, Guyot was appointed professor of physical geography and geology at Princeton (one of the first academic geography positions in the nation), and his departure from the Smithsonian further expanded Blodget’s role in the Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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project. Yet the urgency surrounding meteorology could not overcome existing tensions between Henry and Blodget, which began when the latter delivered his lecture to the AAAS without crediting the Smithsonian. After Henry came into conflict with Assistant Secretary Charles Jewett over the future of the institution, the board fired the latter. Henry suspected that Blodget’s loyalties lay with Jewett and asked the board to investigate this perceived insubordination. The struggle between the two men also stemmed from Blodget’s role in the project itself. Henry considered Blodget a clerk who disseminated the readings to more qualified scientists, while Blodget wanted to analyze the data. In June 1854, as their relationship worsened, the commissioner of patents asked to publish Blodget’s research on climate patterns, for it had clear implications for agriculture in the West. Henry objected, arguing that the agencies responsible for collecting the data should be the first to present its results. But he could not prevent the commissioner from publishing Blodget’s work, which included extensive data on temperature and rainfall.52 In October, the conflict came to a head when Henry locked Blodget out of his office. Surgeon General Thomas Lawson immediately hired Blodget to write a report based on the army’s data, which became the nation’s most extensive effort to map and study climate to date.53 The report featured Blodget’s seasonal and annual average rain and temperature maps, which constituted a comprehensive atlas of the weather and the latest meteorological intelligence (fig. 3.9). The maps were among the first created by Julius Bien, one of the best known map lithographers of the nineteenth century (see website). The publication of the maps enraged Henry, for they were based on data that he considered the province of the Smithsonian. Henry accused Lawson and Blodget of intellectual poaching, dishonesty, and shoddy research. Lawson shot back that the data was owned by the army and merely on loan to the Smithsonian. Furthermore, Lawson wrote, as the surgeon general, he never expected to get into the business of mapmaking and hired Blodget only after the Smithsonian failed to produce anything. Finally, Lawson reminded Henry, isotherm maps were hardly new, for Humboldt’s chart of 1817 and Forry’s map of 1842 meant that Blodget’s was the latest in a long line of cartographic experimentation. Henry’s anger, however, reveals that the maps were important. Forry’s map had been preliminary and purely speculative in the western half of the continent. The army’s 1855 report was the first of its kind to incorporate maps, and Lawson must have known that they would draw attention.54 Blodget compiled the isotherm charts from the perspective of the military, for most cities are absent while dozens of forts are identified (see website). His report also reveals the federal leadership in meteorological science, for the effort to map climate was undertaken primarily to advance the health of soldiers and as a tool for researching the nature of storms. Blodget’s temperature charts 102

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3.9 “Isothermal Chart. Mean Distribution of Temperature for the Summer, . . . Designed and Prepared by Lorin Blodget, from Army Meteorological Register: For Twelve Years, from 1843 to 1854 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, Public Printer, 1855). 24 × 51.5 cm.

and rainfall maps (fig. 3.10) were a kind of science in and of themselves, for they enabled comparisons to be made between regions and introduced new ways to investigate patterns of weather and climate. Far more detailed than the isoline charts of Forry or Woodbridge, Blodget’s revealed a nation of complexity. He demonstrated how geographically proximate areas might be climatologically distinct. Conversely, his maps and charts connected geographically distant regions that might have similar climates. The maps highlighted discontinuities—such as the distribution of rain—but also patterns of continuity, such as temperature. Isotherms also unhinged geography from latitude, for similarities in climate might connect distinct regions and thereby challenge assumptions generated by traditional maps. In other words, climate and rainfall maps opened up the possibility for identifying relationships that might be obscured or invisible on topographic maps. Blodget’s maps gave an original view of the country, one organized not according to boundaries and topography but moisture and temperature.55 When placed alongside his rainfall maps, Blodget’s temperature charts suggested much about the future of agriculture and settlement. They revealed stark differences between East and West, but also intense variation within the West. Blodget’s notes on the map go beyond the measurement of average temperature, for he identified the points of maximum temperature east of the Rockies and the “line of excessive summer temperature for the altitude.” Here he was observing different temperature dynamics and patterns between the East and West. Similarly, he identified a relatively discrete area marked “arid plains” in order to challenge existing generalizations of the Interior West as a “Great American Desert.” As indicated by the rainfall map, the West clearly included arid regions, but it simultaneously revealed much more variation than had been assumed given Forry’s earlier projections. The temperature charts and rainfall maps also represented seasonal and annual averages in an accessible way, which made them highly popular in a country hungry for information about the West (see website). When seen together, Blodget’s seasonal maps enabled viewers to unlock the mysteries of the North American interior, both in the United States and Canada, where even less was known about the nuances of climate.56 While the army staked a claim to meteorology, Matthew Maury—superintendent of the Naval Observatory—announced that the navy would expand its own system of climatic observation. Maury initially ceded the study of weather over land to Henry and the Smithsonian but, by the 1850s, wanted the observatory to become the chief agency of American meteorology. Adding insult to injury, Maury praised Blodget’s report when it was published. In light of this, Henry felt substantial pressure to advance or abandon the Smithsonian’s Meteorological Project and convinced Guyot to return and collaborate with James Coffin, who had recently broken ground in the study of wind patterns.57 But Henry was frustrated by their slow progress and, in the meantime, published his own study of 104

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3.10 “Hyetal or Rain Chart: Mean Distribution of Precipitation for the Year, . . . Designed and Prepared by Lorin Blodget, from Army Meteorological Register: For Twelve Years, from 1843 to 1854 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, Public Printer, 1855). 24 × 51.5 cm.

3.11 “Wind and Timber Map of the United States” (ca. 1856), from Joseph Henry, “Meteorology in Its Connection with Agriculture,” in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 30 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1887), 288. 10.5 × 16.5 cm.

meteorology. His report generated significant interest, and this prompted him to develop maps that would speak to the unique problems of the American interior. He eagerly discussed the idea for his maps with fellow scientists, with noteworthy results (fig. 3.11). Notice his integration of different classes of information to measure the future of western agriculture. He shaded the presence or absence of timber and distinguished between winds “bearing moisture” and those “accompanied by dryness.” He also measured the arability of land by identifying “sterile” lands that required irrigation. He used the map to synthesize precipitation, winds, and timber, thereby analyzing agricultural potential rather than representing the terrain. For this reason, his maps were widely noticed and informed the debate over the future of the arid West.58 In 1857, Blodget published an amplified version of his earlier report for the surgeon general. This was the first comprehensive study of American climatology, and Blodget acknowledged Humboldt as his model. In this single volume, he profiled the climatic patterns across the country and elaborated the maps that

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he had drawn for the army: a chart of average temperatures for each season, one of the annual average temperature, a map of average rainfall for each season, and one for the year as a whole. This made it a landmark in the study of weather but also in mapping. Blodget invoked both Barton and Drake, for epidemic disease gave his study particular relevance. He also promoted the agricultural potential of the North American interior by stressing the sufficient rain and temperature in the northern Great Plains, and his isotherms were quickly adopted in Canada to promote western settlement.59 Isolines were the most dramatic cartographic innovations in the study of the natural world, for they collapsed complex and unwieldy data into a usable, visual format. But experimentation was evident in other areas as well. In Europe, August Petermann created original maps of literacy, slavery, and the location of Native Americans in 1855, all of which were based on the US Census of 1850. The following year he published fifteen maps of American agriculture and ranching in his journal of geographical knowledge, just as scientists in the United States were also beginning to adopt maps to profile particular aspects of the environment. Blodget mapped climate and rainfall by 1855, with more elaborate maps made by Charles Schott between 1868 and 1874. Edward Hitchcock developed a map of American geology by 1853. Henry mapped climate in relation to agriculture by 1859 and hired James Graham Cooper to map forests and vegetation at the same time. Enormous advances were also made in topographical maps of the American West in the 1850s. Considered together, these constitute a remarkable collection of cartographic breakthroughs at midcentury. Henry even proposed a physical atlas of the United States, and, though this project was derailed by the sectional crisis, it reveals his estimation of thematic mapping as a way to make sense of the natural world.60 These maps enabled scientific and political elites to see the nation through different lenses and raised exciting possibilities for reform, rationalization, and control over the environment. As explained in the next chapter, maps of geology, climatology, and soils could isolate areas where cotton could grow, no small matter in a decade of intense strife over the expansion of slavery. Maps of storms, winds, and rain promised to make life more predictable and productive. All of this explains why geography dominated American science in the first seven decades of the nineteenth century. Conceived in Humboldtian fashion and drawing upon maps, geography was poised to uncover the laws of the natural world.61 The enthusiasm in the nation’s capital for these new maps was palpable. Late in 1856, Henry invited the German geographer Johann Georg Kohl to assess American cartography before an audience at the Smithsonian. Kohl was deeply impressed by the experimentation he had witnessed. Maps now measured the

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depth of the oceans, the pattern of winds, and the structure of geology; they profiled the distribution of crime, disease, manners, languages, and race. While in earlier eras a “map” connoted political boundaries or topographical features, now it could organize and divide the world in valuable, practical, and original ways. The effect was nothing less than an intellectual revolution, Kohl insisted, for it changed the very structure of knowledge. Why should we be satisfied with the mere outlines of the political boundaries of states, provinces, counties, and cities, when the Indian tribes, European races, languages, customs, manners, crimes, diseases, &c., are equally subject to geographical distribution, and can be delineated with the same precision and clearness?

This creativity might even force a redefinition of cartography, for each new map—whether geological, botanical, zoological, or ethnographic—“inaugurated a discovery of America in a new sense.”62

The “Washington Map of the United States” These cartographic breakthroughs were boldly publicized by Matthew Maury, superintendent of the Naval Observatory, on a massive wall map measuring over five feet wide and five feet high. Maury issued the first edition of the “Washington Map of the United States” in 1860, an assertion of the nation’s unity, strength, and progress at a moment of supreme instability (see website). The map went through multiple editions during the war, but the basic template remained the same. It was dominated by a large map of the United States and Mexico that marked both physical and political geography. On the initial edition, the national map at the center featured colored counties of the settled East that contrasted with the larger territorial divisions of the West. Through this shading, progress seems to march across the continent. The map betrayed no hint of the sectional crisis and, in fact, is surrounded by overt Unionist statements. George Washington’s home would not become an official national memorial until several decades later, yet a picture of Mount Vernon is featured at the top of the map. To the right is a drawing of the completed US Capitol, though it was still under construction at the time. This nationalist message was underscored by an image of the proposed Washington Monument, and by portraits of previous presidents that bordered the entire map. The 1861 edition also proudly listed the population data from the census of 1860, well in advance of its release to the public. To the left of the map is a chart of religious affiliation in the country, paired with a diagram that attempted to make sense of the dizzying

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particularities of local time in an era before the adoption of standardized time zones.63 But the real innovations on the “Washington Map” are actually at its edges. The top center of the 1860 edition presented a map of the nation’s topography and river systems taken from the latest knowledge provided by the Corps of Topographical Engineers. In the 1861 edition, this inset was replaced by two hemispheric maps with ocean currents that reflected Maury’s ongoing research (see website). These were flanked with Humboldtian diagrams of the comparative height of waterfalls, length of rivers, and elevation of mountains from across the United States. Alongside this were two cross sections of the nation’s elevation, the first at a particular latitude and the second of the proposed transcontinental railroad route.64 Most impressive of all were the maps in the lower half, which showcased the state of thematic cartography in a way that most Americans had never seen. The 1860 edition included a map by Lorin Blodget and James Coffin, which integrated their work on temperature, rainfall, and wind in order to present a comprehensive picture of the natural environment. Next to this were maps of zoology and the distribution of agricultural staples and vegetation made by Traill Green and a geological map designed by Edward Hitchcock and his son Charles.65 Maury gathered these maps as the best of their respective fields and published them on the “Washington Map” to assert the Naval Observatory’s role as the leading agency of national science. Maury had been superintendent of the observatory since 1844 and, throughout the 1840s and 1850s, studied winds and currents and produced a well-known whaling chart that earned him an international reputation. In 1855, the Prussian government awarded him the “Cosmos” medal, given to a scientist who embodied the spirit of Humboldt. Maury also published the first textbook of oceanography, which solidified his reputation among many in the United States. But this celebrity was greeted with skepticism by two of the nation’s leading scientists, Alexander Dallas Bache at the Coast Survey and Henry at the Smithsonian.66 Both considered Maury a charlatan who was more concerned with the advancement of the observatory than science.67 This has been attributed to the tension between military and civilian scientists and to the drive to professionalize science. But part of the rivalry was simply a matter of turf: the Naval Observatory was an arm of the military, while the Coast Survey was staffed with civilian scientists and housed under the Department of the Treasury. The agencies had overlapping agendas and jurisdictions, and both had to court Congress for funding. Maury was competing with Henry and Bache not only for patronage, but for supremacy in the physical sciences and—with Henry and the Smithsonian—for jurisdiction over weather mapping. This bureaucratic infighting also explains why Maury created the “Wash-

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ington Map,” for it staked his claim to the disparate fields of geology, climate, agriculture, and even zoology. Given Henry’s recent break with Blodget, Maury was no doubt keen to acquire the latter’s celebrated maps of rainfall and temperature.68 Maury served under Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, who shared his ardent nationalism and his goal of transforming the Naval Observatory into a “National Observatory.” Maury even renamed the observatory as such on the first few editions of the “Washington Map.” His sense of nationalism prompted him to design the map and also animated his last-minute efforts to avert civil war. After Lincoln’s election, Maury urged the “barrier” states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky to remain in the Union. But after the attack on Fort Sumter, he quit the observatory, followed Tennessee when it seceded, and left the capital to become a commander in the Confederate navy.69 His name was removed from subsequent editions of the map, yet they continued to be made in the same style and with the same inset maps. Early experiments with thematic mapping had appeared in federal reports or scientific journals, but the “Washington Map” was designed to be seen by the public. And while inset maps are usually unattributed, each of these acknowledged its author and were quickly copied, repackaged, and sold by other publishers.70 Significantly, none were made by trained cartographers but, instead, by men working in the fields that had begun to rely on these new mapping techniques: meteorology, zoology, agriculture, and geology. J. H. Colton’s wall map of the United States was made in a style nearly identical to the “Washington Map,” yet includes none of its cartographic innovations. These thematic maps of the environment were efforts to systematize and visualize information and to push geography from description to analysis.71 Indeed, Humboldtian science depended on these kinds of thematic maps, and the “Washington Map” was a tribute to him made even more poignant after his death. In 1859, Louis Agassiz voiced a widely held belief that Humboldt had revolutionized scientific study through visual representation. We are thus indebted to him for the whole of that graphic method which has made it possible to delineate, in visible outlines, the true characteristics of physical phenomena; for afterwards this method was applied to the representation of the oceanic currents, the direction of the prevalent winds, the tidal waves, the rise and fall of our lakes and rivers, the amount of rain falling upon different parts of the earth’s surface, the magnetic phenomena, the lines of equal average temperature, the relative height of our plains, table-lands and mountain chains, their internal structure, and the distribution of plants and animals. Even the characteristic features of the History of Mankind are now tabulated in the same way upon our ethnographical maps, in which the distribution of the races, the highways of navigation and commerce, the difference among men as to language, culture, creeds, nay, even the records of our census, 110

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the estimates of the wealth of nations, down to the statistics of agriculture and the averages of virtue and vice, are represented. In short, every branch of mental activity has been vivified by this process, and has undergone an entire transformation under its influence.72

Agassiz identified two innovations here. First, a new concept of “average” made it possible to navigate the wealth of statistics in the social and physical world. Second, Humboldt represented that aggregate information through cartography. Together, these indicated a much broader shift in the nature of knowledge. To conceive of a map as an analytical tool raised a world of questions and opened entirely new avenues of inquiry.

The Use of Climate Maps Blodget took Humboldt’s technique of mapping average temperature to a new level of sophistication in the 1850s, and his maps were highly anticipated by scientists and medical men such as Barton, Maury, Guyot, James Gillis, and James Dwight Dana. Perhaps the most common application in medicine was to use these isotherms to search for connections between disease outbreaks and temperature, as Thomas Logan did in his study of autumnal fever in California.73 Yet the adoption of Blodget’s elaborated climate and rainfall maps neither contained disease nor pinpointed its causes. Ironically, physician Joseph Toner actually used Blodget’s isotherms to demonstrate the irrelevance of climate over yellow fever. In 1873, he reviewed the assumptions that the disease was prompted by various elements of the environment, particularly latitude, longitude, temperature, wind patterns, and rainfall. He cited the work of Daniel Drake, the “admirable maps” of Lorin Blodget, and the research on precipitation by Charles Schott and the Smithsonian. Without these, Toner could not have undertaken his own research. Yet he was disappointed that “sanitarists” and the medical profession failed to consider elevation, which he addressed by mapping its relationship to yellow fever over the prior two centuries. Using Blodget’s maps, Toner argued that if temperature were the primary factor over the epidemic, it would have affected coastal cities, at least during the summer months. He challenged the assumption that climate shaped yellow fever, yet simultaneously acknowledged the importance of these maps for public health, for they enabled officials to think concretely about the relation between place and disease.74 Blodget’s maps also had implications for national growth and were eagerly sought by men in public life, such as the future president of the American Geographical and Statistical Society James Daly, statistician and southern journalist J. D. B. DeBow, and the archivist Peter Force. In fact, isotherm charts and maps proliferated in part because they coincided with—and were advanced by—the Disease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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nation’s expansion into the West. In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1850, Congress authorized the War Department to seek a railroad route that might knit the continent together, though sectional tensions heightened the political difficulties of such an enormous project. In light of this, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sponsored five surveys between 1853 and 1855, published between 1855 and 1860 as the Pacific Railway Surveys. In the first, Isaac Stevens issued a report and a detailed “Isothermal Chart of the Region North of the 36th Parallel” (1859) (see website). This map surveyed the northernmost route, from St. Paul to Puget Sound, and relied entirely on Blodget’s research. The Pacific Railway Surveys yielded tremendous information about the geography and topography of the West but could not transcend the sectional divisions that grew more serious each year. Ultimately, the issue was settled not through maps or geographical research, but when secession made a northern route inevitable.75 At the same time, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 raised the question of whether the plains and the Northwest could support large-scale agriculture. Blodget and Henry believed that their maps would answer these questions and advance the commercial and agricultural prospects of temperate regions. Yet isotherm charts had already begun to be used to influence western development. In the 1840s, William Gilpin began to promote the commercial and agricultural potential of the plains and was particularly taken with Humboldt’s ideas of interdependence and the influence of climate and geography over economic development. He used this model to argue that the “isothermal zodiac”—his term for a band of temperate climate that undulated across the continents and hosted the great civilizations—destined the United States for success. Gilpin was also preoccupied by the concept of a geographical center and emphasized the middle regions of the American continent as the locus of future growth. Well before the nation acquired the Far West, Gilpin’s vision of manifest destiny brought it into the national orbit. His 1845 “Hydrographic Map” reveals his geopolitical view of the continent, and, as these western regions came under American control, his focus on the interior intensified (see website). The 1859 mineral rushes in the Rocky Mountains brought him even more attention and enlarged his hope that the concave structure of the American interior would make it the economic heart of the nation. His “Map of the Basin of the Mississippi” (1860) graphically depicts his vision of the American interior as the “ampitheater of the world” integrated by a watershed (see website). Bounded by a mountain rim, drawn into a vast network of rivers, the interior was destined to become the center of an American empire. Gilpin invoked Humboldt’s “isothermal zodiac” as evidence that a particular band of latitude—which encompassed much of the United States—favored the development of civilization (fig. 3.12). While isotherms helped Humboldt to identify patterns of climate, for Gilpin they

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3.12 “Map of the World Exhibiting the Isothermal Zodiac or Belt of Equal Temperature around the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth,” from William Gilpin, The Central Gold Region (Philadelphia: Sower, Barnes & Co., 1860). 20 × 38 cm.

became evidence of Manifest Destiny, for in his hands they both explained the great civilizations of Europe and guaranteed a future of commercial growth.76 In this respect, Gilpin used isotherms in a deterministic fashion and insisted that the middle latitudes of the interior constituted a clear and coherent “region” that could be developed through a transcontinental railroad. Speaking in St. Louis only months after gold was discovered in the western reaches of Kansas Territory, his predictions must have seemed prophetic. He displayed an isotherm map and urged his audience to rethink their geographical assumptions. Look upon this map of the world, upon which science delineates the zodiac of empires and the isothermal axis of progress! We have our homes around the centre of this northern continent, the centre of our continental Union, the centre of the Mississippi basin. . . . It bisects the temperate zone—it is the line of land and way travel of mankind. . . . It is along the axis of the isothermal zone of the Northern Hemisphere, that the principles of revealed civilization make the circuit of the globe.77

Gilpin’s enthusiasm for the interior reached a crescendo just when Blodget and Henry issued their maps of the nation’s rainfall and temperature. All three were making arguments that depended upon new forms of mapping and relied upon isotherms and shading to represent patterns. But while Henry and Blodget used maps to characterize the interior as “a barren waste . . . unfit for agriculture,” Gilpin used them to promote its potential. Malcolm Lewis credits Blodget with the concept of a “semi-arid” interior, which eroded assumptions about the “Great American Desert” that had dominated since the 1820s.78 As maps of rainfall became more detailed, they challenged this stereotype, for these enabled one to identify not just patterns but also variation. The overarching assumption of a desert was gradually replaced by a different view of the region, with the eastern plains designated as “prairie,” a term that connotated a region fit for grazing, if not cultivation. This nicely underscores the power of maps. Data regarding rainfall, geology, wind, and other elements of the landscape had been accumulating for decades. Yet the information had limited value without a visual synthesis. Maps of the environment enabled viewers to picture the area as coherent, though these could be directed to a range of purposes. A map of average temperature lines implied consistency even when wild ranges were typical. In this way, the map conveyed stability, in the same way that boundaries drawn on a map often obscure contested borders. Gilpin shrewdly invoked temperature maps while omitting those of rainfall that clearly showed the interior was subject to drought. Like Drake, he used maps to integrate the unsettled territory into the Union by highlighting its place at the geographical and metaphorical center.79 114

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Gilpin was only the first and most vocal of many whose maps promoted the West and implied an influence of climate over human behavior. J. W. Foster used Humboldt and Blodget’s cartographic innovations to advocate the commercial development of the interior. He predicted that irrigation would transform the plains into a fruitful and abundant region, which he “proved” by placing an isotherm chart alongside a map adapted from Henry’s map of the prairie.80 John Disturnell, whose 1847 map of the West was central to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, used Blodget and Henry’s maps to study the effect of climate on human behavior. Disturnell celebrated the very idea of these new maps, for the data recorded by civilians, the army, and the Smithsonian was relevant only to the extent that it could be made meaningful through cartography. It was the government’s synthesis and manipulation of this data through maps—integrating temperature, elevation, soil, winds, and precipitation—that allowed Disturnell and others to speculate about the influence of climate. Disturnell was not a scientist and made no claim to writing a definitive or original study. His excitement derived entirely from the cartographic breakthroughs that allowed him and others to ask questions about patterns and relationships. Just as disease maps connected the human and natural worlds in the 1850s, Disturnell designed his “Climatological Map” and “Agricultural Map” of the United States (1867) to integrate distinct classes of information in order to speculate on the sources of national growth (see website). Ultimately, his conclusions reinforced a deterministic view of climate, for he insisted that only in the latitudes with a mean annual temperature between 40° and 70° did the human race really thrive in terms of moral culture, science, and the arts. Disturnell had long sought to integrate statistical and geographical data, which prompted him to connect the two great “databases” of the period covering the human and natural world. He integrated census statistics on population and agricultural production with the army and Smithsonian’s latest maps of mean annual temperature in order to answer questions about public health, agriculture, and development (see website).81 Like Gilpin and Foster, he praised maps and charts of data for regarding the influence of climate and the physical environment over the nation’s past and future. In this same spirit, in 1869, the newly established Department of Agriculture asked Blodget to use maps to determine the economic potential of the nation’s newest territory of Alaska. Commercial publishers in the United States and Canada quickly adopted these maps of climate and geology in their atlases for public consumption, for they were accessible even to nonscientists and opened new ways to think about the landscape.82 Perhaps the most enthusiastic adoption of environmental mapping to advance the West was undertaken by Charles Denison, a physician who migrated to DenDisease, Expansion, and the Rise of Environmental Mapping

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ver after a pulmonary hemorrhage in 1873. He ardently promoted the region as a refuge for consumptives while simultaneously investing in health resorts along the Front Range. In several publications, he touted the region’s combination of elevation, dry air, intense sunshine, and moderate climate. He portrayed Denver as the most promising of all western destinations and relied on maps to make his case. His “Climatic Map of the Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains” (1877) incorporated data from federal agencies, especially the army’s new Signal Service weather bureau, which had recently taken over the Smithsonian’s system of meteorology (see website). The map was radiantly colored and specifically designed to fit inside his promotional tract, Rocky Mountain Health Resorts. He used the map to illustrate the natural advantages of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. A “traditional” map of topography would have rendered these truths invisible; only by mapping the unseen elements could Denison “prove” Denver’s superior geography. His maps were derived from data and techniques made available by the Smithsonian Institution, the Census Office, the Signal Service, and the army. Without these federal agencies, this type of western promotion would have been impossible. Ironically, two of the most salient influences over early environmental mapping—the threat of disease and westward expansion—were united in Denison’s maps. He was the nation’s leading practitioner of medical geography and a founding member of the American Climatological Association, which promoted western migration. He continued to stress the influence of environment upon health even when the advent of germ theory and microbiology in the 1870s challenged the very premise of medical geography. To sell the virtues of Denver, he hired the new Chicago firm of Rand McNally to design maps for a compact atlas of the nation’s climate, which he marketed to “physicians, tourists, health seekers, farmers, and schools.” He was criticized for using isotherms, for these suggested continuity when wild ranges of temperature were just as typical. Yet, like his fellow western booster William Gilpin, Denison was talented and prolific, and he helped to lure an estimated thirty thousand invalids to Denver by 1890, nearly a third of its population. Medical geography—aided by thematic mapping—fundamentally shaped the city’s early growth.83 The presence of the federal government was central here, though it is easily overlooked. Without the effort to study the environment, the data on which these maps depended would have remained unrecorded. And without the postal network, these forms of communication would not have spread, whether as instruments of disease analysis or in the emerging science of meteorology. The mail allowed for the exchange of intelligence; it gave medical men such as Barton and Drake a wide audience and ensured that climatologists understood the implications of their research. Finally, the nation was the framework for these efforts, for it was an American science of meteorology that was sought. In its earliest 116

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years, meteorology was shaped by the nation’s geographic expansion westward and the imperative of understanding the behavior of epidemics as well as storms. The US Army’s decision to begin observing the weather in the 1810s predated similar European commitments, which reveals an active federal presence in the pursuit of both science and governance.84 Maps of disease and weather constitute some of the earliest examples of thematic mapping in the United States. They were catalyzed by the threat of epidemics and the pressure of westward expansion, but also by the accumulation of data, European cartographic models, and a healthy dose of competition between federal agencies. As the next chapter demonstrates, the greatest threat to the nation at midcentury spawned equally consequential experimentation with maps.

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CHAPTER 4

Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

Over the west staircase of the Senate wing of the US Capitol hangs an iconic image of American history entitled First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (fig. 4.1). Painted by Francis Bicknell Carpenter in 1864, it portrays Lincoln’s announcement of emancipation to his cabinet in July of 1862. The painting immortalized a particular version of events and a narrative of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator that grew substantially over the next century. To create the painting, Carpenter spent six months in the White House and recorded his experience in a memoir published immediately after the president was assassinated. In 2005, the painting’s cultural currency was renewed when it appeared in lithographic form on the cover of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestselling Team of Rivals. Goodwin used the painting to imagine that moment when Lincoln, surrounded by battle maps, transformed the war into a moral contest. In Goodwin’s telling, as in Carpenter’s painting and American civic memory, Lincoln’s decision is treated as a defining moment of moral courage.1 Within this painting lies a detail that has gone largely unnoticed, but which provides a window onto the production and representation of knowledge in the nineteenth century. In the lower right corner of the painting rests a map of the Southern states that Carpenter carefully reproduced for its contemporary importance. The map was first published in September of 1861, measured approximately twenty-seven inches by thirty-three inches, and was drawn on a scale of approximately forty-seven miles to the inch (fig. 4.2). This map of the Southern states used the 1860 census to illustrate the population density of slavery 119

4.1 Francis Bicknell Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (oil on canvas, 1864), US Senate Collection, Washington, DC. 274 × 457 cm.

in graphic terms and was the first American effort to do so. The map not only conveyed the extent of slavery, but also translated the vast data of the census into a compelling and comprehensible picture. This type of map represents a turning point in the graphic presentation of information and initiated a trend of statistical cartography that spread widely after the Civil War. In his memoir, Carpenter acknowledged the power and appeal of this map, but he had a more fundamental reason for placing it in the portrait. During his extended stay at the White House, Carpenter found the president poring over the map of Southern slavery on more than one occasion. Lincoln admired the map not only for its symbolic power and visual appeal, but because it allowed him to trace the military’s maneuvers and to connect those actions to his policy of emancipation. In other words, the map was both a landmark cartographic achievement and an eminently practical military instrument. Lincoln’s own use of this map indicates that it reinforced his conception of emancipation as a wartime measure and enabled him to follow the military’s ability to destroy one of the Confederacy’s greatest assets. The map of slavery was created in 1861 by the US Coast Survey, the most important federal scientific agency prior to the Civil War, which employed 120

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4.2 [US Coast Survey], “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States” (September 1861). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 69 × 86 cm.

approximately one-third of the nation’s scientists. From 1858 to early 1861, the survey frantically produced reconnaissance maps of the southern coasts and ports in anticipation of a military conflict over secession. The fact that this same agency took the time to map the density of slavery at a moment of absolute military and political crisis attests to the significance of this cartographic technique. That the map was reproduced and copied widely during the war indicates that Lincoln was not alone in appreciating its importance. The map is a visual and cultural artifact, a window on to the intellectual and political world of 1861. It also introduced a new way to envision information during the most consequential conflict in American history.

The Politics and Promise of Statistics Stipulated by the Constitution, the first decennial census was taken in 1790, but at the time few men in the early Republic considered the census relevant beyond its role in apportionment. As a representative from Virginia, James Madison proposed that the first census classify persons into five categories: free white males under and over sixteen, free white females, free blacks, and slaves. He also asked that the occupation of each working person be recorded. Yet no data beyond this was collected, meaning that no information existed on the age and sex of either slaves or free blacks. In the early Republic, a widened census was simply not valued and was seen by some as an unwarranted intrusion by the federal government. By the 1820s, however, the growing complexity of the economy, along with changing conceptions of the public good and a rising interest in statistics, encouraged an expansion of the census.2 This enthusiasm for statistics had consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans formed many statistical societies in the 1830s, but few survived beyond the decade. Charles Dupin was the first to assemble a map based on what would soon be known as “moral statistics,” which spoke to the well-being of the population through the incidence of education, poverty, and crime.3 Dupin’s signal contribution was to map the level of popular education across France in 1827. He mapped the number of persons in each department per male child in school, and his map became part of a much larger debate in the 1820s about the relationship of crime to education. This was the first attempt at “choropleth” shading, where areas of enumeration (such as French departments or American counties) are shaded uniformly, as opposed to a continuous gradation of shading. Dupin’s visualization of the spatial distribution of data enabled officials to see and project trends in contemporary education and crime. Though we may question the conclusion that they drew, without the map analysis of this data would have been far more difficult, if it were possible at all. Andre-Michel Guerry followed Dupin’s lead by exploring the relationship 122

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of education to crime. Using recent census data, Guerry identified the number of persons per crime on two maps of France. On a third, he mapped the level of instruction around the nation. Considered together, the maps suggested that crime was related to education. These maps of the 1820s and 1830s measured the distribution of risk across a population and indicate a growing concern with governance, administration, and population control.4 The maps spread quickly among those concerned with moral and social statistics, many of whom were animated by notions of aggregate, average, and normal that were just beginning to take hold. Prior to the nineteenth century, the understanding of human behavior was governed largely by the concept of human nature. With the proliferation of statistics, Adolphe Quetelet pioneered the idea of the “average man,” an abstraction derived from and made possible by aggregated data. The rise of statistics allowed for this new normative concept, which in turn introduced different ways of understanding and evaluating human behavior.5 Americans had an equally well-developed apparatus for measuring themselves and a zeal for statistics that reached back to the late eighteenth century. Initially, this was an interest in information for its own sake. After about 1830, however—as in Europe—hopes grew that statistics might advance social reform and inform policy. In 1836, the German-born political theorist Francis Lieber unsuccessfully agitated for a permanent Census Bureau in the United States, voicing the widely held conviction that statistics become “more important as civilisation advances.” No country was in more need of collecting comprehensive statistics than the United States, Lieber wrote, yet, owing to its size, no other country posed such great obstacles to that task. A year later, the nation extended that reach even further with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.6 This attention to statistics coincided with the rise of abolitionism, which fueled sectional divisions that might be revealed—or even sought—through the census. The Sixth Census of 1840, for example, was the first to gather statistics on mental and physical disorders. These were used by partisans of slavery to “prove” the higher incidence of illness and crime among free blacks. Annexationists also invoked this questionable information to discredit abolitionists who had been insisting that westward growth would disproportionately benefit slaveholders.7 In 1849, Congress passed a bill to organize the seventh census, and this time attempted to expand its jurisdiction and formalize its procedures. Though not without opposition, Congress established a Census Board headed by an appointed secretary, who would plan the schedules of questions, collect and compile the data in the capital (rather than leaving it to representatives in the field), and publish the results. These modifications constitute a turning point, though one that would only be recognized in hindsight. At the time the census commanded relatively little attention. President Taylor appointed a loyal Whig from Pennsylvania to administer the seventh census. Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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came to Washington, DC, in the spring of 1849 and immediately began to propose expanded census schedules for congressional approval. At the same time, the victory of the United States over Mexico brought territorial gains in the West that exacerbated sectional tensions. This complicated matters for Kennedy, for his proposed schedules were introduced in the Senate just as Congress began to debate the status of slavery in this new western territory. Given this timing, perhaps it was inevitable that the census schedules would be seen through the lens of sectionalism and that the main controversies would involve the enumeration of slaves. Before the counting had even begun, the census of 1850 was mired in sectional politics. Kennedy proposed to ask the name of the slaveholder, the age and geographic location of each slave, and also the slave’s name, sex, place of birth, color, and whether the slave was deaf, dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, or a fugitive (one wonders who authored the last question!). He also proposed that the new census count the number of children born to slave women and how many of these children had survived. These questions— especially about sex and place of birth—would have allowed Kennedy to make fairly sophisticated projections about the demographic shift of the slave population over time. Yet Southern Democrats characterized these questions as unnecessary and beyond the scope of the census and federal power. Perhaps more worrisome to them was the possibility that by collecting extensive information about individual slaves—such as name and number of children, as well as place of birth—the census might undermine their status as property. Therefore, Southern Democrats proposed omitting the names of slaves and removing questions about their place of birth and the number of children born to female slaves. After a tussle, the Senate bowed to proslavery sentiment and accepted these changes. Though the 1850 census schedules were still far more extensive than their predecessors, Southerners successfully limited the information collected about slavery.8 This controversy continued with the election of 1852, which turned the Whigs out of the White House. Franklin Pierce replaced Superintendent Kennedy with J. D. B. DeBow, the well-known editor of DeBow’s Review and an ardent Democrat who had managed the Bureau of Statistics in Louisiana from 1848 to 1851. In this capacity, though without formal statistical training (no such training yet existed), DeBow had begun to think about the census as not simply the collection of data, but as the foundation for causal analysis. By the time he became the census superintendent in March 1853, most of the data collection was complete, and he only had to edit what Kennedy’s staff had compiled. DeBow’s superior political connections also helped him secure funding to publish one of the first expanded census reports, the 1854 Statistical View of the United States. The report was full of information, though few Americans would have been able to make sense of this jumble of data.9 124

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The real significance of DeBow’s report was its timing. Heady optimism had begun to infuse the study of statistics, manifest in the 1839 founding of the American Statistical Association and the 1851 founding of the American Geographical and Statistical Society. The AGSS attracted business, political, and intellectual leaders who saw geography and statistics as a way to amplify American power, especially in the West. Intellectually, the members hoped to facilitate progress by using statistics to extrapolate laws of growth and decline. As one wrote, statistics was the study of “society in movement.” Both the ASA and the AGSS drew men who believed that statistics could yield lessons in political economy and ameliorate social ills, and Kennedy actively sought advice from these men when proposing changes to the 1850 census.10 The society’s commitment to statistics peaked 1859, when it invited Kennedy to outline his vision before its members. At this point, he had returned to head the Census Office—appointed by Democrat James Buchanan after Congress appropriated funding in 1858. In his address, Kennedy effusively described the potential of statistics to advance human progress by replacing “vague and unwarrantable ideas” with truth. Such sentiment spoke directly to the sensibility of the AGSS membership, men of diverse occupations who focused on the practical application of knowledge. To this audience, Kennedy repeatedly argued for the unbiased use of statistics, recognizing the ways in which they could be manipulated. His discussion of slavery reflected the anxiety provoked by John Brown’s recent attempted raid on Harper’s Ferry. The much reduced questions on the 1850 slave census schedule had irked those opposed to slavery, but Kennedy now applauded this as a decision made for the good of the Union. To “incumber” the schedule with questions about the occupation of slaves, he argued, would be pointless given their status. Inquiries about their birthplace would be unreliable, and questions about names, children, or anything else would exceed the authority of the census, undermine its popularity, and yield no benefit.11 Yet while he defended the simplified and more politically conservative slave schedules, Kennedy still emphasized the ideal of statistical inquiry as a path to social reform. In this respect, he was influenced by Adolphe Quetelet, who had begun to apply statistics to social problems in France such as crime, disease, and poverty. This in part explains why so much of the early discipline of statistics revolved around the study of population. Kennedy was completely convinced by this vision of “moral statistics,” which had “accomplished more in the last half century for the alleviation of misery, the prolongation of life, and the elevation of humanity, than all other agencies combined.” Statistics was a way to organize and decipher information, a path to uncovering natural laws and social patterns that had heretofore remained hidden. To this end, Kennedy helped to organize the first International Statistical Congress in 1853, held in Brussels. There—as well as at the World’s Exhibition in London two years prior—he met with Quetelet, Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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Charles Dupin, and many others who were taken by the potential of statistics. For Kennedy, moral statistics was nothing less than the “practical workings of an elevated Christianity.”12 Throughout the Civil War, Kennedy attended statistical meetings in Europe and returned with information and techniques that he shared with the medical community and federal agencies such as the Smithsonian and the Coast Survey. The reverence for statistics is difficult to appreciate today, but it carried the hope of uncovering laws of progress and risk that might make American life more rational and predictable. This enthusiasm even prompted the members of the American Geographical and Statistical Society to move the census icon to the foreground of its organizational seal in 1861. Thereafter, statistics was seen less as a discrete field than a method to be adopted by the emerging social sciences, such as epidemiology, demography, sociology, economics, and public health.13 DeBow shared Quetelet’s view that the census had implications far beyond apportionment, and his 1854 report reflects his ambitions (if not his ability) to make this a tool of national inventory. For this reason, he asked a few of the nation’s leading social and natural scientists—such as James Henry Coffin, Lorin Blodget, and Alexander Dallas Bache—to contribute to the report, though their work had no obvious relationship to the census. The result was a report that connected fields of information in an unprecedented way. Yet while DeBow might have understood the implications of statistics, he did not appreciate the possibilities of cartography: his report included only one crudely drawn map that bore no relation to census data. He was, however, able to think about the census broadly and to attract individuals who were also transforming cartography.14 DeBow’s report indicates that the American passion for statistics had not yet translated into graphic form: the cartographic display of information using census data was virtually nonexistent. One remarkable exception is Moses Greenleaf ’s 1829 statistical history and atlas of the new state of Maine, one of the earliest state atlases published in the United States. In the maps, Greenleaf adopted innovative techniques to convey data. While the first four maps are topographical and the fifth depicted land grants, the sixth marked the center of population and taxation at three moments—1778, 1790, and 1820—then shaded these stages of settlement. Greenleaf ’s goal was to encourage migration to Maine, so he included information that would allow prospective investors and emigrants to think about the terrain in ways that would go unnoticed on a traditional map that featured only topography or locations. But maps such as these required substantial effort and data.15 By the 1840s, several attempts had been made to place statistics onto the map in order to convey census data, property valuations, population statistics, or election data. Edward Biddle’s Industrial & Political Map of Pennsylvania listed

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data on the map but did not map that data. Similar was the “Statistical Map of North America: To Illustrate M. de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with the Census of 1840” (1841) (see website). The map listed each state’s population but did not translate those numbers into visual form. The inset maps listed the surface area of each territory, average height in the Allegheny Mountains, and the number of whites and blacks in states where slavery had been abolished as well as where it persisted. Yet, as this map shows, statistics had yet to be translated into cartographic terms: information is placed on the map, not integrated into it.16

The Cartography of Slavery The importance of statistical cartography is apparent when we examine popular maps in the context of rising sectional tensions. By the 1830s, lithography had facilitated the rapid production and dissemination of cartography. Yet despite this technological advance and the growth of thematic cartography in Europe, census officials produced no maps in the antebellum period. The sole map in DeBow’s 1854 Census report only marked the nation’s major geographic regions and used none of the data yielded by the census itself. This is puzzling considering that other federal bureaus had already begun to experiment with cartography. Furthermore, techniques to map data were already in use. Topographical and nautical maps had long incorporated contour lines and other ways to distinguish different elevations, and Matthew Maury used tints to compile his wind, current, and whaling charts for the navy in the early 1850s. The US Coast Survey was also wholly engaged in cartographic experimentation by the mid-1850s, particularly in the use of shading to represent topography. Moreover, Kennedy was well aware of the creative use of maps to study epidemic disease.17 Despite this cartographic experimentation, Kennedy made no effort to map data. In fact, the earliest attempts to map US census data were made in Europe. DeBow’s 1854 report of the census had circulated internationally, giving the Prussian cartographer August Petermann the opportunity to translate this mountain of data into visual language. Petermann had contributed to both the Berghaus and the Johnston atlases and, in 1855, experimented with original maps and “graphical presentations” based on the 1850 census. He was among the first to represent the size of cities through the use of graduated circles, a technique that is still common. He was also the first to map the actual size and density of the slave population in the United States (fig. 4.3). He used three degrees of shading to measure the relative slave population in each state and then identified the average number of slaves per square mile with a number. Petermann’s own political orientation was apparent. He wrote that the “life-germ” of the nation— the areas of growth—lay within nonslaveholding states and demonstrated this

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4.3 Detail from August Petermann, Volks-Dichtigkeit der Sklaven im J. 1850, in Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt Uber Wichtige Neue Erforschungen auf Dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie von Dr. A. Petermann, vol. 1 (1855). 11 × 18 cm.

by mapping the distribution of libraries and universities and the circulation of newspapers and magazines. This map of “intellectual culture” compared school attendance to the total population as Dupin and Guerry had a few decades earlier and emphasized the difference in literacy and public school education between slave and nonslave states. On the map, the darker shading represents higher rates of school attendance and thus a greater rate of growth and civilization. Petermann’s progressive politics were shared by his fellow Prussian cartographers who emigrated to the United States in the antebellum decades and who brought their expertise with them.18 No maps of the census data comparable to Petermann’s existed in the United States in the 1850s. But the upheavals of the decade produced a wave of political maps in the North, many of which took data from the Seventh Census to argue against slavery. In January 1854, Stephen Douglas introduced the KansasNebraska Bill, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and opened the possibility of slavery’s expansion into the interior. This inadvertently mobilized many Northerners against slavery, many of whom soon abandoned the Democrats and Whigs to form what would eventually become the Republican Party. The territorial changes proposed by the bill were uniquely suited to cartographic illustration, especially in the hands of anxious Northerners. On January 24, the newly organized Independent Democrats—led by Salmon Chase—urged fellow Northerners to “take your maps” to recognize how vast a region the act opened 128

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to slavery. “The very heart of the North American continent,” they argued, was at stake.19 Days later, about three thousand gathered at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. George Colton unfurled a giant map that shaded the Louisiana Territory to indicate the potential extension of slavery. On his map, the distinction between slave and free no longer fell across a north-south axis. Instead, slavery now potentially extended to the northernmost border of the Union, obliterating the long-standing line drawn by the Missouri Compromise. Colton’s massive, dramatic map was the centerpiece of the New York meeting, and, by extending slavery north and west, it characterized the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a betrayal of the Union’s existing political geography. Speaker after speaker invoked his map to galvanize opposition to the bill and to defend the Missouri Compromise, a decision that had endured for over three decades as evidence of the common desire to curb the extension of slavery.20 Colton quickly adapted his map for publication in newspapers, and this spawned several variations over the next few years. The map startles the reader by threatening the Northeast and Upper Midwest with slave and potential slave states and separating them from the Far West altogether. Only upon close inspection is it apparent that slave states are shaded differently from the territories, but, given contemporary anxieties, such confusion was perhaps deliberate.21 The editorial accompanying the map in the New Hampshire Statesman offered reprints of the map in order to publicize this “monstrous iniquity.” Openly alarmed, the editors argued that the exceptionally fertile territories needed only a small but vocal minority of slaveholders to turn them into slave states. The New York Tribune published census data and a similar map drawn by John Jay to illustrate the extent of the slave-power conspiracy, a “small but iron-willed oligarchy” that ruled the South (fig. 4.4). Once the statistics were mapped, Jay argued, the case was undeniable: Now look on the map, blackened by slavery, and you will see that Kansas is the key to the large territory lying to the west of it, the boundless regions of Utah and New Mexico, extending hundreds of miles till they meet the eastern boundary of California. Is it not clear, that if we lose Kansas we shall in all probability lose not only the Indian Territory lying to the south of it, but these vast territories stretching to the westward, and large enough to make more than six States of the size of Pennsylvania?22

Jay concluded with an impassioned plea to support John Fremont and the Republican Party in the election of 1856. Several more sophisticated maps were produced to advance the Republican cause. William Reynolds issued the “Political Map of the United States” in Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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4.4 [ John Jay], “Freedom and Slavery, and the Coveted Territories,” in “The Border Ruffian Code in Kansas” (ca. 1856). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 14 × 21 cm.

early August, starkly dividing the nation into regions of slavery, free labor, and those territories opened to the possibility of slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (fig. 4.5). By shading the territories in a color close to the slave states, the map echoes the newspaper maps. All of these popular political maps actually anticipate the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of 1857, which ruled that Congress had no Constitutional authority to bar the extension of slavery into the territories. Published in both Chicago and New York, Reynolds’s “Political Map of the United States” warned that the legislation of 1854 allowed slavery to extend westward into an area “which is greater than that of all the States combined.” The map intentionally draws the viewer’s eye to the nation’s center. Kansas is colored separately to define it as the issue of the campaign, and, in this respect, the map captures the sensibility of antislavery Northerners at the moment that Abraham Lincoln himself joined the Republican Party. The Missouri Compromise line is marked as a grim reminder of the end of a thirty-year arrangement that had limited slavery’s future. Along its lower edge, Reynolds’s map included statistics drawn extensively 130

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4.5 “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States, Designed to Exhibit the Comparative Area of the Free and the Slave States” (1856). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 48 × 70 cm (map only).

from the census of 1850. A table of revenues and expenditures favorably compared free to slave states, and the publisher noted that “Of the 6,222,418 white inhabitants of the South, only 347,525 are owners of slaves. And yet this faction controls every branch of the federal Government, and wields its influence for the increase and perpetuation of Slavery.” The statistics relentlessly documented the disproportionate power of slaveholders over the national economy. Geographical area, racial breakdown, valuation of property, acres of improved land, miles of railroad, circulation of newspapers, and number of public libraries—nothing was overlooked in the drive to make this map a tool of sectionalism. Even Hinton Helper—no Republican—used this map and the statistics behind it to establish the comparative economic weakness of the South. In railroad construction, manufacturing, agricultural production, and the like, Helper argued, the South was hindered by slavery. Significantly, Helper’s use of the census came at the height of the sectional crisis and did not go unchallenged. New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett, as well as many Southerners, charged Helper with manipulating statistics for political purposes. They employed the same information to argue that it was Northern labor, not Southern, that was truly degraded. Clearly, “moral statistics” could be interpreted in a variety of ways.23 The wide use of these sectional maps in the 1856 campaign suggests that they spoke directly to Northern concerns about the spread of slavery. George Elliott’s “Map of the United States” appears very similar to that of Reynolds but also highlighted Fremont’s expeditions across Kansas in the 1840s (see website). These routes bore no direct relationship to the election, yet they were featured in a way that suggests the permanence of railroad routes. In this way the Republican-sponsored map “claims” the territory for the antislavery cause. On both of these campaign maps, Kansas Territory sits at the political and geographical center of the nation, a symbol of the nation’s greatest promise as well as its deepest failure. Europeans mapped slavery with slightly more nuance. A. K. Johnston, the venerable Scottish cartographer, had—like Petermann—begun to experiment with cartography in the 1850s. His “General Map of the United States” resembles those above, but he carefully differentiated between states exporting slaves in the Upper South and those importing slaves the Lower South (see website). This knowledge was itself a product of the 1850 census. Though it did not inquire about the birthplace of slaves, the Seventh Census provided aggregate figures on the slavery in each state. This enabled Europeans to map not only the slave population, but also the trajectory of slavery based on those figures. Johnston’s map portrays a population in terms of both place and change over time.24 On the eve of the Civil War, then, Americans would have been familiar with maps that separated slave from free states and that distinguished areas of slavery’s growth from decline. Joseph Kennedy would have been aware of these maps as

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well as the intellectual underpinnings of thematic and statistical cartography that swirled about him in the 1850s.25 This sets the context for two remarkable maps published during the first few months of the Civil War, both drawn from the Eighth Census. In retrospect, Kennedy’s effusive address to the AGSS regarding the promise of statistics for the future of the Union reads like an acknowledgment that the rising tide of sectional violence was perhaps irreversible. No sooner had he arranged for the enumeration of the census than Lincoln’s election gave fire-eating Southerners a reason to secede. By April 1861, eleven states had formed the Confederacy.

Enter the Coast Survey In June, the commercial lithographer Henry S. Graham printed a revolutionary map drawn by the US Coast Survey that depicted the population density of slaves in Virginia (fig. 4.6). Over the summer, the map was updated and reissued at least twice, which indicates the survey’s sense of its importance. None of the Virginia maps identify the Coast Survey as its source, but they do bear the name of Edwin Hergesheimer, who had worked for the survey since the 1850s and in 1861 oversaw its drafting division. Since 1858, Superintendent Bache had redoubled the Coast Survey’s efforts to map areas that might become central to a naval war, especially the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, the important rivers of Virginia, the southern coast, the Mississippi River, and the Texas coast. He recalled surveyors from the West Coast so that the agency could focus on what now appeared to be an inevitable armed conflict. This makes the statistical maps of the slave population even more unusual, for they were atypical for an agency focused on hydrographic surveys and required far more time and expertise than the sectional maps of the 1850s discussed above.26 But the Coast Survey’s decision to map slavery in the midst of the secession crisis makes sense if we consider the role of German cartographers, the techniques they developed, and the politics of secession. Hergesheimer was part of an elite group of cartographers who had been exposed to the work of Petermann and his peers. Like many others, he came to the United States after the failed German revolution in 1848 and brought his drafting expertise with him. As a result of this infusion of immigrant talent, the Coast Survey began to experiment extensively with map production in the 1850s. The inclusion of Hergesheimer’s name on the map indicates that it was executed under his direction. As chief draughtsman, he had pioneered techniques that shifted the survey toward photography and lithography to accelerate production. He was especially adept at illustrating topographic variation through shading, and this experimentation came as the sectional crisis reached a breaking point. His use of shading to map

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4.6 [US Coast Survey], “Map of Virginia Showing the Distribution of Its Slave Population from the Census of 1860” ( June 13, 1861). Lithographed by H. Graham. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 49 × 68 cm. See website for other editions.

slavery represents a pathbreaking application of these techniques—which were first designed to represent the physical landscape—to nonterrestrial, human geography.27 Hergesheimer and his fellow German emigrants shared an intense hostility to slavery and a corresponding sympathy for the Union. This alone might have predisposed Bache and his staff at the Coast Survey to map slavery.28 But the immediate impetus was the political upheaval in the border states in early 1861. In the two months following Lincoln’s election, the states of the Lower South decisively left the Union. The states of the Upper South—especially Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina—were far more cautious and divided in their response. Throughout the winter and spring of 1861, Unionists battled secessionists for the upper hand, leaving the political fate of the Confederacy in question for an agonizing period that extended well past Lincoln’s inauguration. The Unionists of the Upper South held the advantage throughout this period, but their political power collapsed when the president summoned troops just days after the attack on Fort Sumter.29 During this intense debate over secession, Census Superintendent Kennedy turned his office into a clearinghouse for Union propaganda. In February, hoping to capitalize on a Unionist insurgency throughout Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, Kennedy asked census workers to gauge political sentiment in those states. He then organized a massive mailing to undermine secession, together with William Seward and Charles Francis Adams, two of the most prominent leaders trying to end the crisis.30 Kennedy’s efforts focused on Virginia, so it is not surprising that he supplied the data that made the slave map possible. Virginians had been aware of the conflicting interests within their state long before the secession crisis, with slavery concentrated in the east. On April 4, members of the Virginia convention that was debating secession defeated a proposal to join the Confederacy. Then, after the crisis at Fort Sumter, Lincoln called up seventy-five thousand volunteers, and, just days later, the Virginia convention voted again, and this time chose to secede. The decision was officially ratified on May 23. Three days later, General George McClellan (then commander of the Department of Ohio) invaded western Virginia and spent the next two months fighting to secure the region for the Union.31 The Coast Survey issued its first map of slavery in Virginia in June, in the midst of this momentous division within the state. To the left of the map are population data from the census, which Kennedy funneled to the Coast Survey long before releasing it to commercial mapmakers. Notice that the counties are ranked not according to geography or absolute population, but relative to the percentage of its population enslaved. Prior to the Civil War, abundant maps of Virginia covered county boundaries and railroads, topography, internal improvements, and hydrographic surveys. But this map was the first to show the Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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statistical distribution of slavery and one of the first thematic maps made of the state. Bache may have initiated the map himself after the secession crisis abruptly chilled his Southern sympathies and admiration for Jefferson Davis. Bache’s Unionism was so strong that he became the vice president of the US Sanitary Commission when it was formed in June 1861. The phrasing on the map, “Sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded of the U.S. Army,” anticipates the slogan of the Sanitary Commission, “for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers,” with Bache linking the two. This coincidence indicates that Bache was central to the Union network that emerged so rapidly in the spring of 1861. He had also been involved in the beginnings of Girard College in Philadelphia, which sensitized him to the importance of educating the public. Indeed, much of the Coast Survey’s recent experimentation with maps had been undertaken not only to accelerate its output, but also to widen its audience.32 The slave map of Virginia sends two mutually reinforcing messages about the crisis. First, it made undeniable that slavery divided the state along geographical lines. There is no legend on the map to explain what the shading represents, yet the message was clear. Viewers intuitively understood that the darker the shading, the higher the ratio of the slave to total population. Second, the shading largely, though not absolutely, corresponded to secessionist sentiment. Areas with relatively minimal slave populations generally sided against secession when the vote was taken on April 4 (when it failed), then again on April 17 (when it succeeded). However, this regional opposition to secession did not translate into abolition or even resistance to slavery. When West Virginia finally became a state in June 1863, its manumission laws were rigid and would have enabled slavery to survive for decades were it not for the Thirteenth Amendment. Furthermore, in several counties, the opposition to secession constituted a slim rather than a decisive majority; in other words, the map is not a transparent reflection of political opinion and there is not a perfect correlation between presence of slaves and secessionism. Still, Lincoln held out hope throughout the first year of the conflict that Southern Unionists might prevail, and the lighter areas on the maps might have reinforced his belief in Southern Unionism. But, by 1862, his attention probably turned toward the darker areas of the maps, where the military might inflict maximum damage upon slavery and advance the Union cause.33 Inscriptions on the map reveal its relevance and use. Captain William Palmer sent a copy of the June edition to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and a copy of the August edition to General Ripley of the US Army. Palmer had been part of the army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers for many years before joining the staff of McClellan and fighting with the Army of the Potomac. Palmer was also an old friend of Bache, which partly explains the former’s decision to work for the Coast Survey in 1860 and 1861. While at the survey, Palmer championed the agency’s cartographic experimentation and its adoption of photography to accel136

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erate production. He had access to the survey’s prodigious cartographic output, yet he was especially taken with the Virginia slave map, which indicates that it was used to influence secession as well as the emerging military conflict within that state. This first edition of the map was issued in June, just as McClellan led some of the Union’s earliest volunteers in an invasion into western Virginia. This allowed the Unionists in western counties to assemble at the second Wheeling Convention, where they declared their intention to separate from Virginia and reject secession. In his July address to Congress, Lincoln recognized these loyalists within Virginia as its legitimate leaders while McClellan continued to fight General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces.34 By late summer, McClellan’s occupation enabled the Unionists in western Virginia to form a reorganized government. It was at this moment of military occupation in August that the Coast Survey reissued its slave map of Virginia, which indicates the geopolitical importance of the region as well as the relevance of this new method of mapping the population. The original name for the proposed new state, “Kanawha,” prominently marks the western counties and implicitly endorses its political independence. Months before the actual creation of West Virginia, the federal government’s foremost mapping agency had openly recognized its legitimacy. In the middle of the map, the survey created a small table that measured the stark difference between the population of eastern and western Virginia. It listed the white and slave population before the division within the state and thereafter. With this political separation, slavery became entirely concentrated in Virginia, a stark reminder of the divergent interests of the two regions. The distribution of the population had not changed since June, but the political reality had entirely reversed. In this second edition of the map, the Coast Survey set “Kanawha” apart from Virginia by giving it a distinctive color and solid political boundary (smaller than its eventual boundary, which encompassed eleven additional counties) (fig. 4.7). Palmer once again recognized the importance of the map by sending a copy to a general in the army just days after it had been printed as a symbol of early Union victory in western Virginia. The survey issued its third edition of the Virginia slave map in September, which featured a testimonial from Census Superintendent Joseph Kennedy that vouched for the accuracy of the data and the originality of its execution (see website). Kennedy played a central role in the creation of the map by supplying the data to the Coast Survey well in advance of its official release in 1862. The entire enterprise was an audacious attempt to use shading to represent the population. Its success was confirmed not only by the multiple editions of the map in the summer of 1861 but also by the agency’s decision to extend the technique from profiling slavery in a single state to the Southern states as a whole. If the map of Virginia was intended to encourage Union loyalty in its western counties, and then to proclaim the sovereignty of Kanawha, there were similar goals for the Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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4.7 Detail of Kanawha, from [US Coast Survey], “Map of Virginia Showing the Distribution of Its Slave Population from the Census of 1860” (August 27, 1861). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 47 × 67 cm.

map of slavery in the South. One of the most apparent effects is to suggest that the vast areas with little to no shading were pockets of potential Union loyalty or at least weak Confederate support. As one leading Unionist in western Virginia claimed, West Virginia could be a model for other areas of the South where slavery did not dominate, as in eastern Tennessee, western Arkansas, northern Alabama, and northern Mississippi.35 Whatever the initial motive for its creation, the map of the Southern states is remarkable for its ability to depict an immense body of information in a new manner. Its minimalism and absence of decoration and color suggests neutrality and transparency: it appears simply to translate population data into graphic form. Yet the very decision to map the relationship between slaves and the general population reflects a belief that slavery was behind the rebellion. And, as explained below, the map enabled Lincoln to follow the progress of his military, which after January of 1863 had officially become an army of liberation. In each of these ways, the map deployed its power in a slightly different way. The absence of decoration, color, and a formal cartouche allows the map to assert its task without fanfare. This plain form also downplays the map’s political message; instead, it resembles the countless maps of exploration and administration that poured forth from contemporary federal bureaucracies. The ratio of slave to total population is represented on a map marking only counties and state borders. With its scientific appearance and streamlined use of statistics, the map almost seems like an outgrowth of the census. This assumption is furthered by Kennedy’s imprimatur in the lower left corner; the Census Office did not create the map, but its superintendent enthusiastically endorsed it. Kennedy instantly recognized that this represented a new purpose and meaning for cartography. Unlike the maps of the 1850s, propagandistic in tone and appearance, the 1861 slave map exudes a quiet confidence. It simply “shows” the viewer what is already known—though perhaps not fully understood—by the census, but does so graphically and in a way that instantly suggests the nature of the war. In this respect, the map nicely deploys the scientific authority of cartography, a tool that appears to allow the data to speak for themselves. The details on the map reinforce this apparent transparency. The table in the lower middle outlines the number of slaves in each state and in the proportion to the overall population. The table orders the states according to their dependence upon slavery, but few contemporary viewers would have failed to notice that this corresponded—almost without exception—to the order that the states left the Union. The same lesson was reinforced by the map itself: the darkest portions of the map mark the most entrenched regions of plantation slavery and the areas that had been most hostile to opposition to slavery. This shading scheme recalls Henry Clay’s odd premonition of decades earlier, when he decried slavery as “the darkest spot in the map of our country.”36 Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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Though its appearance suggests otherwise, the map is a strong Unionist statement. The title, “The Southern States of the United States,” ignores the fact of the Confederacy, while the lithographer proudly asserts that it was “Sold for the benefit of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the U.S. Army.” This map was published well before the Sanitary Commission’s fabled wartime drives or and the founding of Union Leagues, making it one of the earliest examples of wartime fund-raising and propaganda. The war fostered a metamorphosis in American national identity, and this map expresses the seeds of that sentiment in scientific, cartographic form.37 Ironically, the map conveys nationalism by focusing entirely on states that have left the Union. It covered the South—not the nation as a whole—and maps only the incidence of slavery. Furthermore, the map allows the viewer to connect the destruction of slavery with the defeat of the rebellion. This makes the timing of the map’s publication important. After the Union defeat at Bull Run in the summer of 1861, Congress passed, and Lincoln signed, the First Confiscation Act. This attempted to weaken the Confederacy by subjecting to capture all property that was used to aid the rebellion. It essentially nullified claims by masters to slave labor though technically did not free the slaves themselves, and the Fugitive Slave Law remained in force. Yet individual generals—notably John Fremont, David Hunter, and Benjamin Butler—exceeded the act by liberating slaves in areas of military conquest and jurisdiction. Though they were quickly overruled by Lincoln, their actions reveal the controversial nature of emancipation as a military instrument in the early months of the war. The slave map should be seen in this context. To American viewers in 1861, the map connected the strength of the rebellion with the institution of slavery, thereby fueling Unionist arguments about emancipation or confiscation as military measures. The map tells us nothing about the nature of its opposition to slavery (moral, political, or other), but its very existence— coupled with the timing of its publication—makes it an antislavery document.

Lincoln’s Map The map also occupies a privileged place in history, for Lincoln kept it close at hand and consulted it repeatedly. The president had access to countless maps during the war, many with far more detail than this map of slavery.38 Yet most were primarily topographical. In this respect, the slave maps were eminently practical, for they gave Lincoln and his cabinet access to a new form of information. Other maps listed populations but made no attempt to visualize those figures.39 Lincoln’s attention to statistics and geography is not difficult to establish. The Eighth Census of 1860 counted nearly four million slaves in the American South, with an aggregate value of over $1.2 billion. Lincoln requested information on this population from Superintendent Kennedy in order to make a case 140

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for compensated emancipation. In July of 1862, the president revealed his new plan of forced military emancipation to his cabinet. Several members of the cabinet advised him to wait until a more politically opportune moment to announce such a dramatic policy. When no such moment occurred over the summer, he took advantage of the marginal victory at Antietam in September to formally issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet throughout the fall, Lincoln continued to lobby privately for both compensated emancipation and colonization, neither of which ever gained wide support. He made the case publicly for these two measures in his Annual Message to Congress in December 1862. By his reckoning, this plan rested on three pillars: provisions to each state that voluntarily emancipated its slaves by 1900, compensation to individual slave owners whose chattel were freed by the exigencies of war, and the colonization of emancipated slaves outside the United States.40 The 1862 message is widely known for Lincoln’s concluding flourish, “we cannot escape history.” But the heart of the speech is his case for compensated emancipation and colonization as a path to reunion, and this plan relied on statistics and geographical knowledge. Lincoln describes the United States as a unified territory that literally cannot be divided, for the geographic interdependence of free and slave states mocks the prospect of separation. The border is—literally— just a line on the map, and Lincoln repeatedly stressed the nation’s territorial coherence. As he wrote, “a glance at the map” made it obvious that the nation’s future lay west of the Mississippi, this vast western interior depended on trade outlets in San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and Boston. Such a region could never be parceled between North and South.41 Lincoln used Kennedy’s statistics to show that the cost of compensated emancipation could be absorbed by the nation’s growing population. His advocacy of compensated emancipation and colonization is now seen at odds with his moral opposition to slavery. But we need to establish this conflicted position in order to ask how he made sense of this map, which brings us back to Carpenter’s painting. Francis Bicknell Carpenter had painted Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and John Tyler, as well as John Fremont and Henry Ward Beecher. He was so moved by the Emancipation Proclamation that he decided to immortalize Lincoln’s announcement to his cabinet, “a scene second only in historical importance and interest to that of the Declaration of Independence.” This complex moment was rich with artistic possibilities, for the cabinet received the proposal with a range of emotions. For Carpenter, this meant that the portrait must recreate, as much as possible, the truth of that moment, free of the “false glitter” so common in art. This desire to capture the reality of the announcement led Carpenter to seek access to the president and his cabinet. Through Illinois Congressman Owen Lovejoy, he was able to meet Lincoln, who described the scene on the day of the announcement and then invited Carpenter to stay at the White Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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House to draw the portrait.42 In his memoir, Carpenter explained his composition of the painting, particularly his decision to arrange the cabinet according to their response to emancipation: Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton are to Lincoln’s right (Chase is standing), while Secretary of State Seward sits in the foreground. The secretary of the navy is at Lincoln’s immediate left, the secretary of the interior and postmaster general stand to the rear, and Attorney General Edward Bates sits at the far right of the portrait. Lincoln sits at the center “nearest that representing the radical, but the uniting point of both.”43 Carpenter gave the same care to the physical details of the painting: a copy of the antislavery New York Tribune lies at the feet of Edwin Stanton, while a portrait of the prior secretary of war, Simon Cameron, is visible beyond Stanton’s head. The map lying across the table—directly behind Seward—was the Coast Survey’s 1862 “Map of the State of Virginia,” which included both population statistics and concentric rings around Richmond to guide Union strategy. This was one of the Coast Survey’s most requested maps. Over five thousand copies of the first edition were sold and distributed, which indicates how aggressively the survey disseminated its maps.44 But during his frequent visited to the Executive Chamber, Carpenter also noticed a “lithographic map, showing the slave population of the Southern States in graduated light and shade.” The map was usually leaning against a leg of Lincoln’s desk or table, and it “bore the marks of much service.” As an artist, Carpenter quickly appreciated the visual power of the map and its ability to convey the relative population of slaves. After he noticed Lincoln so frequently engrossed in the map, Carpenter decided to reproduce it in recognizable detail within the portrait. Yet to do this he needed to study the map closely, so one day Carpenter took the map to his studio and kept it there. According to the artist, soon thereafter Lincoln paid him a visit, as he often did to distract himself from the pressures of war. Upon entering the studio, the president quickly noticed the map in the corner of the room and exclaimed, “you have appropriated my map, have you? I have been looking all around for it.” Carpenter continued: And with that he put on his spectacles, and, taking it up, walked to the window; and sitting down upon a trunk began to pore over it very earnestly. He pointed out Kilpatrick’s position, when last heard from, and said:—“It is just as I thought it was. He is close upon—County, where slaves are thickest. Now we ought to get a ‘heap’ of them, when he returns.”45

Lincoln was referring to Judson Kilpatrick’s cavalry raid on Richmond, from February 28 to March 2, 1864. The maneuver failed to conquer Richmond and disgraced Kilpatrick in the eastern theater. Carpenter’s anecdote indicates that 142

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Lincoln used the map to chart the progress of Union troops in liberating slaves, thereby destabilizing the Confederacy. The president’s preoccupation with this map cannot explain his motives for issuing the proclamation, but it does reveal the contemporary organization of information. The map enabled Lincoln to visualize the military expediency of emancipation and perhaps the recruitment of black soldiers. It seems fitting then that Lincoln was enthusiastic about Carpenter’s finished portrait and singled out what he called the “slave-map” as one of its notable details.46 Carpenter plays a crucial role in this story. Were it not for his memoir and portrait, we would have no evidence of Lincoln’s connection to the slave map. Such are the contingencies of the historical record. We also do not know precisely how Lincoln came across this map. Captain Palmer, who sent copies of the Virginia map to Gideon Welles, may have also passed copies of the second map to the cabinet. In 1861, Lincoln asked Kennedy for census figures in order to calculate the feasibility of compensated emancipation, and the slavery map might have been initially used for this same purpose. Yet, by early 1863, he had abandoned both compensated emancipation and colonization and now approached the war at least partly as one of liberation. Scholars are not entirely sure how this conversion took place in the winter of 1862–63, but, thereafter, he began to justify emancipation as a military necessity. Lincoln and his contemporaries were also keenly aware of the problems that emancipation posed for apportionment. Ironically, the Thirteenth Amendment would increase the strength of Southern states in Congress and in the Electoral College. In a roundabout way, this threat to the Northern states and the Republican Party led to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which attempted to ensure the access of blacks to the ballot box. All these issues might also have occurred to politically sensitive Republicans who examined the Coast Survey’s slave map. Both Lincoln and Carpenter realized that it was fundamentally different from other maps. And though Lincoln may not have appreciated the technical expertise and innovation behind it, he clearly understood that the map was decidedly more sophisticated than its prewar counterparts, for it revealed a dimension that otherwise remained invisible. The Coast Survey’s slave map was copied and reproduced widely, which suggests that it struck a chord outside the White House as well. One version appeared in a pamphlet published by the New York Times during the secession crisis, which criticized the “southern mind” for believing in an easy future based on cotton riches.47 Taking a cue from DeBow’s Review, the writers argued that the Southern economy was built on an inefficient labor system that was riddled with waste, limited by a stunted infrastructure, and doomed to failure. The New York Times used a similar map of slavery in order to make this assessment clear. Published before the crisis at Fort Sumter, with Virginia still in the Union, the pamphlet might have been issued to reverse the momentum toward secession Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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and to influence the states of the Upper South.48 The pamphlet specifically argued that Virginia’s future lay not with slavery, but with the commercial model of the Northern states. In this context, the editors used the map of slavery to demonstrate what many already knew: slavery was concentrated in Virginia’s eastern counties. The map exposed the comparative weakness of slavery and the great diversity of the Southern population, both of which indicated that Virginia’s interests were tied to the Union. The map suggested that the protection of slavery was the goal of only a minority, yet it threatened the entire nation’s future.49 The slave map also reinforced the belief that the nation was physically indivisible, and the editors insisted upon “the impossibility of dividing the country upon any political boundary.” State borders, they wrote, were arbitrary, signaling no distinction of habits and character of the people inhabiting them. Secession was impossible, for Southerners occupied no unique region, nor did their people constitute a coherent nationality.50 This geopolitical position was shared by William Gilpin, as discussed in the preceding chapter, and more famously by Lincoln himself. In the midst of the secession crisis, another editorial insisted that the geographical configuration of the country would doom any attempt at secession or outright war a failure. As the author wrote, the topography of America was dominated by the Alleghenies in the east and the Mississippi and its tributaries in the west. The mountain range in the south was hostile to slavery, while the southern reach of the Great River compelled those who bordered it to align economically with those to the north, at its headwaters. These “two great and dominating features” made national unity geographically inevitable. “A glance at the map” showed that the mountains reached into several Southern states, containing antislavery constituencies that would be loyal to the Union. Like Lincoln, the author believed that the regions of the South devoid of slavery would necessarily support a Union party, “whose natural and spontaneous sympathies are far more with the frugal and industrious North, than they are with the rice and cotton planters of the south.” And in a moment of foreshadowing, the author predicted that while the Mississippi River brought tremendous prosperity to the Southern states that bordered it, that same advantage would be their undoing in a potential conflict, for the river would lay “them instantly and completely open to the most irresistible and destructive assaults, the moment they make the states north of them their antagonists.” Disunion was “struggling not against moral forces alone, or chiefly, but against the lay of the land and the run of the rivers.”51 Of course, the author—like Lincoln—was wrong in this respect: secession did occur, and many were willing to give their lives to make such a division permanent. But the slave map—and others discussed below—suggested not a coherent, unified South but rather a region of diverse interests arterially connected to those outside. Lincoln also insisted that secession and division were geographically impossible in a nation that had no natural boundary separating “north” from “south.” 144

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The South was a place of competing interests, and he continued to hope that the variability evident on the slave map meant that Union sentiment would surge if given sufficient time and encouragement. In a conversation with General O. O. Howard in September 1863, Lincoln pointed to the Cumberland Gap and declared “They are loyal there, they are loyal!”52 Perhaps his belief was reinforced by the Coast Survey’s statistical maps, which showed large areas of the south completely free of slaves. This is precisely the effect the maps had upon Sidney Edwards Morse, who designed a map to highlight the presumed Unionism in the mountain regions of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina (see website). Morse then marked the railroads and topography of the Southern states in order to show the advantageous placement of the mountain range in the heart of the Confederacy. The great mistake of the Union effort, he wrote, was to ignore the geographic distribution of slaveholding. Using the slave map, Morse argued that the solution to the military stalemate of 1863 was to fortify the central mountain region of the South. This terrain had never been conducive to plantation agriculture, and hence the population— though not abolitionist—was generally antislavery on economic grounds and opposed to secession. The edges of the mountain district were connected to almost every major city of the Confederacy. To conquer this region, Morse argued, would give the Union an enormous advantage in penetrating the Deep South by capturing the rails that fed the mountains. The wisdom of his proposed military strategy is surely subject to debate. The point here is that none of Morse’s formulations could have been conceived without maps that identified the slave population and the presence of railroads.53

Mapping the Strength of the Rebellion The Coast Survey maps were not the sole attempts to address the sectional crisis through cartography. Maps were used to ask several moral and practical questions of the moment: Was slave labor as efficient as free labor? Could cotton feasibly extend north and west? Debates around these questions intensified with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and continued with the rise of sharecropping. Among the first to map these problems was Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the designers of New York’s Central Park and a pioneering figure in American landscape architecture. In the 1850s, he was hired by Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times (then the New-York Daily Times) to travel through the South and send back his observations. His journeys through the South yielded many stories for Raymond’s paper, which were then published in three separate books that substantially raised Olmsted’s profile among Northern readers. Amplifying the arguments of Hinton Helper, Olmsted insisted that slavery retarded economic development and entrenched inefficient practices. After the secession of South Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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Carolina, Olmsted decided to reissue these observations in a single volume and, in March 1861, hired Daniel Goodloe—the abolitionist and editor of the National Era—to help him edit his work. Goodloe was himself an accomplished antislavery writer, and his journal drew heavily on geographical and statistical material. The two men had different assessments of the Southern economy, and while Goodloe pressed for abolition, Olmsted preferred voluntary manumission. But both were enamored of statistics and eager to use census returns to demonstrate the fundamental poverty of slave labor. Goodloe worked throughout the spring of 1861 to condense Olmsted’s work as the secession crisis worsened by the week. Like many Northerners, Olmsted and Goodloe were deeply concerned about British expressions of sympathy for the Confederacy. Many Northerners had avoided identifying slavery as the primary cause of the rebellion, for fear of alienating those potential Union loyalists in the Upper South. Ironically, however, this allowed the British to see the crisis as driven by Northern oppression rather than a conflict over slavery. British opinion leaned against slavery, but the country imported 80 percent of its cotton from the American South, and this weighed heavily in diplomatic calculations. James Henry Hammond’s insistence that “Cotton is King” was actually a reference to Southern power over British trade. After the crisis at Fort Sumter, the queen of England issued a proclamation of neutrality in May. This effectively granted belligerent status to the rebellion, though did not recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign entity. In this context, Olmsted saw an opportunity to dissuade the British from intervening in the crisis. He knew that they already understood—and widely accepted—the humanitarian critique of slavery, and in face he dedicated the book to John Stuart Mill. But the text itself emphasized that slavery was a supremely inefficient system of labor. It hijacked capital away from reinvestment, it required resources to force productivity, and—worst of all—it insulated cotton prices from competition because the fixed price of slaves drove all aspects of production. Such a system could never create prosperity for more than those who held a sufficient number of slaves. Despite the opulent displays of wealth, Olmsted wrote, the South fundamentally remained a place of poverty and dependency. Hence he ironically titled the tract “The Cotton Kingdom,” which turned Hammond’s boast on its head.54 Both Olmsted and Edward Atkinson—discussed below—had questioned the efficiency and productivity of slave cotton since the crisis in Kansas, and Olmsted went so far as to encourage European immigration to west Texas in order to secure that region for free soil interests in 1855 and 1856. Indeed, many who had settled in western Texas were refugees from 1848 and held the same antislavery position as their fellow German emigrants who worked for the Coast Survey in the 1850s. Olmsted used his Journey through Texas (1857) to attract free 146

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soil–minded Germans and English—preferably those with money—to migrate to Texas. He also wrote directly to British cotton manufacturers to lure capital and free labor to the Southwest in order to expand cotton production beyond the limits of the slave states.55 As secession swept through the South in the spring of 1861, Olmsted inserted himself into the crisis and elaborated his case through cartography. His desire to use a map is partially explained by his correspondence with Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Early in 1861, Adams had written admiringly of Olmsted’s observations on the South, and the latter responded by proposing an organization that would fight the rebellion through words and data. This resonated with Adams, who identified several Northern and Southern men who could launch an intellectual assault on secession. The correspondence between Olmsted and Adams indicates that both perceived a need for Union propaganda, and this goal was partly realized in the Sanitary Commission in June 1861 and the Loyal Publication Society in 1863.56 This is the context within which Olmsted and Goodloe mapped the productivity of slave cotton, which they considered the backbone of the Confederacy (fig. 4.8). They first classified areas of high, medium, and low cotton output, then identified the density of slave population. Like the Coast Survey map of slavery, Olmsted’s map clearly and immediately conveys the absence of slavery through large swaths of the South. Solid lines indicated the heaviest concentrations of slavery, while broken lines marked more dispersed populations. Areas without lines represented those where the free population was at least twice the slave population. The authors used these two separate measures—density of slavery and productivity of cotton—and shrewdly left readers to assess the productivity of the system as a whole. Those areas shaded as highly productive but without corresponding slave populations were, in their view, clear economic evidence against forced labor (fig. 4.9).57 The effect is stark. Virginia is bisected by a mountain range, and the absence of slavery in the west starkly contrasts with the dependence in the east. Of course, Virginia was never a locus of cotton production, and, in this respect, Olmsted’s map slightly misrepresents the situation by assuming that all places with a heavy dependence upon slavery cultivate cotton. Olmsted was not an abolitionist, though he encouraged voluntary manumission. His point was that slavery was inefficient and that arguments that whites were unfit to cultivate cotton were contradicted by the evidence. In most cases, the areas of high production corresponded to those of those with relatively low slave populations, though Olmsted made little effort to explain how this was true. The imminent possibility of British intervention in the conflict explains Olmsted’s desire to use cartography. The map was an urgent attempt to shift the debate and to challenge assumptions of Southern agricultural superiority. A British observer might quickly notice that those areas most committed to slavery were not necessarily those with the Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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4.8 Detail of legend, from “The Cotton Kingdom and Its Dependencies,” in Frederick Law Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (London: Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1861). 30 × 44 cm. See website for entire image.

highest cotton exports and that therefore comparatively little would be risked by the refusal to recognize the Confederacy. In other words, the economic map might lead to the more important political conclusion: slavery was not worth defending. Olmsted’s map is also a landmark in American statistical cartography and one of the first attempts to measure agricultural productivity with a map. While his eight-hundred-page manuscript made a relentless case against slavery, the map distilled that argument into a single image. Olmsted and Goodloe raced to complete the manuscript by June, and the London publisher issued it in October. The work was reviewed extensively in the British press, reprinted the next year, and released in the United States in November 1861.58 After completing the manuscript, Olmsted became the secretary of the newly organized US Sanitary Commission, where he developed a strong working relationship with Bache, the treasurer of the commission. In fact Olmsted and Goodloe were mapping cot148

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ton production at the same time that the Coast Survey was mapping the slave population. Though no evidence speaks to the connection, the coincidence is suggestive to say the least.59 The efforts of the Coast Survey and Olmsted spawned a host of other attempts to map the strength of the rebellion. In 1862, for instance, John Mallet mapped cotton for a British audience from a slightly different perspective. Mallet, an Irish emigrant to the United States trained in chemistry, authored one of the first scientific studies of cotton cultivation. Ironically, the very ease and success of cotton cultivation meant that Americans ignored the need to study the plant in any systematic fashion. Perhaps because of this, questions persisted as to whether cotton—and slave labor—could move beyond the Southern states. Mallet wrote the study as a blueprint for cotton cultivation in India that would enable the British to replicate the advantages of the Southern experience while avoiding its mistakes. Yet he also observed that rapid migration within the South, and the persistent desire to seek virgin soil, suggested that Americans needed to think and act strategically about the crop. Few places in the world had the

4.9 Detail from “The Cotton Kingdom and Its Dependencies.” Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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combination of humidity, soil, and temperature of the American cotton belt, which ensured that the region would continue to dominate world production. But the time would come when exhaustion of this soil would demand fresh sources, and, with the proper commitment and approach, the British could master this market in India.60 To explain the complexity of the cotton crop, Mallet compiled a map that integrated the recent breakthroughs in thematic cartography discussed in chapter 3 (fig. 4.10).61 Using maps of climate, geology, and rainfall, Mallet classified regions relative to their suitability for cotton cultivation. The effect was confusing—a jumble of lines and colors—but important as one of the first attempts to integrate different types of data on a single map and as the first map of

4.10 Detail of legend, from “Map of the Cotton Regions of North America Showing the Geological, Climatological, and Agronomic Conditions of the Plant. by Dr. Jno. Wm. Mallet, 1862,” in John William Mallet, Cotton: The Chemical, Geological, and Meteorological Conditions Involved in Its Successful Cultivation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862). 51.4 × 61.6 cm. See website for entire image. 150

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cotton cultivation made in the United States. Mallet’s map enabled the reader to isolate the most productive cotton regions and then to trace the corresponding areas of temperature, rainfall, and soil composition. By mapping four classes of information, one could determine the best soil, the best temperature range, and the ideal amount of moisture. With this information, Mallet hoped the British might maximize productivity in India rather than waste time and resources in regions where the proper growing conditions did not exist. His tract had limited circulation in the United States, yet he addressed a question that had raged since the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Mallet’s map envisioned a future for cotton devoid of politics and labor, one guided solely by the optimal environmental conditions. Yet cotton production could not be considered apart from the sectional conflict. Stephen Douglas defended the Kansas-Nebraska Act on several grounds, one of which was that cotton—and by extension slavery—would never take root in territories north of the Missouri Compromise line. Thus, he insisted, Northerners opposed to slavery had little to fear from the act. In his famous speech at Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln dismissed this as a “lullaby” that could be refuted by a simple “glance at the map.” Five slave states lay north of the Missouri Compromise line, and thus climate was no barrier to the spread of slavery. Furthermore, the census of 1850 counted nearly one quarter of the nation’s slaves living in those states. As Lincoln uttered these words, Lorin Blodget and Joseph Henry were vying to publish the first comprehensive maps of climate in the United States.62 In fact, Mallet used Blodget’s charts of climate to develop his map of cotton cultivation. Mallet’s report had a minor impact in the United States because it was intended for a small audience of British colonists. Yet his map had an important afterlife when it was found by Edward Atkinson in 1863. Atkinson was an agent and treasurer for several northeastern cotton mills, and knew the intricacies of financing and manufacturing cotton better than any other American. In 1850, he joined the Free Soil Party, then became a Republican, and even supported John Brown along with other like-minded Bostonians. Atkinson had dual commitments: he was heavily invested in the profitability of cotton but repulsed by slavery. This conflict led him to seek alternatives to the Southern cotton trade, either through an increase of foreign imports or through free labor. Like Olmsted, he supported the introduction of free labor as a way to undermine the iron grip of slavery over cotton production. After secession, he joined the Boston Emancipation League and began to develop a systematic argument for the cultivation of cotton without slaves. When European recognition of the Confederacy seemed imminent, Atkinson championed emancipation as the quickest way to crush the rebellion. And while cotton manufacturers worried that slave labor was the best and perhaps only path to profitable cotton, he detailed the comparative inefficiency of slave labor, argued for its abolition, and described the potential for cotton cultiSlavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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vation further north and west. As Atkinson wrote in 1861 in a widely circulated wartime pamphlet, cotton could be raised by whites and free blacks “with perfect ease and safety.” Free labor was not the obstacle, but rather the path, to cotton profits. Atkinson was widely quoted and—through exposure in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune—became a familiar voice in England, where his pamphlet refuted Southern claims that emancipation would damage the cotton industry. Like Olmsted, Atkinson constructed an economic case for emancipation.63 After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Atkinson turned to cartography to convince his skeptical colleagues that the policy would enhance cotton production. Published in March 1863, Atkinson’s map built on recent advances in thematic mapping (fig. 4.11).64 He took data on race and labor population from the 1860 census, average seasonal temperatures from Lorin Blodget and John Mallet, and cotton production figures from both the census and Mallet. The result was a map that integrated cotton production, climate, and soil types in order to show that this crop, if properly cultivated, could extend far beyond its present geographical limits.65 As he wrote, “The principal cotton region is not upon the unhealthy coast line, where malarious fevers prevail, but is mostly a healthy interior upland country, the largest portion being

4.11 Detail of “The Cotton Kingdom,” from Edward Atkinson, Report to the Boston Board of Trade on the Cotton Manufacture of 1862 (Boston, 1863). 42 × 37 cm. See website for entire image. 152

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far more healthy than many of the Western States.” Ironically, Atkinson used Mallet’s data to argue not for the limits of cotton, but for the opportunities to expand. To make this case, he simplified Mallet’s complex map. He kept the data on the outer limits of cotton cultivation but removed Mallet’s emphasis on soils, then incorporated Blodget’s summer isoline to suggest that cotton might thrive further north and west. The map allowed Atkinson to make a few controversial arguments. He insisted that cotton was but a fraction of the South’s economy and that its power and influence had been exaggerated. Less than 13 percent of the land in the six principal cotton states had been improved, a statistic that Atkinson visualized by showing with shaded boxes how little of each state was under cultivation. Comparatively speaking, the states of the Northeast and middle Atlantic placed far more of their land under cultivation, a statistic that challenged the assumption that the South was the agricultural center of the nation. Less than 2 percent of the area of the cotton states was devoted to cotton, which constituted a fraction of the region’s potential.66 Atkinson also designed the map to show that cotton cultivated by slave labor was supremely inefficient. As J. D. B. DeBow had argued repeatedly, the great limitation to cotton production was not climate, but the cost of slave labor. Given this artificial limitation, Northern cotton “spinners” (meaning manufacturers) had a right to demand that slavery be replaced by free labor. Already, Atkinson noted, approximately one-ninth of the nation’s cotton supply was produced by free whites in Tennessee and Texas.67 Atkinson used Blodget’s isotherms to argue that the optimal “healthful” locations for cotton were outside its current domain. Anticipating an objection that white farmers could not thrive in the southern climate, his average temperature lines suggest that much of the American South resembled the climate of southern Europe. With emancipation, he predicted that cotton production would flourish, for it would operate under far more efficient conditions set by the market. In his view, the ideal region for health and cotton production was contained by the line marking a mean summer temperature that extended from central Georgia through Alabama to southern Illinois.68 What Lincoln feared in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act—that cotton as a crop could easily extend north and west—Atkinson actually encouraged. But for Lincoln this necessarily involved slave labor, while for Atkinson the evidence suggested the extension of the crop would be a boon if cultivated by free white labor. The map even documented population growth in the midwestern states, which he saw as boding well for the growth of cotton cultivation after emancipation. Atkinson’s view of slavery and race was complex, but perhaps typical. In introducing and explaining his map, he wrote that slavery had the unfortunate result of concentrating the black population to “disturbing” levels in the Southern states, for slavery had discouraged white emigration. With the end of slavery, AtSlavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography

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kinson predicted that an influx of white farmers would improve the productivity of cotton, for he believed that white labor was more industrious than black. He also predicted that emancipation would “reduce the colored to the ratio it bears to the white in Maryland and Delaware, in which it is not only not a disturbing element but a very valuable one.” Atkinson envisioned a rosy future after emancipation, one where free “common” laborers could—with far less labor required to farm in New England—cultivate both cotton and food. On the left of the map, he listed “typical” expenses of planters and free laborers in order to show the efficiency and economy brought by liberating labor from the fixed ceiling brought by the limited number of slaves to be traded. And by moving cotton away from the “unhealthy coast line, where malarious fevers prevail,” to the “healthy interior upland country,” the region would experience an overall elevation of both productivity and prosperity. As he optimistically wrote, “How rapid a settlement of the cotton region will be induced by the ability of a common laborer to raise in each year an ample supply of food and a crop of cotton which will bring $1250 in gold on demand, let each one judge.” The map made the case that slavery must end for the sake of the nation’s prosperity and free market future. Mallet might have challenged Atkinson’s conclusions, yet they were drawn from Mallet’s map. Atkinson made climate the determining factor for cotton, yet omitted reference to soil. His selective map allowed him to persuade fellow cotton manufacturers that emancipation would unleash Southern productivity. Beyond emancipation, Atkinson proposed that the Union smash the rebellion in Texas in order to cultivate cotton on farms rather than plantations. He urged that German colonists be put in charge of emancipated slaves to test his hypothesis about the profitability of free labor, a plan close to one proposed by Olmsted. The Union army, of course, could not spare the resources for such a plan.69 Atkinson’s map—like those of the Coast Survey—resonated during the war. It was reviewed positively in the Northern press and noted for its “ingenious method” of visually integrating data on labor, cotton production, and climate. By measuring the actual acreage devoted to cotton, Atkinson could show the relative power of the crop in the Southern states as a whole. As the map demonstrated, only a fraction of the territory productively cultivated cotton, yet planters controlled the political and economic decisions of the entire region. As one reviewer wrote, “The Cotton States taken together have 10.7 per cent. of their territory in improved lands, of which less than one-sixth is given to cotton,—the interest, on which, as we have said, everything is made to turn.” The map exposed this relatively inefficient—yet exceedingly powerful—interest group, and made Southern demands for additional land seem ludicrous.70 Atkinson’s map was undeniably argumentative, and many would challenge his conclusions. But notice that these conclusions were discovered through cartography and illustrated with cartography. The map starkly and memorably ex154

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posed the inefficiency of cotton cultivated by slavery and earned a measure of permanence when Benson Lossing reprinted it in his widely read account of the Civil War. Lossing used the map to mock the conventional Southern wisdom that “Cotton [was] King.” Instead, Lossing wrote, Atkinson’s map portrayed a slaveholding elite that misrepresented its economic power in order to extend the labor system westward.71 Atkinson made essentially the same point through his map that Olmsted had in 1861, though with different techniques and visual effect. Both highlighted the inefficiency of cotton production in order to make an economic case against slavery. Robert Bruce has written that the war hurt American science and slowed the progress of basic research. Yet it stimulated remarkable innovation in cartography and graphic representation.72 Leading this innovation was the US Coast Survey. The agency’s slave maps—whether wielded as antislavery propaganda or to make sense of complex data—resulted from European models, the rise of inexpensive map publishing, the widened purview of the census, the growth of sectional tensions, and the secession crisis. Bache and his staff visualized the human landscape of slavery just as countless other maps had visualized the physical landscape. In the process, they introduced the possibility that maps could be tools to represent and analyze unseen data rather than simply identify borders, cities, topography, and roads. President Lincoln quickly noticed the slavery map for its ability to reveal what traditional maps could not. How he looked at the map at any given time is impossible to determine—as mysterious as how individuals read novels or watch films. And the map reinforced false assumptions such as the hope that the South was full of pro-Union sentiment. Yet this experiment influenced the growth of statistical and thematic cartography after the Civil War. It was produced to shape the outcome of that conflict, but also to promote the census and mapping as relevant tools in a nation of expanding governance. By this reckoning, maps are products of circumstance, but they also shape those circumstances. After the war, Francis Amasa Walker and Daniel Coit Gilman touted thematic and statistical cartography as a new way to convey ideas about the national population. As the next chapter shows, thematic and statistical maps became handmaidens to late nineteenth-century governance. The Coast Survey maps of slavery—born in the secession crisis—were among the first American examples of this new form of cartography.

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CHAPTER 5

The Cartographic Consolidation of America

In the midst of the Civil War, physician Edwin Leigh tried to map the strength of slavery. Like Frederick Law Olmsted and Edward Atkinson, he was enthralled by the power of maps to visualize data. Leigh had long been part of the antislavery network of the Northeast and wanted to measure the power of the institution in Missouri. He termed these maps of data “bird’s-eye” views, which is odd because that term generally referred to oblique views of a city or town, with streets and buildings fully visible and identified. Bird’s-eye views became popular in industrial America as a form of civic promotion that combined art, advertising, and cartography. But Leigh he took the term “bird’s-eye” to mean a literal overview of the state’s resources, which he dissected through individual maps of overall population, slave population, slaveholders, and agricultural output. His final map was the most ambitious, “A View of the Relation of Slaves to Agricultural Wealth in Missouri” (1862) (see website). Here he incorporated several classes of data to measure the “true” strength of slavery in one of the few Southern states that remained in the Union. The year before, the Coast Survey had used a technique of shading to represent the distribution of slavery in a way that was immediately recognizable and meaningful. By contrast, Leigh’s method of visualization marked a step between data on tables and in cartographic form and required the viewer to calculate and convert in order to make sense of the information. As a result, his maps were not nearly as compelling. His map of slaves and agriculture actually confuses matters. He purported to measure productivity by giving a ratio of slaves to investment in 157

farm equipment in each county. But this left out several other variables, such as quality of soil, agricultural output, and land value. Leigh’s map was something of a failure, albeit an interesting and notable one. He failed because he tried to do too much with the map with too little information. This reminds us that thematic mapping was still in its infancy and that to render data into visual form was a complex enterprise. His map inadvertently highlights the tremendous achievements of the Coast Survey in the 1860s, which prompted an outpouring of cartographic experimentation after the Civil War.1 In his bird’s-eye maps of Missouri, Leigh introduced symbols to represent numbers and intended to apply these techniques to the nation as a whole. This approach bore fruit when Congress established the Bureau of Education in 1867 and asked him to assess the state of American literacy. Leigh had authored and edited multiple texts on orthography and phonetics, and this concern with communication inspired him to seek “a new model of expressing numbers” through cartography. He aimed to make census data relevant by rendering it visual, creating “pictures of numbers” that would allow the viewer to assess the meaning of statistics. As he astutely put it, “Our Arabic figures are a kind of short-hand notation for numbers; while they record them, they hide them; they cover them up as in treasure-houses, where they are carefully preserved, but are not exposed to view so as to be seen in their actual proportions.”2 But the map, Leigh argued, was a superior language through which shading and iconography spoke in ways that numeric symbols could not. Drawing on the energy and enthusiasm of social inquiry, he analyzed literacy along lines of geography, race, ethnicity, and sex. One of his proudest discoveries was that rates of illiteracy were not highest in cotton states, but in farming states outside the South. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had rates as high as any of the slave states, which challenged assumptions that had been “documented” in maps and statistics, such as Peterman’s map of “intellectual culture” discussed in the preceding chapter. Nor could northern illiteracy be explained by the foreign-born population, for these trends were already in place prior to the “great tide of unlettered immigrants.”3 Leigh’s attempt to map literacy and culture in the United States reveals the government’s commitment to population mapping, which began before the war and flourished thereafter. This activity has been overshadowed by the more dramatic achievements of the federal coastal and geological surveys. The reconnaissance work of Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and Ferdinand Hayden immensely expanded the knowledge of the nation’s land and resources, erased the blank spots on the map, and became instruments for the federal management of the West. The epic scale of these efforts has obscured a quieter but equally consequential shift in the use of maps. Leigh’s maps, for instance, reflect the treatment of the population as an aggregate body to be managed. He designed maps to frame illiteracy as a national affliction that required a national remedy. That Con158

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gress even asked him to undertake this reveals an agenda that would have been unimaginable two decades earlier. By the late 1870s this type of investigation had become almost routine. As the population became an abstraction to be administered and measured, maps took center stage. This chapter examines the network of men who energetically mapped the nation after the Civil War, most of whom were employed or sponsored by the federal government. With congressional blessing and funding, they confronted social problems through the latest cartographic and statistical methods, and this directly challenges our assumptions about an inert postwar state wedded to laissez-faire ideals. During the Gilded Age, maps became tools of governance that facilitated the rise of the modern state. Yet we know little about how this shift took place and who was behind it.4

Statistics and the Advent of Social Inquiry The enthusiasm for statistics described in chapter 4 extended beyond the census to the emerging field of vital statistics. This interest in the measurement of health and disease within the population partly originated within the nation’s military. In 1852, Surgeon General Thomas Lawson—who published Lorin Blodget’s groundbreaking maps of climate and rainfall in 1855—commissioned a study of “medical topography” in order to investigate the causes of diseases at the nation’s military posts. The army had gathered statistics on soldiers since 1819, though only after Lawson arrived in 1836 was the data systematically assembled, collated, and condensed.5 The US Sanitary Commission was equally committed to medical topography. Local sanitary commissions had sponsored the study of epidemics in the 1840s and 1850s; then, in June 1861, Lincoln approved a War Department order organizing a national Sanitary Commission to mobilize the home front. The shocking defeat at Bull Run in July raised alarm about the strength and character of Union troops. In response, Frederick Law Olmsted— the commission’s newly appointed secretary—immediately began to study the military camps. This effectively gave the Sanitary Commission full access to the records of the surgeon general.6 As Olmsted surveyed the condition of individual soldiers, Ezekiel Brown Elliott suggested that it would be more effective—and more accurate—to study the troops as an aggregate. Elliott saw the war as an opportunity to research the moral and physical attributes of the soldiers on a large scale, which would both aid the war effort and contribute to social science. The Sanitary Commission zealously adopted his suggestions by establishing a “Statistical Bureau” to gather data about the troops. As an actuary in Boston, Elliott had used statistics to determine life span, assess risk, and calculate premiums for life insurance. Once the war began, he used the military’s vital statistics to create a generalized picture The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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of human potential that he hoped would make government more enlightened and efficient.7 His enthusiasm for statistical averages was inspired by Adolphe Quetelet, the French statistician who pioneered the concept a few decades earlier. As sanitarian Charles Stillé put it, “the experience of thousands or hundreds of thousands of men may be substituted for that of one man, and the accuracy of numerical computation may thus supply the place of the rude estimate of personal opinion.” Several life insurance companies actually sponsored the Sanitary Commission’s efforts to collect vital statistics, for the promise of accurately assessing risk was more than worth their investment.8 In 1862, the Sanitary Commission published Elliott’s study of casualty and illness rates from three wars.9 He isolated the correlation of variables—place of origin, status in the military, geography, and climate—over mortality and illness. For the first time, the health of a given population in the United States was treated as an aggregate and measured through graphs and charts. Elliott’s research on military health continued under Benjamin Gould, a prominent member of the Coast Survey and chief of the Harvard Observatory in Boston. Gould had long been devoted to the study of longitude, and he brought this same precision and zeal to vital statistics. He compiled an inventory of the soldiers’ physical measurements, including weight, height, complexion, and hair color. While Elliott traveled to Berlin to share these statistical techniques, Gould championed their relevance in the United States for “anthropometry”—the measurement of man—and “anthropology,” or the “laws controlling the development of man.”10 Elliott’s notable work prompted the Office of the Surgeon General to organize its own study of the military through the Bureau of the Provost-MarshalGeneral (within the War Department) in January 1864. The bureau was led by Jedediah Baxter, an energetic doctor who compiled extensive data on the health of soldiers during the final year of the war. Before the bureau’s dissolution, Baxter asked for support to transform the data into a formal report. This was a rather bold request, but he believed that this research on the health of soldiers had implications not just for the military but for science, social science, and national governance. Congress considered and granted his request in the summer of 1866, as debates raged over the Civil Rights Bill, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the proper role of the federal government. For some, this research was essential, a “perfect work” that measured the strength of the nation in a way that had yet to be undertaken anywhere in the world. For others, this type of inquiry was entirely unnecessary and fell outside the purview of the federal government.11 This zeal for statistics and social inquiry found a new outlet in October 1865, when members of the US Sanitary Commission met in Boston to form the American Social Science Association. The founders were already known for their engagement with reform: Amasa Walker, an economist and opponent of slavery; Edward Jarvis, a doctor and authority on vital statistics; Daniel Coit Gilman, ge160

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ographer and educational reformer; and David A. Wells, who had been working with Edward Atkinson to rationalize the nation’s system of tariffs. Each of these men influenced early social science by emphasizing its statistical dimension, and several experimented with maps as tools of governance. They conceived of social science in terms of interdependence and were drawn to maps as a way to dissect this complexity.12 Many of the association’s leaders also pressed for reform within the Republican Party. These self-styled liberal Republicans would not leave the party until 1872, yet their separation began as early as 1867; after the 1870 election, Wells, Atkinson, and E. L. Godkin met to formalize their political agenda.13 Historians usually treat these reformers as conservative ideologues who aimed to dismantle tariffs, end Reconstruction, and establish a civil service independent of the spoils system. Some argue that they neutralized the energy to expand government influence during Reconstruction by promoting an individualist ethos that looked skeptically upon federal governance. In some respects, the role of the state actually did expand, notably in the realm of data gathering, where the public assumed that the government had a clear responsibility and authority to act. There were also new bureaucracies in the postwar period, such as the Department of Justice in 1870 and the Bureau of Education in 1866, and an ongoing commitment to surveying in the Corps of Engineers and the Geological Survey. Yet generally, these developments are treated as the exception that pales next to the limited funding and power granted to these agencies and the general retreat from governance during the 1870s.14 More recent scholars reject this picture of a weak postwar national state and argue that the major concern of these liberal Republican reformers was the Grant administration’s inefficiency, not its corruption. In fact, these men sought a more activist state for more than reason. Postwar upheaval raised unprecedented challenges, such as universal suffrage, the spread of wage work, the rise of the corporation, and the growth of administrative government. Liberal Republicans were not imagining a smaller state, but a more precise and efficient one, which explains their preoccupation with statistical reasoning and civil service reform. The first would place governance on a more scientific foundation, and the second would facilitate a bureaucracy free of partisanship. Thus, it was the Gilded Age—not the Progressive Era—that first generated the concerns about mass society and governance that led to modern liberalism. These were the same concerns that animated the ASSA and inspired its members to apply principles of social science to governance.15

Daniel Coit Gilman This effort to rationalize governance was encouraged by Daniel Coit Gilman, an ardent education reformer and an advocate for the German university model. The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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Gilman corresponded widely with the leaders of science and social science, helped to found the ASSA, and launched Johns Hopkins University. But what makes him relevant here is his endorsement of mapping as a way to rationalize society and knowledge itself. Gilman was born in 1831 and, as a young man, worked for Henry Stevens, the century’s foremost collector of Americana. In helping Stevens prepare a catalog of George Washington’s library, he was exposed to cartography and became particularly interested in the organization of information. After graduating Yale University in 1852, Gilman studied lexicography at Harvard. While in Cambridge, he lived in the home of Arnold Guyot, whose Earth and Man had already become celebrated as a groundbreaking study of the relationship of the human and natural environment. Guyot drew Gilman toward geography, an interest confirmed by his time in Europe after graduation. While abroad, Gilman absorbed the German model of higher education and the ideas of Karl Ritter, especially the relationship between historical and geographical thought.16 Upon his return to the United States, Gilman spent nearly ten years as a librarian at Yale. He also began to write “Geographical Notices” for the American Journal of Science and Art, the country’s foremost forum for scientific discussion that was edited by Benjamin Silliman. In both capacities, Gilman was immersed in news of science and exploration and tasked with explaining these developments to a general audience. His first “Geographical Notice” of 1858 discussed the work of August Petermann, whose Mittheilungen compiled the latest geographic intelligence and taught Gilman how maps could visualize and analyze information. On the eve of the Civil War, he enthusiastically reviewed the surgeon general’s latest research on vital statistics and medical geography. This included an outline map of the United States, which identified only the nation’s seven military departments, its forts, and its arsenals. Such a new kind of map, designed for a specific analytical purpose, fed his excitement that cartography could target specific scientific and social problems.17 Through the 1860s and 1870s, Gilman corresponded with historians, geographers, statisticians, doctors, political leaders, reformers, and bureaucrats. His wide-ranging network indicates few boundaries between these areas of knowledge, and this may have facilitated the rapid spread of thematic mapping techniques across these fields. From 1863 to 1872, he taught physical and political geography at Yale’s Sheffield School, among the first devoted exclusively to scientific study. He was also appointed by Francis Amasa Walker as deputy marshal for collection of social statistics in Connecticut, where he saw firsthand a wealth of information about poverty, crime, and education. His geographical training enabled him to think about the spatial distribution of this data, and, while he made no original contribution to the discipline of geography, he understood that maps had the potential to address social science. His attention to 162

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the institutional structure of knowledge led him to preside over the University of California in 1872, which he left after two years to accept the position as the first president of Johns Hopkins University. This was an important moment, for Hopkins was the first institution modeled on the German university and designed primarily for graduate education and research. The nation’s leading university presidents all named Gilman as the best choice to realize this vision of higher education.18 As the country’s most respected and influential geographer, Gilman was invited to give the annual address to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in January 1871. In his address he celebrated the federal government’s many mapping efforts, and stressed that cartography was an essential tool of national progress.19 Though impressed by the scope of these efforts, he also took care to explain that the very meaning of a map was shifting. Until that point, the primary goal of mapmaking had been to represent boundaries, locations, or topography with increasing precision. As exploration waned and industrialization advanced, maps began to address the social environment by depicting patterns of settlement, rates of development, and the relationship between humans and their environment. Gilman accelerated this shift by touting maps as tools of investigation that would aid national development. This seems axiomatic to us today, for we are accustomed to seeing maps as extensions of power and handmaidens to governance. But the use of maps for analytical purposes, or for processing data, was not inevitable. In the United States, it occurred only because individuals such as Gilman encouraged it. In his address to the AGSS, he singled out a few examples of this new type of cartography, all of which emerged from federal agencies. His examples were thematic but not statistical, mapping information but not necessarily its distribution. All explicitly spoke to development, settlement, and infrastructure. One of Gilman’s favorites was a comprehensive map of the West created by the Indian Bureau immediately after the Civil War, a highly charged moment in Native American history.20 The Indian Bureau had moved from the War Department to the newly organized Department of the Interior in 1849. During the 1860s, the tenuous relationship between Native Americans and the government deteriorated with the Sioux uprising and the Sand Creek Massacre. In early 1867, the Doolittle Report publicized a steep decline in the Native population, which galvanized support for policy reform. In response, Congress created a Peace Commission, and President Johnson tasked Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor with quelling violence in order to facilitate western development. By August, the commission decided to separate peaceful from aggressive tribes and to distance both from planned railroad routes in the West. Negotiations culminated in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge (1867) and Fort Laramie (1868), which placed Natives on the plains in two large reservations.21 The reThe Cartographic Consolidation of America

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sulting peace was short, and, six months after the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, the commission candidly reported that hostility between Natives and whites was the responsibility of settlers themselves. The commission also recommended that the government no longer recognize tribes as “domestic, dependent nations.” In 1871, Congress complied by ending its capacity to make treaties with tribes. Thereafter, American policy toward Native Americans moved toward allotment and assimilation.22 In the midst of this shift in policy, Commissioner Taylor authorized a map of the western territories to shed light on the state of Native American life and asked W. J. Keeler to compile it from public surveys and existing railroad and mining maps (see website). The “National Map of the Territory of the United States” (1868) is actually the government’s first attempt to comprehensively map tribal life, and it anticipates the momentum of western development. Keeler advocated settlement by mapping land surveys, railroad routes (both projected and existing), mining discoveries, forts, military posts, and Indian reservations. His map celebrated the economic potential of the West and especially the trajectory of development by highlighting mineral lands, transportation routes, and progress of the survey. Keeler excitedly described the “hidden treasures” that lured the railroad across the continent and marked the latest mining discoveries, leaving the “Indian troubles” as just a footnote in the story of development. He designed the map as an instrument of settlement: one edition was printed in pocket form, suitable for migrant travel, while another included a thirty-page guide to obtaining land through the Homestead Act. The advent of the reservation system gave Native American life an explicitly spatial dimension, and this map starkly charts the collision course of two civilizations. Gilman was particularly drawn to the Keeler map for its ability to frame and advance national development.23

Francis Amasa Walker One year later, Gilman was again invited to address the AGSS regarding the state of American geographical knowledge. After reviewing the progress of exploration and the surveys, he returned to the shifting meaning of cartography, this time paying close attention to statistical mapping. Gilman had long championed the work of August Petermann and now celebrated August Meitzen, a statistician who in 1866 began publishing a series of original maps of Prussian territorial divisions, geological structure, population density, wealth, taxation, and industry. Along with the Coast Survey’s maps of slavery, these were among the most ambitious examples of statistical cartography to date. After being displayed at the International Statistical Congress in 1869, they circulated at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. When Gilman saw them, he began to think about maps 164

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as ways to reach beyond physical geography to depict population, commerce, and culture.24 Among those listening to Gilman was Francis Amasa Walker, one of the most gifted and driven civil servants of the postwar era. No doubt Walker’s career was shaped by his father Amasa, a leader of the Free Soil movement in Massachusetts, cofounder of the ASSA, and one of the nation’s leading economists and reformers in the 1860s. After graduating Amherst College, the younger Walker took up law, then distinguished himself as a Union officer. This service deepened his nationalism as well as his sense of moral strength and self-discipline. It also trained him to think about government as an instrument of power and change.25 Walker dabbled in journalism for a few years until David Wells named him chief of the new Bureau of Statistics in 1869. Like Gilman, Walker was drawn to the organization, communication, and use of information, and, though he never formally joined the ASSA, he shared its concern with a scientific approach to governance. Like the reformers in the ASSA, he promoted a more rational administrative state and a more professionalized, permanent Census Office that would operate as a tool of both enumeration and reform by extending knowledge of education, health, jurisprudence, finance, and social economy. These areas of inquiry relied on statistics, which explains why the ASSA pressed in the late 1860s for the federal government to expand its collection of statistics, especially through census reform.26 While Walker was working at the Bureau of Statistics, he was noticed by Congressman James Garfield, who was then the chief advocate for census reform. Garfield hired Walker and his colleague Edward Jarvis—another statistical authority—to draft census legislation in 1869. Walker’s bill expanded the schedules (questions) and proposed a permanent bureau to stabilize the enterprise and remove it from the realm of partisan politics.27 The Senate defeated Walker’s legislation in early 1870, dashing the hopes of census reformers. Yet at the same moment President Grant appointed Walker—then just twenty-nine—as superintendent of the Ninth Census. This appointment was undoubtedly a victory for Walker, yet by defeating the legislation the Senate had saddled him with a limited and outdated census structure. His efforts were further hindered by the political aftermath of the war. Many white Southerners chafed at Reconstruction, and Walker suspected local census agents of undercounting the African American population. He also publicly traded barbs with former Superintendent J. C. G. Kennedy and even repudiated some results of the Ninth Census as inaccurate and mired in patronage politics. Yet the census of 1870 was still the most accurate, ambitious, and varied to that point. Walker issued instructions that were far more specific than Kennedy’s in 1860, but more consequential was his ability to make the census meaningful and relevant by mapping the data in compelling and appealing forms.28 The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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Walker brought tremendous dedication to his wide-ranging responsibilities. A few years after naming him as superintendent, President Grant gave him a concurrent position as commissioner of Indian affairs. With Gilman’s help, Walker also became a professor of political economy and history at Yale in 1872, a post he held until serving as the third president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1881 to 1897. He presided over the American Statistical Association from 1883 to 1897 and the American Economic Association from 1885 to 1892, all while writing prolifically on economic and social issues, organizing liberal Republicans in the 1876 election, and coordinating the Centennial Exposition of 1876. He was one of several high-level bureaucrats who sought to make federal agencies more purposeful and who saw themselves on the vanguard of social inquiry. Along with members of the ASSA, Walker argued that a more permanent apparatus of governance would be better equipped to investigate social and economic problems.29 Like Gilman, Walker was impressed by the experimental maps coming out of Europe, especially those of Meitzen. In early 1871, he began to think about the application of these new techniques to census data. When Asher & Adams sent advance sheets for its atlas to Walker for approval, he was impressed by the firm’s decision to remove irrelevant information, thereby avoiding “the erroneous method of crowding and burdening maps.” Yet these did not incorporate statistics into the map itself, and Walker recognized that this failure to visualize data was widespread. To properly map data would require a deeper reconsideration of cartography as both an art and a science.30 That summer, Walker informed Gilman that he planned to submit, “for your criticism, some of our feeble efforts in initiation of this method of representing statistical results.” His goal was “to have a few charts colored in such a way as to strike the mind of the average Congressman, and thus secure authority for putting our whole Census work, substantially, into light and shade.”31 That fall, Walker and his staff made a few preliminary maps of the population and its “principal constituent elements”: immigrants, African Americans, and native-born whites. The maps used shading to identify the number of this group per square mile. Walker loaned the maps to Gilman in January 1872 so the latter could gather support for the project among his colleagues at the Sheffield School. As it happened, Gilman was scheduled to address the AGSS that very month and used this platform to showcase two of Walker’s maps that separately depicted the population per square mile of the foreign born and African Americans (figs. 5.1 and 5.2). Gilman extolled the maps, both as individual documents and also for what they revealed together. Notice, he remarked, that the maps instantly conveyed certain “truths” that raw data would yield only reluctantly. This type of mapping could ask questions, visualize data, and integrate disparate realms of information, all of which were lost when that same information was left 166

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5.1 “Foreign Population,” from Report of the Ninth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1872). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 41.5 × 38 cm.

in numerical and tabular form. For instance, the viewer could immediately ascertain that “the foreign born population is thickest, where the Africans are not, and vice versa.” The absence of geographical overlap between these two populations was apparent only because Walker had mapped the data. Gilman was intrigued by other hidden patterns that maps of this type might reveal.32 Walker was proud of the enthusiasm his maps stimulated at the AGSS. A few The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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5.2 “Colored Population,” from Report of the Ninth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1872). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 41.5 × 38 cm.

years later, he recalled that these early maps were crude, for he “had only begun to appreciate the capabilities of this method.” Yet he had broken new ground, and his private letters to Gilman convey sincere excitement that maps might fundamentally alter our understanding of information and governance. Gilman was equally taken with Walker’s maps, so much so that he held onto them longer than expected, and Walker had to scramble to deliver them to Congress in time to consider his request for funding. Yet Walker was grateful when Gilman and his 168

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colleagues petitioned the secretary of the interior in support of his work. In June the secretary asked House Speaker James Blaine for twenty-five thousand dollars so that Walker could illustrate the census with twenty maps made “in the best style of the art.” That summer Congress approved—for the first time—a request to map the census, with an emphasis on population, industry, agriculture, and disease.33

The Census Reports Before 1870, the Census Office had never produced maps of its data, so the adoption of cartography and graphic illustration is remarkable in and of itself. The maps first appeared in Walker’s three-volume Report of the Ninth Census. Many were executed by Julius Bien, whose lithographic skill was unrivaled. Despite the conflict and concerns plaguing the Ninth Census, Walker’s Report was praised for its breadth and depth.34 The first volume appeared in November 1872 and opened with a map of the nation’s population density per square mile (fig. 5.3). The most striking feature is its geographical limit; despite claiming to be a map of the entire population, it extended only to the hundredth meridian, with an inset map of California. As explained below, this map was especially consequential, for it both reflected and advanced Walker’s concern that urbanization and the decline of rural life had negatively affected the population. Next, Walker mapped the “colored” and “general foreign” population and followed these with a smaller maps of immigrant groups: German, Irish, English and Welsh, Swedish and Norwegian, Chinese, and British. On each of these, Walker tailored the geography to the group: while the English, Welsh, Swedish, and Norwegian populations were mapped in the Upper Midwest and Northeast, the Chinese was limited to the Far West (see website). Of these, it was the “distribution of colored” and “general foreign” population maps that had so impressed Gilman in January 1872. Within these maps lies a crucial detail that is easily missed. Recall that the Coast Survey maps of slavery used county boundaries to measure the ratio of slaves to the total population. These “choropleth” maps did not identify variations within a county and, in this respect, flattened the distinction between urban and rural by encompassing both. By mapping a particular phenomenon according to existing geographical categories, choropleth maps produce a picture that is forced into established political units rather than represented on its own terms. Walker would have been familiar with the Coast Survey maps of slavery, and this model of using preexisting units—counties, congressional districts, or census enumeration districts— would have been the obvious choice for his own maps. Yet instead he chose the more labor-intensive task of representing the population not within a given area, but as it “truly” exists. For example, his map of the “Colored Population” has five The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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5.3 “Density of Population,” from Report of the Ninth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1872). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 41.5 × 38 cm.

categories of density per square mile, but nowhere on the map are county divisions evident. Instead, Walker’s “dasymetric” technique allows the contours of population density to determine the area, rather than the reverse. This technique gives the map more precision and nuance and allows the population to “speak for itself.”35 This decision had important implications for representing the population. 170

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Among the most suggestive of Walker’s early maps were two arranged together, of the distribution of illiteracy and wealth. These two maps indicated an inverse relationship, with southern illiteracy starkly contrasting with northern wealth (see website). The Ninth Census was also the first to count African Americans as a free population. Walker noted that emancipation—effectively ending the threefifths compromise—had enlarged the population of the southern states by nearly 14 percent and the national population by over 4 percent. But he knew that the greatest concern was not over emancipation, but instead the aggregate population, which was expected to exceed forty-two million. This expectation had been set in 1815, when Elkanah Watson extrapolated the growth rate through 1900. Over time, his predictions proved accurate and, with each census, gained more authority as a measure of national progress. The unusually rapid expansion of the population in the first half of the nineteenth century conditioned Americans to see progress in terms of growth.36 Then, in 1870, the Ninth Census calculated the aggregate population at 38.5 million, which fell short of Watson’s projection. Though this number was larger than that of the Eighth Census, the rate of growth between 1860 and 1870 fell, which many interpreted as a sign of national weakness. Walker directly addressed this anxiety and explained the decline as a function of Civil War casualties and the absence of these soldiers from the pool of reproduction. To buoy public spirit, he stressed that the slowed rate of growth might actually indicate that the national “body” was maturing “from the gristle to the solid bone of manhood.” That the population grew at all given the war was a sign of strength, for “Nothing but the irresistible vigor of our stock, the noble opportunities afforded by our expanding territory, and the provocatives of our bracing air and generous diet, would have sufficed to repair such losses and make such gains.” It is hard to find a better example of the census as a measure of national strength, especially Walker’s description of the population as a body. But after these reassuring statements, he drew attention to the declining birth rate among native-born Anglo-Americans and stridently argued that a rising standard of living—marked by the “multiplication of artificial necessities” and the entry of women into the workforce—had adversely affected fertility: “Luxury, fashion, and the vice of ‘boarding’ combine to limit the increase of families to a degree that in some sections even threatens the perpetuation of our native stock.” If such “notorious” habits continued, the next census might record an sharper decline, “even without a devastating war to account for the loss of hundreds of thousands.”37 Walker’s concern about anemic growth was shared by his contemporaries, and it recalls the intense fear of epidemic disease described in chapter 3. Just as maps of yellow fever and cholera searched for contagions, census maps sought to explain the failure of the population to thrive. Walker used the Report to parse the decline of the native-born Americans alongside the rise of immigration and The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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comparative immigrant fertility. He even claimed that immigration had long masked the decline of the native-born population. Equally disturbing to him was the 6 percent rise of those living in urban areas, and this shaped his approach to cartography. His use of dasymetric mapping highlighted the distinctions between urban and rural regions that were often lost on choropleth maps. He may also have considered this a more precise rendering of the population, for it did not conform to political boundaries that were somewhat irrelevant to patterns of settlement. Indeed, on most of his maps, he removed county boundaries altogether, a bold choice in an era when this was still the basis for most American maps and local administration.38 All of maps in the Report were based on census data, except the last, which focused entirely on the “acquisition and transfer of territory” (see website). After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo extended the nation to the Pacific in 1848, commercial cartographic firms began to print maps that chronicled this expansion from the original colonies through the trans-Mississippi West. In this respect, Walker’s map of westward growth is not unusual. But by detailing each acquisition, he underscored the territorial dimension of the nation’s history. His elaborate commentary on the map documented the state of settlement at the time of each census, from the original thirteen states—seven of which had undefined boundaries—through a century of negotiation that ultimately encompassed the entire continent. This map and commentary about territorial growth reflects his commitment to broadening the census from a tool of enumeration and apportionment into an instrument of national development.39 To investigate the underlying dynamics of the population, Walker devoted the second Report to “vital statistics.” This marks the first use of the term in the census. He also sought advice from the surgeon general regarding the proper classification and organization of these maps. This decision to consult the surgeon general reveals a continuing belief that many diseases were rooted in the environment and therefore worth mapping. He hired Ezekiel Elliott, who had worked with him at the Bureau of Statistics, to organize this volume, most likely because Elliott shared Jarvis and Walker’s preoccupation with population distribution, growth, and decline. This volume contained some of the first national maps of mortality from disease, all of which were made possible by census data.40 These disease maps were followed by maps depicting elevation, average temperature, and rainfall, an arrangement that also reflected the assumption that environment influenced disease (see website). By including these subjects in his report to Congress, Walker framed the census as an opportunity to inventory the nation as a whole. His expanding use of maps also indicates his interest in cartography as an enterprise. The elevation map had been developed before the war by Arnold Guyot and enhanced by the German-American Charles Schott, who had worked extensively for the Coast Survey. From 1868 to 1874, the Smithsonian 172

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hired Schott to prepare two monographs on rainfall and temperature, which superseded those drawn by Lorin Blodget in the 1850s.41 That Henry, Schott, and Guyot loaned their talents to the Census Office reveals Walker’s influence within the tight network of federal scientists. In turn, he sought out these maps as the latest intelligence and cartographic innovation. For Walker, the physical world was the stage on which the human drama took place, and these maps added another layer to the problems he sought to investigate. While the report for the prior census had no maps or graphs of any kind, Walker thought about the census through the use of cartography, both statistical and physical.42

The 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States Walker’s maps in the Report were widely reproduced in county atlases and school texts. The maps of crops and population became standard ways of picturing data in a way that was accessible and required minimal literacy. The Report was also a political success, and, in the summer of 1873, Congress took the unprecedented step of appropriating thirty thousand dollars for Walker to produce a statistical atlas that would translate the entire census into visual form (see website).43 The secretary of the interior endorsed the project as a way to “promote that higher kind of political education which has hitherto been so greatly neglected in this country.”44 This education was to be geographical and spatial, based on “the exact knowledge of our country” that grew out of Walker’s veneration of facts. While he went to great lengths to persuade Congress with his Report of the Ninth Census, he went even further to make the Statistical Atlas comprehensible and appealing. Page after page of large, beautiful, groundbreaking maps and graphics enabled Americans to see themselves counted and measured in dazzling and provocative ways. But beyond this visual audacity, the Statistical Atlas posed fundamentally new social questions. By emphasizing the geography of census data, the maps raised issues of distribution and causal correlation. Conversely, any spatial analysis of data necessitated a map, a fact so obvious today that we may fail to recognize how novel it was at the time. Walker, like Wells and Gilman, was acutely aware that forms of communication were playing an increasingly important role in decision making. Significantly, he explained each of his complex charts in detail, yet insisted that the maps spoke for themselves. As he wrote, they “require[d] no verbal description and explanation, beyond what is given on their face. It is not the Compiler’s intention to preach from them, as a text; nor does he assume that attention needs to be directed to their more obvious or their more recondite suggestions.” This assumption of the map as simply translating facts into graphic form captures the enduring view of maps as scientific documents, self-evident forms of communication that were independent of interpretation.45 That Walker knew he was on to something is apparent in his arrangement The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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of data. In the Report of 1872, he mapped individual groups and their density per square mile. Yet without a larger frame of reference, this information was of limited use. For example, a map of the black population density only made sense relative to another measure. Walker realized this after his Report was released and thus adopted a more sophisticated approach to mapping data in the Statistical Atlas. Recall his concern with both anemic population growth and urbanization, which he believed were linked insofar as urbanization caused—or at least reflected—a declining birth rate. In light of this, he again adopted a dasymetric approach in order to identify the contours of population density with as much nuance as possible. He applied this technique to each of the seven decennial censuses. The final map of 1870 separated the population into six categories, from under two per square mile to over ninety (see website). Walker then devoted two separate maps to each ethnic and racial group within the country. The first identified the density of that group per square mile, elaborating on maps he had initially created for the Report. But he then added a second map that measured that particular group relative to the total population. In this respect, he recognized that the earlier maps were incomplete and that mapping these subgroups relative to the total population would be more meaningful than simply mapping each of these on its own (fig. 5.4). These maps were modeled on the 1861 Coast Survey maps of slavery, which used a scale of shade to identify slaves as a percentage of the population. Similarly, Walker sought to illustrate how any given group existed in relation to the aggregate and used shading and Roman numerals to identify the ratio of a particular group to the general population. He then enhanced these maps by marking in blue ink the density of the general population per square mile, which he had established on the first map of the 1870 population. Thus, the initial map became the basis for all subsequent maps, for it established the contours of population density that he reproduced in blue ink on all of the population maps, divided into categories of two to eighteen, eighteen to forty-five, and over forty-five (fig. 5.5). These maps integrated two classes of data—the absolute density of the aggregate population and the proportional density of the subgroup—in a remarkable way. The two maps devoted to each group—of the density of the group per square mile and as a ratio of the aggregate population—appear to tell a similar story, but they follow two very different lines of inquiry: one addresses the population as an entity, while the other situates that group within the nation. On the map of the foreign born, for instance, one could locate areas of high settlement and then discern whether these corresponded to areas of high density overall. Where dark shading and high blue numbers coincided, one could see the regions of heavy immigration in populated regions. More surprising and interesting to Walker were areas where that subgroup settled beyond the rates of the general

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5.4 “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to the Aggregate Population, Compiled from the Returns of Population at the Ninth Census of the United States. By Francis A. Walker,” from Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census ( Julius Bien, 1874). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 49 × 38 cm.

5.5 Detail from “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to the Aggregate Population.”

population, for this perhaps indicated a choice on the part of the group, one that was ripe for social analysis. Through these maps of relative population density, Walker also established a practice where one could identify areas where particular groups were growing and declining relative to the aggregate. For instance, consider his “Map Showing the Proportion of the Colored to the Aggregate Population” (see website). Here the map enabled one to ask where African Americans constituted a large subgroup but also whether that concentration was growing or declining. Walker applied this cartographic analysis not just to racial and ethnic subgroups, but to illiteracy and poverty. And by mapping these problems together with population density, he implied a correlation between the two. For instance, his map of the distribution of wealth made clear that, contrary to expectations, wealth was not concentrated in the cities of the Northeast, but spread relatively evenly across the northern states, regardless of population density (see website). The stark unevenness came not between rural and urban regions, but between North and South. Similarly, his map of illiteracy (fig. 5.6) spoke to the contemporary discussion of whether this was endemic to rural regions. These concerns reflect 176

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5.6 “Map Showing the Illiteracy of the Population, Compiled from the Returns of Population at the Ninth Census of the United States 1870. By Francis A. Walker,” from Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census ( Julius Bien, 1874). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 49 × 38 cm.

the state of social science, where problems such as illiteracy could be analyzed broadly as a function of other variables. Walker emphasized population density in his maps of disease as well. Here, notably, he was less concerned with the causes of disease than with their effects on the population. Therefore he approached the problem by mapping the number of deaths from a particular disease relative to deaths from all causes. The incidence of consumption, for instance, was placed in the context of death rates in order to assess the threat posed by that particular disease (see website). This data was then integrated with the contours of population density so that one could ask if that disease was endemic to certain geographical regions or to urban or rural areas. Walker was able to execute these maps in part because the medical men before him had used maps so extensively to investigate the causes of epidemics. Like them, he used the map to sort through a problem by integrating information. In his hands, the map became an instrument of analysis rather than an illustration of data. Walker designed these maps so that the viewer could correlate population density to other phenomena. They marked social trends and gradations rather than political and civil divisions in order to unearth the web of relationships and interdependence that lay hidden on traditional maps. They allowed the viewer to choose a lens through which to see the nation and then to connect this to other phenomena. These visual forms of information aided social science, for they raised as many questions as they answered. By both integrating and isolating information, Walker used maps to pose questions about social organization that were profoundly open-ended: How (and whether) to ameliorate poverty? What role should the state take in an expanding and industrializing market? He also mused on questions specific to particular groups. Why don’t foreign born suffer from fevers while colored do? Is consumption related to geography? To racial stock? To occupation? Like Gilman, Walker could not help but notice that the “foreign” and “colored” elements of the population did not overlap; neither did their respective temperature and rainfall zones. This led him to speculate that blacks were adapted to the moist, hot climates of the South. Such a conclusion owes much to the scientific racism of the time. But the conclusions that he reached are less significant than the questions he was asking, for these were not only enhanced by cartography, but made possible by them. As one contemporary remarked, without the maps and graphs “many interesting questions would scarcely be solved, and many others would never have been raised at all.”46 This is evident in his “Maps of the Pacific Coast” (see website). By arranging multiple maps on a single sheet, Walker invited a type of analysis that was impossible on traditional maps. He first mapped the density of the aggregate population, then that of foreign birth, foreign parentage, and Irish, Chinese, and German residents, as he had for the eastern half of the country. Toward the end 178

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of the atlas, a stunning array of charts profiled religious affiliation, occupation, public debt, mental defects, and physical afflictions. Though the abundance of these charts suggested comprehensiveness, each category was designed to assist governance and manage the population in a specific way. Walker did not always know what kind of picture the map would create, but all of them derived from the modern concept of the population as a body to be administered. His attention to governance is also apparent in the way he mapped Native Americans, a group that was not officially enumerated until the 1860 census and not with any care until 1890.47 The first population maps in the Statistical Atlas outlined the population distribution from the First through the Ninth Census. On the earliest of these, he identified tribes of the Southeast and the Midwest, but, as the nation moved west these tribes gradually disappeared from the map. Then, on the map of the constitutional population from 1870, Walker featured the Indian reservation system. He then published a more elaborate edition of this map to illustrate a series of articles he had written to defend federal Indian policy (fig. 5.7).48 This is a provocative application for population mapping. Over state boundaries, topography, and river systems, Walker identified the white population, Indian reservations, and hunting grounds. The map highlights the creeping expansion of the white population and frames reservations as protecting Natives from obliteration. Notice the contrast between the fixed and angled borders of the reservation and the fluid borders of the nonnative population along the Front Range. Walker used the map to characterize the emerging reservation system as a peaceful and pragmatic alternative to the ongoing Indian wars in the West. Walker’s map of reservations was published just as Joel Allen was designing his “Map of North America” to depict the shrinking population of bison (see website). Allen used color to designate five phases of the geographical extent of bison since 1800, and two others for the ancient period. He relied on Nathaniel Southgate Shaler’s expertise in paleontology and geology and also drew extensively on Charles Schott’s isothermal charts and the records of the Coast Survey. As the nation celebrated its centennial in 1876 Allen’s bison map was a reminder of the complex legacy of western development. The map also had implications for contemporary debates about Native Americans, for no viewer could have missed the obvious connection: as the bison shrank during the nineteenth century, so too did the Native population, accelerated by the advent of reservations. Allen also designed the map to illustrate change over time, which had been a perennial challenge for cartographic representation. It became the model for William Temple Hornaday’s well-known map of bison in 1886, which inaugurated a national movement to reverse the destruction of buffalo.49 As he had in the Report, Walker included maps of the natural environment in the Statistical Atlas to explore its influence over human development.50 The atlas opened with the “Map of the River Systems” made by Adolph von SteinThe Cartographic Consolidation of America

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5.7 Map of white population and Indian reservations, from Francis A. Walker, The Indian Question (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874). 21.7 × 26.1 cm. See website for entire image.

wehr, another German immigrant who had worked for the Coast Survey prior to a noted career in the Union Army (fig. 5.8). Walker published Steinwehr’s map as the absolute latest in cartographic intelligence. The map identified the nation’s separate drainage systems, then listed crop yields, average annual rainfall, and population for each of the regions. Steinwehr even incorporated the use of steam and water power expended in each of these regions, all with the aim of predicting where agriculture could grow and where it may have reached its limit. The next map measured the distribution of woodland, using color in a manner that starkly illustrated the tremendous variation across the country (see website). This same map marked the river systems in great detail, so that the viewer might understand the relationship between these two resources. Walker also eagerly reprinted the celebrated geological map of Charles Hitchcock and William Blake. Bien lithographed the map with glorious color that persists to this day. Though 180

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maps of North American geology had circulated in scientific circles for decades, none matched this one for its vibrant beauty (see website).51 Although precedents exist as early as the sixteenth century, only in the nineteenth century was it possible to use the atlas as an inventory of the nation through statistics. And only in the nineteenth century did the rise of bureaucratic government and the activism of scientific elites make such an undertaking seem both possible and relevant. Walker’s was the first attempt to profile a nation and its population through cartography, predating the Atlas of Finland—commonly regarded as the first national atlas—by over twenty-five years. It was a curious model in some ways, for atlases usually included large-scale maps to detail the physical and political geography of a particular nation through its regions. By contrast, Walker relied on maps of the entire nation in order to examine it as an entity. This was a demonstration of national identity, of national scientific achievement, and the ability to marshal data for analytical purposes.52 In this respect, the Statistical Atlas also anticipates geographic information systems. Modern geographers trace the origins of GIS to the computer revolution of the 1960s, when the quantitative turn in geographical analysis joined emergent technology to create new ways of organizing and manipulating information. Yet the conceit behind GIS is that information can be mapped—especially multiple layers of information—and this was precisely the practice that Walker brought to the census in the 1870s. Just as Walker published the Statistical Atlas, the provost-marshal-general issued a long-awaited graphic report on disease and health in the military. Congress had granted funding for Jedediah Baxter to expand the data collected on soldiers during the war in July 1866, a project that rivaled the efforts of the Sanitary Commission under Ezekiel Elliott and Benjamin Gould. Baxter spent nearly ten

5.8 Detail of “Map of the River Systems of the United States, Compiled by Adolph von Steinwehr,” from Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census ( Julius Bien, 1874). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. See website for entire image. The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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years compiling and synthesizing the data for this report and was evaluating the health and strength of the military population at the same time that Walker was expanding and refining the census. The two men worked in parallel fashion, and they understood their charge as more than simply enumerating the population. Both sought to make their data useful and accessible: Baxter translated the surgeon general’s data into an accessible report, while Walker rendered the results of the Ninth Census of 1870 into an atlas for the public. Both men used their positions to amass, organize, and communicate large bodies of information regarding the population and assumed that the federal government would be the arbiter of this data. The final products—Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States in 1874 and Baxter’s Report of 1875—were similar in appearance and purpose. Both were printed by Julius Bien, the most important map lithographer of the postwar period. Like Walker, Baxter used maps and charts to visualize data. He believed that the successful map would speak for itself, allowing the mind to determine the truth “without effort,” for while, “a landscape may be voluminously and completely described . . . one glance at a painting of the scene will convey more satisfactory knowledge.”53 Baxter’s maps were limited in scope, for his subject was men drafted and rejected by the Union army during the Civil War, while Walker’s was the population as a whole. Baxter’s maps were also more modest in their purpose, for each simply surveyed the incidence of a particular disease—rheumatism, scrofula, syphilis—within that population (fig. 5.9). What would be learned by such an enterprise was not the source of disease, but the incidence and prevalence of disease among men from particular states. Baxter’s report experimented with statistics, for each “disease” was charted against different variables and also mapped. Syphilis, for instance, was measured as a function of marital status, age, height, skin complexion, and nation of origin, with those from the United States separated by race into “white,” “colored,” and “Indian.” Similarly, Baxter designed a chart to correlate “Disease in Its Relation to Occupation” (see website). He designed these maps and charts as models to export to other populations and situations, and he considered these techniques the basis for the study of aggregate human behavior, what he termed anthropology. The absence of vital statistics collected from a wide population gave the provost-marshal-general report and Walker’s Statistical Atlas real authority.54 But the government’s decision to extensively map the population and its resources does not mean it governed with the same depth or precision. These maps implied a level of control and certainty that simply did not exist, for millions of immigrants in New York and Chicago alone made orderly enumeration of the population impossible. Yet these maps reflect a vision and a plan for the nation. Walker saw his job as calculating and constructing the population, both as an aggregate, but also through several different measurements. Through these maps, Americans could 182

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5.9 “Plate IV. Illustrating by Gradation of Color the Prevalence of Syphilis. (Congressional Districts.) (Drafted Men.),” from US ProvostMarshal-General Bureau, Statistics, Medical and Anthropological, of the Provost-MarshalGeneral’s Bureau (Washington, DC: GPO, 1875). 29.3 × 41.1 cm.

identify themselves as part of ethnic, racial, geographic, or economic groups. In this respect, his maps aided state governance by transforming people into an abstract “population” with particular attributes that could be managed and administered. Though the maps may appear to reflect the population as it exists, Walker prioritized certain categories (race, income) and problems (literacy, the incidence of disease) as geographical in nature. In the process of observation, the census created the very categories it sought to identify.55 These maps also attached the population to the territory. As an ideal, the census provides a literal overview that ties each individual, through an address, to a network where governance can be undertaken remotely. The modern state also demands that territories and populations be organized within units, be they congressional districts, counties, or states. In both these respects, government administration was a spatial process. The quest for government control transformed national space by placing a premium on the articulation of territory. Walker was central to this, for he used the census to organize knowledge into spatial, territorial terms. Consider the main responsibilities of the government after 1877: the growth of post offices, railroads, tariffs, taxation, and Indian control. All of these required spatial knowledge. In turn, Walker’s work advanced the study of political and social statistics.56 But the timing of the Atlas is surprising, for it was undertaken in a period of relatively limited government. Walker constructed a population through the atlas, but he anticipated and shaped those needs rather than responding to them. He was expanding the responsibilities of the state while simultaneously advocating laissez-faire economic policies. This may seem paradoxical, but it was shared by the liberal Republicans in general. They sought to put themselves in charge of government taxation and finance, yet also cited the importance of individual liberty against the creeping power of the state.57 This delicate balance between liberty and expanded governance was facilitated by increased knowledge of the nation’s resources. These men who worked in the federal bureaucracy were driven by a passion for enlightened governance but could think about reform only to the extent that they had information about the population, which they acquired through tools such as the census. Yet the census operated in a nearly invisible manner, which might have been the key to its effectiveness. Walker’s goal was to establish a more professionalized and efficient office that collected data and presented results in a widely accessible format. Behind this was intense deliberation about the nature of the population and the politics of growth and decline. This was particularly important in the 1870s, when a chaotic war to defeat southern independence had left the census with the task of reconstituting the nation, its population, and its resources. Walker’s task was to reintegrate the Union through information; he chose to do this through maps.

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Using the Statistical Atlas The Statistical Atlas included a section on the “Progress of the Nation,” where Walker discussed the migration of the population from 1790 to 1870 and introduced the concept of the “center of population.” To calculate this center, he drew on Julius Hilgard’s work at the Coast Survey, which was itself derived from Walker’s Report of 1872. Hilgard began with the premise that migration in America was unlike that in Europe. Here, the addition of territory drove the continuous movement of population, crops, and industries, and this raised questions of how people migrate, whether they gather or disperse, and the climate and terrain they seek. These were questions that American statisticians might answer through census data, while in Europe the conditions which gave rise to mobility had long since passed. The settled and stationary populations of Europe precluded the sociological possibilities of the census, while these opportunities remained open for Walker. Hilgard captured this fluidity by charting the center of population over time. He mapped the “advance” of the population in both senses of the word, both movement and progress, at the very moment when the struggle for control of the territory reached its peak. Walker reproduced Hilgard’s map in the Statistical Atlas (fig. 5.10) and prominently marked the moving “center of population” on each map of population density from 1790 to 1870. By placing these maps in chronological order, he created an almost animated sense of movement into the West.58 These historical maps became the basis for Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Without statistical maps of westward growth, Turner could not have developed his thesis and certainly would not have thought about the frontier as he did. The frontier is a cartographic idea: without a map, it makes no sense, nor is it a meaningful observation about physical space or history. Turner immersed himself in contemporary statistical atlases, census bulletins, and thematic maps, especially Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States (1883), which was based on the 1880 census and executed according to Walker’s ambitious agenda. He urged his students to use the atlas and relied upon it extensively when researching the history of western migration.59 Perhaps most revealing, he sent his seminal essay directly to Walker, who immediately recognized its importance and its cartographic premise. Turner’s engagement with mapping was also noticed by Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of history and political science. When he asked Turner to name the maps that had shaped his thinking, the latter responded that contour maps of the Geological Survey, made “without any names or political boundaries,” were a “revelation.” Turner’s ideas came through cartography.60 The Turner thesis may owe even more to Walker’s Statistical Atlas than we

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5.10 Map of the center of population, from Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census ( Julius Bien, 1874). Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 10.8 × 19 cm.

have realized. On each of Walker’s thirty-five statistical maps—of population groups, disease, wealth, illiteracy, and agriculture—he drew a bold line to divide the nation at about the ninety-seventh meridian (see figs. 5.4 and 5.6). The line is so dark that at first glance it appears to be the nation’s western border, but it actually signals a more subtle and “invisible” boundary: to the west of the line the population fell below two persons per square mile. Walker took pains to mark this border with precision because he believed it was significant, even on maps of wealth or illiteracy that bore little direct relationship to the frontier. He did this in order to translate the complex data into a meaningful geographic picture of the nation’s population. Walker coined the phrase “frontier line” and then drew that line on maps nearly two decades before Turner published his thesis on its influence over American history. Walker took the crucial step of rendering census data in visual, cartographic form. By featuring the concept on his maps, he enabled Turner and others to visualize the frontier as a continuous line worthy of careful consideration.61 Behind the success of Walker’s maps was a cultural interest in statistics that began decades earlier. The census was the best example of this migration toward quantitative thinking, which embodied a shift in the understanding of

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“what counts.” This interest in statistics dovetailed with the rise of realism in late nineteenth-century culture and a corresponding fetish for facts that contributed to the advent of social science. Sociologist Lester Frank Ward considered “tangible facts” to be “materials for the intellect,” and economist Edward Ross concurred: numbers—what could be counted, measured, and weighed—made life solid and real. Statistics met, and perhaps even generated, the desire for a more basic and fundamental truth that lay beyond bias, perception, or theory. Yet this data also made it possible to theorize about social behavior. William James acknowledged that the “richness of the concrete world” enabled him to develop the fuzzy ideas of truth known as pragmatism. In the same way that photography liberated painting to move from representation toward abstraction, the quest for facts in the nineteenth century allowed for social theories based on those facts.62 The postwar desire to settle on a number of Civil War fatalities emerged from this same preoccupation with figures. The effort to establish the number of dead was fraught with error, yet it continued because quantification meant something. Drew Faust writes that it was the “specificity, rather than the accuracy” of the number that gave consolation, for a concrete figure was both “comprehensive and comprehensible.” And if many soldiers were destined to remained unnamed, they could at least be “counted,” in both senses of the word. Moreover, to agree upon a number of those who perished was a way to establish “a price of freedom and national unity.” This number gave Americans an illusion of certitude and control that was utterly absent from that moment of collective life.63 This presented an interesting problem for Walker. The war caused far more deaths in the 1860s than typhus or consumption, yet he only briefly mentioned it. Walker was devoted to memorializing the Union and its soldiers, yet the war did not fit his vision for the atlas, which was sociological and scientific. To map casualties meant mapping battles, which had little to do with the peacetime dynamics of the population. However consequential the war, in his view, it had little to do with patterns of aggregate settlement and behavior. Faust’s emphasis on the “specificity rather than accuracy” of these numbers aptly describes Walker’s ambition for the Statistical Atlas. The Ninth Census was full of errors and omissions, yet its legacy is a profile of the country that appears—above all—to be precise and certain. Contemporary reviewers were awed by Walker’s Statistical Atlas and hailed Bien’s lithography. The maps provoked debates about trends and social problems, especially the relationship between different variables, such as immigration and industry or poverty and illiteracy. The North American Review admired Walker’s “magnificent” atlas and his command of statistics; his historical map of territorial acquisition “ought to hang on the wall of every American schoolroom. Nothing can more clearly and impressively epitomize the history of the

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United States.” This map captured the nation’s arc of growth in a single image and quickly began to appear in school texts alongside population maps derived from the Statistical Atlas. Walker’s maps were a source of ongoing interest at the American Journal of Science and Arts and were celebrated both for their concept and execution. His Statistical Atlas made it possible to think about problems beyond population dynamics as well, such as the relationship between forests and rainfall, which was the subject of intense speculation in the late nineteenth-century American West.64 The Statistical Atlas was also recognized abroad as a model of both statistical research and cartographic design. At the International Geographical Congress in Paris in 1875, Walker, Ferdinand Hayden, and the Coast Survey were all cited for their cartographic contributions. Yet despite the recognition of American talent, Gilman—who attended the meeting—was humbled by the breadth of cartographic experimentation among Europeans and worried that his country “appeared to great disadvantage.” He viewed cartographic progress in national terms and hoped that Johns Hopkins could remedy this deficiency by teaching the latest techniques in geological, agricultural, topographical, and economic mapping. At Hopkins, Herbert Baxter Adams also began to stress statistical inquiry as central to research in the humanities, while Gilman systematically pushed his students toward the kind of thematic mapping modeled by Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, Arnold Guyot, August Petermann, and George Perkins Marsh.65 In this vein, in 1874, Gilman proposed a journal that would examine social problems in light of the human and physical environment, to be titled “Earth and Man” (after Guyot’s magnum opus). Though it never materialized, his reasoning is relevant. As he explained to Andrew Dickson White, then president of Cornell University, “There is no such journal in the world. The graphic methods of illustrating social and historical papers could be most efficiently introduced. It might be made a journal of anthropology,—not of man’s body only, but of all his social progress. Such work as Walker is doing for the US census could be expanded and multiplied indefinitely. History and political economy might be treated on a scientific basis.”66 Walker both fulfilled and advanced Gilman’s vision of social knowledge. Notice as well his reference to “anthropology,” now a fixture on the landscape of social science due to the efforts in vital statistics undertaken by the army and the Sanitary Commission. And the convergence of events in 1874 indicates a sea change in the production of knowledge: Walker published maps and graphs to depict a society of interdependence, just as Johns Hopkins University opened its doors to advance a model of social science as the interdependence of human experience. The Statistical Atlas was used not just by educators, but for commercial purposes as well. In the South, the war brought a decline of capital and agricultural production that was compounded by the end of slavery. The South was disad188

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vantaged further by federal incentives to move west, such as the Homestead Act. This instability and economic stagnation led the Virginia state legislature to authorize a “Board of Immigration” in 1873 to attract white migrants from other states and immigrants from Germany, Scotland, and England. One of the board’s first acts was to hire Jedediah Hotchkiss to help promote the state by writing a guide to its resources and advantages. Hotchkiss was a topographical and mining engineer who was best known as the Confederacy’s leading mapmaker. He was capable of gathering and synthesizing the kind of information that this promotion effort required, from the frequency of storms and the patterns of climate to data on manufacturing and longevity. Moreover, he was able to map Virginia’s natural, social, and commercial advantages. To do this, he relied extensively on recent federal data, chiefly Walker’s Statistical Atlas. He used Steinwehr’s map of river systems and crop yields to demonstrate Virginia’s agricultural potential; he used the map of hay production to favorably compare the state to its neighbors; he drew on the 1860 and 1870 census returns to exhibit its high life expectancy and low levels of crime, dependency, and idiocy. He even used Walker’s graphic chart of church accommodation to establish the moral strength of Virginians. This suggests how widely Walker’s maps had circulated and the range of purposes to which they could be put. Through the Statistical Atlas, Walker gave Hotchkiss a model for mapping Virginia.67 To sell Virginia, Hotchkiss also included a map of the state’s geology that was derived from that designed by William Barton Rogers well before the war. The map profiled existing and proposed railways and canals alongside geological classifications. This enabled the viewer to correlate mining activity with transportation in a way that Hotchkiss would elaborate as he became more deeply tied to that industry. He also drew a “Commercial Map of the World” that placed Virginia at the center. Like William Gilpin’s attempts to center the map of the world on the Great Plains or Charles Denison’s use of maps to prove the superiority of the Front Range, Hotchkiss identified ocean currents, railroad routes, and transatlantic distances to highlight Virginia’s ideal location. Thematic mapping had become a preferred method of promotion in the increasingly competitive postwar marketplace.68 Hotchkiss’s unpublished maps also demonstrate his interest in thematic mapping. Within the Hotchkiss cartographic collection at the Library of Congress are five small maps that he created in the mid-1870s (see website). Each is drawn from an identical base map of Virginia and then tailored to a specific resource within the state: two cover the distribution of forests, one examines the faunal regions, one covers the general population, and the last maps the African American population. The maps appear unfinished, with incomplete coloring and annotations regarding improvements. They are each numbered by Hotchkiss in a way that suggests they were part of a larger collection, probably of maps The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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devoted to specific aspects of Virginia. They appear to have been made to promote the state after the war and show how Hotchkiss was experimenting with possible uses of mapping.69 Each of the five maps was adapted from existing data. The two population maps were derived from Walker’s Statistical Atlas and adopted his numerical categories of population density. On the map of the general population, Hotchkiss incorporated Walker’s classification scheme, then included Hilgard’s markings of the shifting geographical center of population to reveal the scope of westward migration (fig. 5.11). This also positioned the state as an attractive destination for investment and migration, though the center of population was moving past Virginia to the west. Hotchkiss includes several types of data on the map, such as population migration, density within Virginia, topography, rivers, and even a bit of oceanographic information.

5.11 Jedediah Hotchkiss, “Map Showing Distribution and Density of Population in VA., in 1870. Compiled from Ninth Census of United States by Supt. Walker.” Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 8 × 12 cm, on sheet 35 × 28 cm. See website for entire image. 190

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5.12 Jedediah Hotchkiss, “Map Showi[n]g Distribution and Density of Negro Population in Va. in 1870. Compiled from Ninth Census of United States by Supt. Walker.” Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 8 × 12 cm.

Hotchkiss’s unfinished map of the black population also includes annotations that reveal the logic behind thematic mapping (fig. 5.12). Notice that he adopted Walker’s use of blue ink to demarcate population density, so that one could compare the ratio of blacks to the population as a whole and presumably draw comfort that they constituted a distinct minority. Annotations on the map (probably made by Hotchkiss) suggest revisions of color and symbolization to clarify the layers of information. This should remind us that thematic maps depended as The Cartographic Consolidation of America

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much on arrangement and design as on information. Here he was experimenting with techniques that had only recently become available in order to showcase the state’s natural and human resources, its position relative to other states, the national population, and centers of production. We do not know where (or whether) these maps were published, but they show the mapmaker at work, considering the composition of various classes of information in order maximize the map’s effectiveness. Hotchkiss devoted himself entirely to promoting the state’s resources and development after the war, and maps were central to this effort. In 1880, he launched The Virginias, a magazine designed to attract capital to the region by detailing its economic advantages, especially the mining riches that he believed had been undervalued.70 From 1836 to 1842, Rogers had undertaken an extensive geological survey of Virginia and became enamored with the industrial possibilities of the state’s western mineral resources. In 1842, preoccupied with the problem of slavery, the Virginia General Assembly failed to fund his final report, much to the dismay of his fellow scientists. Rogers was convinced of Virginia’s industrial future, particularly the coal and iron stores in the trans-Allegheny region. But given the timing, state legislators from the east were focused entirely on the rejuvenation of soil and agriculture. When the legislature declined to continue funding his geological work, the research and maps went unpublished and eventually languished when he turned his attention back to university work. In 1853, Rogers moved to Boston, where he became the first president of MIT (succeeded by Walker in 1881). The coal that he believed lay in the Allegheny Mountains was left untapped, then forgotten in the upheaval of war.71 Yet Rogers’s research made an impression on Hotchkiss, who shared his belief that the state’s future lay in industry. After the war, the Virginia legislature hired him to promote the state’s agriculture, but, throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Hotchkiss instead emphasized the mineral resources in the western counties. He initiated another geological survey in 1873 and also began to focus on the state’s industrial future. In his mind this future demanded white labor and capital for mining and railroads. The Virginias was his attempt to generate these resources, and it found an audience among railroad and mining financiers in the United States and England. Hotchkiss abundantly illustrated the magazine with beautiful and original maps that he drew to highlight the potential for mineral development and to lure capital to the coal fields. For instance, his 1880 “Map of the Shenandoah” shrewdly identified the relationship between railroads and iron ore belts and other mineral resources (see website).72 The following year, the owner of the Norfolk and Western Railroad asked Hotchkiss about his knowledge of coal deposits. Hotchkiss responded by sending maps, and these convinced Frederick Kimball to extend that railroad into what would become the Flat Top mining region (see website). Through this work, Hotchkiss helped 192

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to inaugurate the Virginia and West Virginia coal industry, the cities of western Virginia, and the railroad network of the Shenandoah Valley. He used maps to create a new picture of Virginia. Geological maps were made possible by prior surveys, but Hotchkiss adapted this data for promotional ends.

Reforming the Census Walker’s Statistical Atlas had a direct effect on the scope and structure of the census. He designed maps to flex the power of the census and to demonstrate its intellectual potential. By doing so, he made census reform seem both urgent and necessary. After the publication of the Statistical Atlas, Congress welcomed and passed the legislation he had originally written for Garfield in 1869. The result was the Census Act of 1879, along with an 1880 amendment, which together transformed the operation and meaning of the entire enterprise.73 Walker professionalized census enumerators and trained them in more systematic ways. He expanded the role of the superintendent in the administration of schedules and the organization of districts. The staff for the 1880 census was three times the size that it had been under the constrained circumstances of 1870. The expanded schedules now included questions on marital status, occupation, nativity, and many more on agriculture and manufacturing. Walker demonstrated the relevance of the census by visualizing its results and considered the 1880 census as an opportunity to showcase a century of growth. In 1878, the Census Office published the first Statistical Abstract of the United States, which condensed the data into tables for public use. This was yet another example of Walker’s desire to make the census relevant. He also proposed that the census (still a temporary office rather than a permanent bureau) be attached to the newly established Office of Labor in 1888. Though this effort failed, it reveals his hope that the census would be an active influence over policy rather than an occasional tool of apportionment. The Statistical Atlas of the Tenth Census (1883) also grew out of Walker’s agenda, and the editors acknowledged as much by dedicating it to him. The 1883 atlas substantially expanded the number of maps, charts, and diagrams that Walker had pioneered and drew data from a much wider range of sources to extend the analysis he had initiated in the 1870s. Walker conceived of this enterprise and created the market for it. In the process, he launched a commitment to census mapping that endured well into the twentieth century. In 1890, the Census Office began using the Hollereith machines to sort and tabulate data, which sped up computation and made an even wider range of statistical correlations possible. All of this was premised on the idea of the census as an analytical enterprise.74 As one reviewer wrote of the 1883 Statistical Atlas, the “suggestive” maps raised key questions about the 1880 election, such as why some counties are ReThe Cartographic Consolidation of America

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publican while their neighbors are Democratic. The maps opened several possible explanations: perhaps the topography and climate shaped the original character of these settlements or drew industry that spawned interest in protective tariffs. Perhaps some regions had taken up abolition, while, in others, partisan feuds had influenced political identity. All of these possibilities could be uniquely seen, and explored, through maps of data. Only a cartographic approach could help to explain why eastern Kentucky and Tennessee had so many Republican counties, or why so many white Arkansans voted for Garfield in the 1880 election.75 Statistical and thematic maps simultaneously raised questions and provided explanations. They ushered in a new way of thinking that used aggregate data and maps to predict human behavior, the very goal of social science. As president of MIT, Walker insisted that the graphic visualization of information be taught widely. He also continued to engage problems of population, immigration, industry, and statistics. His pessimism about population trends among native-born Americans was learned in part from fellow leaders in Massachusetts and confirmed by a growing belief that industrial conflicts were caused by the degrading influence of immigrant labor. By the late 1880s, he advocated legislation to curb immigration, and, soon thereafter, the Immigration Restriction League (1894) was founded and formulated positions and proposals based on his reading of the census. It is unclear whether mapping data led him to embrace immigration restriction, but his population maps directly influenced discussion of the issue. The Census Office commissioned a study of the ethnic origins of the population in 1900, and the findings were used to argue that immigration had taken the population far from its roots, a claim that culminated in the National Origins Act of 1924.76 Walker’s statistical maps were among the most visible examples of the use of cartography as an analytical and argumentative tool. Admittedly, all maps are argumentative, for they involve the selection and arrangement of data. Yet the Statistical Atlas marked a shift in thinking about maps and confirmed assumptions that had been spreading for decades: maps were necessary mediators in a complex society, and they could play a central role in governance and social inquiry. In the United States, this activity was undertaken at the national level, when the federal government planned to manage the population and its resources in ways that would have been inconceivable a few decades earlier. In this respect, thematic mapping exemplifies the role of the federal government in nineteenth-century American life. The state operated as coordinator and facilitator of economic development but did so in a manner that was “out of sight.” Territorial expansion, land distribution, the administration of court justice, and the postal service all required central authority and a national infrastructure. While the Coast Survey and the USGS mapped the coast and interior, the Smithsonian and the Signal 194

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Service built a weather apparatus to make life more predictable and prosperous. The nineteenth-century state was most effective when least visible.77 This observation captures the aim of the census under Walker, for it operated with a low profile yet asserted power and organized the population and its resources in ways that were essential to administration and management. The apparatus was little noticed, yet generated the information necessary for governance. Perhaps then it should not surprise us that innovations in thematic mapping almost invariably emerged from federal agencies. Walker understood how to organize data into knowledge relevant for public policy and successfully expanded the census long before Progressives made the case for an active national state. Brian Balogh’s description of a government out of sight captures the subtle power of cartography to organize and profile the citizenry. But while maps elegantly pictured information, they also hid the investment and research that made this act possible. Individual authors frequently disappeared from the map into institutional structures, and this obscured the ways in which the mapmakers designed the maps for specific purposes and with particular agendas. The federal government also erected a structure through these maps. Walker’s atlas demonstrated to Congress and the public the importance of the census, of reforming it, and of making it more stable through a permanent apparatus. Like postal networks, census maps integrated disparate regions into a coherent unit. The research community responded to the increased scope of the census by embracing statistics, pushing for an even wider collection of data (especially around labor and industry), and establishing a Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maps were central to this enlargement of federal responsibility, and Walker made this kind of knowledge available and accessible. Walker’s work was also a primary example of the heightened attention to territory in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Maier identifies the 1860s as a key moment in world history, one where territory became the primary unit of political organization. As he write, the 1860s were characterized by a number of related trends: the strengthening of central authority, the increased use of territory as a political and economic resource, a corresponding decline of territory as inert or “buffer” space, the breakdown of land control by traditional rulers, an increase in migration, and a growing fixation on frontiers and borders. Maier’s framework makes Walker central, for he both documented and advanced the administration of national territory by mapping its population. In his hands, maps were both a cause and consequence of modern nationalism.78

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CONCLUSION

Francis Amasa Walker was keenly aware that his Statistical Atlas of 1874 was not just visually arresting, but unlike anything that most Americans had ever seen. At the same time, he assumed that the use of color and shading made the maps intuitive and self-evident. Yet when he shared advance copies of the maps with his peers—among the most educated and cosmopolitan men in the country—he noticed a problem. Viewers were drawn to the outline of a group, rather than to gradations of shading within that group. In other words, they did not immediately grasp the distinctions of density, though Walker considered this the most suggestive aspect of the map. For instance, on his map of the ratio of foreign born to the aggregate population (figs. 5.4 and 5.5), viewers quickly noticed the concentration in urban areas and the Northeast generally. Less obvious, but more evocative, were lower ratios in rural areas, where some immigrants had moved to pursue agriculture. In Walker’s eyes, this phenomenon could be fruitfully analyzed for what it revealed about the social and economic considerations made by groups. Without a map of the data, this subtle trend of migration out of cities would have been lost.1 This experience taught Walker that these new forms of cartography would require training to be understood; by extension it should teach us what a major shift in thinking was involved. Walker and his colleagues spent great effort to conceive of these maps and to execute them in a way that was sensible, familiar, and faithful to the data, all while maintaining visual appeal. Today, we are immersed in maps of information, for technology has made them infinitely easier 197

to produce. Decisions about data sets are now made quickly, and the maps are executed by software. And because we know how this form of knowledge operates and how thematic maps work, we think differently about how it can be used.2 As a result, thematic mapping has spread to the point that it is now the dominant form of cartography rather than an experimental branch within it. Some of the earliest forms of this experimentation were found in nineteenth-century maps of the past, disease, slavery, rainfall, climate, and census data. These maps were not illustrations but methods of analysis, and they were designed to confront some of the most pressing issues in American life. Emma Willard created maps of the past to convey a sense of sovereignty and identity to her fellow citizens. Her historical atlas gave tangible evidence of the new nation’s coherence and stability at a time when both were very much in question. Similarly, Johann Georg Kohl tried to convince Americans—“still casual about their history”—to collect and preserve old maps as evidence of their nation’s territorial legitimacy and as irreplaceable sources of contemporary knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, facsimile maps had become ordinary and familiar documents that routinely appeared in atlases and textbooks; they were direct links to the nation’s prehistory and symbols of its authenticity. Kohl’s concurrent efforts to map the history of discovery reinforced an emerging story of American history, one that featured explorers as the central figures who made the land and its contours known and therefore subject to claim. Kohl and Willard gave the nation’s history a cartographic dimension and established many of the models of historical mapping that endure today. The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States reflects their influence and especially that of Frederick Jackson Turner. The Atlas integrated facsimile maps from the past, as well as newly generated maps of the past, in order to organize the nation’s history as the story of a population shaped by the landscape. The Atlas remains one of the most ambitious attempts to establish the authenticity and permanence of the nation through maps. Its framework—which emphasized Turner’s frontier and the persistence of regionalism—was made possible by the maps that Walker had executed a half century earlier. As Kohl, Willard, Paullin, and Wright mapped the nation’s past, others raced to map its present. Alexander von Humboldt’s innovative charts of average temperature became an inspiration for those facing the threats of severe weather and mortal epidemics. These epidemics drove other cartographic experimentation as medical men frantically sought to locate the sources of cholera and yellow fever. In the decades before germ theory, maps reigned supreme as tools of etiology, for if diseases were rooted in the environment—spawned in specific places—maps were uniquely geared to fight them. This urgent quest to identify the sources of storms and disease drove the pursuit of meteorology, which also depended greatly on the invention of the telegraph. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that 198

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weather mapping emerged alongside the telegraph, and in fact Joseph Henry had a hand in both. The telegraph made it possible to relay information about severe weather across distance, and communication was no longer limited by the speed of human travel. Newspapers were among the first to make use of this innovation, and by 1860 the Times of London was printing weather “forecasts.” James Gleick recently observed that the telegraph allowed people to think of the weather as “an interconnected affair rather than an assortment of local surprises.”3 Yet the ability to see the weather as a larger system depended on a new kind of map, one that was designed to showcase patterns of rainfall, wind, climate, and pressure, and then to synthesize those patterns. In other words, the volume of data collected across the nation could be understood only to the extent that it could be mapped. This explains the intense competition to create maps of temperature and rainfall in the 1850s, for they held the potential to unlock mysteries and tame unpredictable threats. In this respect, maps were beginning to fulfill the promise initially articulated by Humboldt, as analytical tools rather than descriptive records. It is no coincidence that maps extended into new areas of analysis as the nation extended its territory. By the 1850s, maps were central to etiology, the pursuit of weather, the quest to build a transcontinental railroad, and the ongoing debate over the agricultural potential of the West. At the same time, maps began to be used to make sense of the substantial data gathered by the census. That some of the nation’s earliest statistical maps were made of slavery again indicates that cartographic experimentation was often fostered by crisis. The Coast Survey had been adopting new print techniques for some time, but it was secession that prompted Bache and his staff to apply these to the threat of slavery. These maps, like those of meteorology produced by the Smithsonian, the army, and the Naval Observatory, reveal a government actively shaping the nation’s future. The techniques used to map slavery, climate, and cotton became models for the postwar era, and no individual embodies this new form of cartography more than Walker. He adapted techniques from both Americans and Europeans, but also established ambitions for cartography that are second nature today. By using maps to layer data, he presaged the advent of geographic information systems. His statistical and thematic maps assessed the nation by measuring its strengths, weaknesses, and resources. While Frederick Jackson Turner used his maps to develop a theory of the national past, Jedediah Hotchkiss and Charles Denison used them to sell its future. Jane Addams and the residents of Hull House applied Walker’s methods to map wages and nationalities on the west side of Chicago, an analytical approach that both grew from and advanced the Chicago School of Sociology.4 By the turn of the century, these maps were assimilated into American life, exemplified by the nation’s response to the Great War. In September 1917, five months after Congress declared war on Germany, President Wilson envisioned a new future for Europe, where states formed on the basis of shared goals and Conclusion

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identities rather than being subsumed within imperial hierarchies.5 To anticipate this shift, he organized a committee of scholars—known as the “Inquiry”— which included geographers, historians, and economists. Their purpose was to prepare for peace by studying the complex welter of territorial claims and governance across Europe. To do this, they gathered and created maps of language, ethnicity, irrigation, crops, transportation, and historical borders, anything related to human and economic geography. Walter Lippmann envisioned transparent boundary maps that could be superimposed onto those of physical geography, resources, or ethnicity. The goal was to use maps to understand human organization and then design more logical, coherent, and natural divisions. As the committee reported, maps would visualize “the interests of each nation” and trace these to their source. Thematic mapping had become an assumed element of modern governance.6 The leader of the Inquiry was Isaiah Bowman, president of the American Geographical Society. Bowman was aware that maps had limitations, for they could simplify and manipulate information, and were simultaneously “a picture and an argument.” As he put it, a new map language was emerging, and Americans were not alone in using new cartographic methods for diplomacy. In France, such research began in 1914 and was formalized in 1917 when historians and geographers were appointed to a Comite d’etudes.7 Their work, like that of the Inquiry, relied on statistical mapping to represent religion, history, resources, and ethnicity. Bowman privileged thematic maps for their ability to render data in spatial form and thereby reveal problems that remained invisible on traditional political and topographical maps. The Inquiry researched a host of geopolitical problems and scenarios, among the most salient of which was the “storm center” of ethnic groups across southern Europe. To define a coherent Yugoslav nation, Bowman and his colleagues turned to maps of language and ethnicity. Rather than determine the fate of territories through force, they made calculations regarding the population, first defining national identity in terms of ethnic dominance, then translating that dominance into political sovereignty.8 These maps could only have been undertaken after a century of aggregated information and after decades of experimentation made it possible to visualize data. Such experimentation began in Europe with the first maps of crime and literacy in the 1830s. By 1917, Bowman could boast that the Inquiry was prepared to create any map needed for the Paris Peace Delegations in a matter of hours. This was not the first time that thematic maps had been used in diplomacy. In the Frankfurt Treaty, in 1871, Otto von Bismarck relied on August Petermann’s maps of language to defend German claims to the Alsace region. Yet these maps were used to defend a goal rather than to create one. In the Inquiry, Americans turned to maps to design a more harmonious, rational, and democratic Europe. Because of Bowman’s influence, maps played an unprecedented role in the Paris 200

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negotiations. As one participant in the conference noted, geography had come into its own, and the appeal to maps was constant: Wilson could be found at one point on all fours, scouring a map of the Klagenfurt Basin to learn not just its topographical contours, but its economic geography. The American position at Paris has been criticized as a thinly veiled agenda to advance capitalism, and this may be accurate. Yet hardly a better example can be found of the power of this type of cartography to serve the modern nation-state.9 Wilson relied on the Inquiry to develop his position at the conference, which opened in January 1919 and ended in the Treaty of Versailles. The advice was not always followed, but what concerns us is its reasoning. For centuries, national coherence had been defined by lines drawn through power and conquest. In Wilson’s vision, the people would determine the border, rather than the border determining the people, thereby allowing “true” nations to emerge. This ideal of diplomacy rested on knowledge more than power. As Wilson urgently put it to Bowman on the eve of the conference, “Tell me what is right and I will fight for it. Give me a guaranteed position.”10 This type of thinking about governance, national identity, and sovereignty was impossible without the kind of maps that had been engineered in the nineteenth century. The use of thematic maps continued to grow through the twentieth century, whether in urban planning, etiology, social research, political strategy, or marketing. Maps of information are now so ubiquitous that we simply expect information to be visualized and think little about the history of this assumption. Yet it involved a profound shift in thinking that was made possible with the advent of adaptable and inexpensive printing. Even under the right circumstances, and with techniques imported from Europe, the creation of thematic maps was primarily driven in the United States by crises that demanded the visualization of information, such as the panic around epidemics, the urgency of meteorology, the threat of slavery, or the drive to expand westward. Since the 1960s, the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) has accelerated the growth of thematic mapping by organizing and manipulating information through the use of technology. Like thematic mapping, GIS subjects information to spatial analysis. The technique is instrumental, not illustrative, for it is designed to identify patterns, discern relationships, and analyze behavior. The advent of online and digital information has advanced this type of mapping even further. The 2010 census data was rendered into cartographic form immediately after its release. The New York Times designed an interactive program to map this ethnic and economic data, down to the level of blocks and neighborhood precincts. Similarly, the organization Patchwork Nation maps census and other data to reveal demographic profiles that illuminate how the nation functions beyond “red” and “blue” political categories. The Digital Scholarship Lab Conclusion

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at the University of Richmond applies similar techniques to the past in order to uncover hidden history, such as the geographical experience of emancipation during the Civil War or the physical movement of individual regiments through time. These are just a few examples of the perpetual, ever more dazzling efforts to map information. And this new form of knowledge has prompted a change in knowledge itself, just as Walker believed that mapping data would prompt entirely new questions.11 The rise of digital information and communication echoes the advent of thematic mapping. In some respects, the Internet is itself conceptualized as a map of information, though one that can never be seen in its entirety. The purpose of hypertext markup language, or HTML, was to organize data into meaningful form through websites. Thematic maps were also ways to access data and make it useful, as in climate charts or rainfall maps. Without them, the data were essentially inaccessible, just as online information is virtually meaningless without a tool such as HTML. In a related way, a project such as Google Books aims not only to digitize information, but to open up new lines of inquiry through that process. With the rush to digitize libraries, we find ourselves replaying the dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander von Humboldt. For Jefferson, a universal library would encompass all human knowledge, while Humboldt believed that observation of the natural world would reveal larger harmony and divine purpose. But in this drive, the organization of information became essential. We face a similar moment, when the struggle to understand information has redefined the very meaning of a map.12

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Conclusion

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Introduction 1. Jesse McKinley, “Marriage Ban Donors Feel Exposed by List,” New York Times, January 19, 2009, A12. 2. Janusz J. Klawe, “Population Mapping,” Canadian Cartographer 10, no. 1 ( June 1973): 44; Arthur H. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), introduction. 3. Max Eckert distinguished between maps that reproduce geography as it exists in nature and those that derive from some kind of abstraction, a distinction that is slippery at best. Eckert (translated by W. Joerg), “On the Nature of Maps and Map Logic,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 40, no. 6 (1908): 344–51. Gilles Palsky and Michael Friendly, “Visualizing Nature and Society,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James Akerman and Robert Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 209–16; Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographical Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 264–65. 4. Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, 1540–1861 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957–63); Paul Cohen, Mapping the West: America’s Westward Movement, 1524–1890 (New York: Rizzoli, 2002); Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1980); William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), and Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1978); Bill Hubbard, American Boundaries: The Nation, the States, the Rectangular Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 5. On historical and geographical knowledge in national identity, see Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History 203

of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Ian Tyrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1015–44. Theoretical discussions of the meaning of maps and national identity include J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 1983). 6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science: An Address, Delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society at the Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860,” in Holmes, Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), pt. 2, “Medical Essays,” 12. 7. Matthew Edney, “Cartography without Progress: The Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking,” Cartographica 30, no. 2/3 (1993): 54–68; and Jeremy W. Crampton, “Cartography’s Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974–1990,” Cartographica 31 (Winter 1994): 16–32. 8. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping; Palsky and Friendly, “Visualizing Nature and Society”; Godlewska, Geography Unbound; Tom Koch, Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine (Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2005), and Disease Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). 9. Matthew G. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 34, 142. 10. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), chap. 3, “Freedom in an Age of Nation Making”; Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 ( June 2000): 807–31. 11. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in NineteenthCentury America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 12. Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), and Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990). Chapter 1 1. One of the few atlases to directly consider chronology was Johann Matthias Hase’s 1743 atlas, which mapped a succession of empires over time and brought “history” to the present. Walter Goffart, “Breaking the Ortelian Pattern,” in Editing Early and Historical Atlases, ed. Joan Winearls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 50–56. 2. Walter Goffart, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9, 313, 460; Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 109. 3. Kruse’s atlas was published in installments and remained incomplete until the 1840s. Goffart, Historical Atlases, 314–21, 520. D’Anville’s atlas was reprinted in the United States in 1807 by Etheridge & Bliss, in Boston. Christian Kruse, Atlas zur Übersicht der Geschichte aller europäischen Staaten (Oldenburg and Halle, 1802–10); Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (1983): 909–28. 4. Goffart, “Breaking” 58–61; Black, Maps and History, 8, 17, 25–26, 39, 41–42. 204

Notes to Pages 6–14

5. Black, Maps and History, 8, 17, 25–26; Goffart, Historical Atlases, 342. 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Colin Williams and Anthony D. Smith, “The National Construction of Social Space,” Progress in Human Geography 7 (1983): 513. 7. The complex history of the “Lesage” atlas of Las Cases is covered in Goffart, Historical Atlases, and Black, Maps and History. The American edition was copyrighted in 1820 and appeared as A Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological, and Geographical Atlas Being a General Guide to History, Both Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Sons, 1821). See also William Winterbotham’s Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States (New York: John Reid, 1795), a four-volume narrative with a series of maps of each state in the new Union and one of the United States, but which had no sequential maps and made no attempt to map change over time. 8. Goffart, Historical Atlases, 9, 308, 313, 323; Black, Maps and History, 36. 9. Henry Charles Carey, A Complete Historical, Chronological, and Geographical American Atlas . . . to the Year 1822: According to the Plan of Le Sage’s Atlas, and Intended as a Companion to Lavoisne’s Improvement of That Celebrated Work (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1822); William Darby, View of the United States, Historical, Geographical, and Statistical (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner, 1828). 10. Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, & National Identity (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina, 2006), 244–46 and 251. 11. Stephen Ferguson, “The 1753 Carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 52 (Winter 1991): 190–230. 12. Joseph Priestley, A Description of a System of Biography: With a Catalogue of All the Names Inserted in It, and the Dates Annexed to Them (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1803), and A Description of a New Chart Of History, Containing, A View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire, That Have Taken Place in the World (London: J. Johnson, 1769 [US ed., 1792]); Priestley passage taken from Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124. For superb commentary on timelines, see Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 19, 96, 112, 126. I thank Dan Rosenberg for sharing his work on this complex form of graphic knowledge. 13. Throughout the text, “(see website)” refers to the companion site to this book, which can be found at mappingthenation.com. 14. “A Map Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States by David Ramsay” (ca. 1811); Ramsay, “A Chronological Table of the Principal Events Which Have Taken Place in the English Colonies, Now United States, from 1607, till 1810 Explanatory of and Supplementary to Dr. Ramsay’s Map Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States, and Noticing the Progress of Improvement in the Same” (Charleston, SC: J. Hoff, 1811), 4, 7; Robert L. Brunhouse, “David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 55, pt. 4 (August 1965): 43–45; Arthur Shaffer, To Be an American: David Ramsay and the Making of American Consciousness (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991). Another timetable influenced by Priestley is Robert Scott, A Regular Series of Chronology, from the Creation of the World, to the Year 5813, Ending with the Autumnal Equinox, A.D. 1810. (Poughkeepsie, NY: Joseph Nelson, 1810). 15. Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution, 108–16; Bruckner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly 51, Notes to Pages 15–18

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no. 2 (1999): 311–43; Ralph Brown, “The American Geographies of Jedediah Morse,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 31, no. 3 (September 1941): 150; letters from Ramsay to Morse in Brunhouse, “David Ramsay,” 121–22, 171–79. David N. Livingstone, “‘Risen into Empire’: Moral Geographies of the American Republic,” in Geography and Revolution, ed. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 16. John Pinkerton, A Modern Atlas from the First and Best Authorities (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson and Son, 1818), 3; Penny Richards, “‘Could I but Mark Out My Own Map of Life’: Educated Women Embracing Cartography in the Nineteenth-Century American South,” Cartographica 39, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 1–17; H. Fowler, “Educational Services of Mrs. Emma Willard,” American Journal of Education 6 (March 1859): 125–68. 17. Quote in Fowler, “Educational Services,” 151. Edward Stevens, The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 132–35. The gendered dimension of Willard’s work is covered in Mark David Hall, “Emma Willard on the Political Position of Women,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 13–26; Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3–25, and “What, Then, Is the American, This New Woman?” Journal of American History 65, no. 3: 675–703; Angelo Repousis, “The Trojan Women: Emma Hart Willard and the Troy Society for the Advancement of Female Education in Greece,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 445–76; and Lucy Townsend and Barbara Wiley, introduction to The Papers of Emma Hart Willard: 1787–1870 (hereafter “Willard Papers”) (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2004). 18. Emma Willard, Willard’s Historic Guide: Guide to the Temple of Time; And Universal History for Schools (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1850), 15. Fowler, “Educational Services,” 134. Others influenced by Morse’s emphasis on rote include George van Waters, who used rhyme as a mnemonic device, just as Willard used graphics. Van Waters, The Poetical Geography, Made to Accompany Any of the Common School Atlases; To Which Is Added the Rule of Arithmetic, and a Sketch of English History, in Verse (Milwaukee: Wilson & King, 1848). 19. Willard’s interest in mnemonics is apparent in her prefatory comments to Woodbridge’s System of Ancient Geography (1821), unpublished but available in manuscript form in The Papers of Emma Hart Willard, Reel 7, Frame 475. On late nineteenth-century criticism of Willard’s emphasis on memorization, see J. Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 20. Middlebury Female Academy was founded by Idea Strong in Vermont but did not exist at the time of Henshaw’s journal. Linda Eisenmann, Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 248. 21. Henshaw’s journal from the David Rumsey Collection. She copied her maps and some text from Carey’s American Pocket Atlas (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1805); the angel on her “Virginia” page and many of the calligraphic styles were taken from Eleazer Huntington’s Introduction to the Art of Penmanship (1816). I thank Robert Williams, former assistant design manager at the University of Chicago Press; Truman Young, at the University of California; and David Rumsey for sharing their knowledge of calligraphic practices and Henshaw with me. 22. Bruckner, Geographic Revolution, 246; Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York: Norton, 1979), quote on 175. 23. Emma Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time; And Universal History for Schools (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1850), 3. Willard’s own politics are difficult to ascertain. She worshipped Clay, particularly after the Compromise of 1850, associated with Whig values, and 206

Notes to Pages 18–21

in 1860 strongly supported the Constitutional Union Party in the hopes of averting secession. Her intense opposition to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the enfranchisement of women complicates her politics, which are explored in Scott, “What, Then, Is the American,” and Nina Baym, “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History,” American Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1991): 1–23. 24. Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 30. 25. William Woodbridge [and Emma Willard], School Atlas to Accompany Woodbridge’s Rudiments of Geography, Atlas on a New Plan, Exhibiting the Prevailing Religions, Forms of Government, Degrees of Civilization, and the Comparative Size of Towns, Rivers, and Mountains (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke, ca. 1824). George H. Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 57–58. History instruction was required in Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island. Science was more common for girls than boys, and Willard led this trend. Kim Tolley, “Science for Ladies, Classics for Gentlemen: A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Subjects in the Curricula of Boys’ and Girls’ Secondary Schools in the United States, 1794–1850,” History of Education 36, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 129–53. 26. Callcott, History, 31–32, 89–90. On history in the early republic, see Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); D. Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953); Ellen Ka-May Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 651–77, and Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (1983): 909–28. 27. Callcott, History, viii, 56; Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 11. Willard to A. W. Holden, September 5, 1846; Willard to William Coggswell, December 21, 1841, both in Willard Papers. 28. Willard, quoted in Fowler, “Educational Services,” 135. Michael Conzen, A Scholar’s Guide to Geographical Writing on the American and Canadian Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 29. William Woodbridge, A System of Universal Geography on the Principles of Comparison and Classification, bound together with Emma Willard, Ancient Geography, as Connected with Chronology, and Preparatory to the Study of Ancient History: Accompanied with an Atlas [also known as Woodbridge and Willard’s Geography] (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke & Co., 1829). Ancient Geography was first published in 1822, and the 1824 edition includes Willard’s quirky use of the Amazon to map Roman history (Oliver D. Cooke & Sons). A similar example of metaphorical mapping is found in the “Abolition Map” of Thomas Clarkson, reproduced in Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000). Humboldt’s visual techniques were widely adopted in American textbooks, such as the comparative length of rivers and comparative view of mountains, see School Atlas to Cummings’ Ancient and Modern Geography Improved (New York: Collins & Hannay, 1829), and chapter 3 below. 30. Quote from American Journal of Education (1828): 675. 31. Early studies of American historical mapping dated its rise to the late nineteenth century, nearly a half century after Willard’s atlas. Lester J. Cappon, “The Historical Map in AmeriNotes to Pages 21–24

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can Atlases,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, no. 4 (December 1979): 624; and L. W. Towner, “The Mapping of the American Revolutionary War in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mapping the American Revolutionary War, ed. J. B. Harley, B. B. Petchenik, and L. W. Towner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 32. The role of women in writing historical narratives is a matter of some disagreement. Sharon Harris outlines the limited access of woman writers of history, thereby stressing the exceptional achievement that this work represented. Nina Baym, however, has shown that women’s historical narratives were common in the early nineteenth century, especially considering historical themes in poetry and fiction. Harris, Women’s Early American Historical Narratives (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Baym, American Women Writers. 33. Emma Willard, A Series of Maps to Accompany Willard’s “History of the United States, or, Republic of America” (New York: White, Gallaher and White, 1828). 34. Steve Conn has explored this belief in History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). According to Conn, while in Europe archaeology helped extend history (and thereby national legitimacy) back in time, in the United States the same opportunity to give the nation chronological depth through the history of Native Americans was passed over in favor of removing them from the realm of history to anthropology. 35. Albert Gallatin, “Map of the Indian Tribes of North America about 1600 A.D.,” in Archaeologia Americana. Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1836); Horatio Hale, “Ethnographical Map of Oregon,” in Ethnography and Philology (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1846); John Wesley Powell, “Map of the Linguistic Stocks of American Indians North of Mexico,” in Indian Linguistic Families of America, North of Mexico (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891). 36. See, for example, Allen C. Thomas, A History of the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1894). 37. Brian Harley, “New England Cartography and the Native Americans,” in The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 169–95; Malcolm Lewis, ed., Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Amy DeRogatis, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 38. Marcius Willson, A Reply to Mrs. Willard’s “Appeal,” as Lately Published by A. S. Barnes & Co. (New York: M. H. Newman, 1847). 39. Goffart, Historical Atlases, 374n128, and letter to the author dated December 15, 2004; Black, Maps and History, 59; Cappon, “The Historical Map,” n41. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 40. On Quin’s posthumously published historical atlas, see Goffart, “Breaking the Ortelian Pattern,” and Historical Atlases. Emma Willard, A System of Universal History, in Perspective: Accompanied by an Atlas, Exhibiting Chronology in a Picture of Nations, and Progressive Geography in a Series of Maps (Hartford, CT: F. J. Huntington, 1835); and Emma Willard Yates, Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History (Hartford, CT: F. J. Huntington, 1836). 41. T. G. Bradford, A Comprehensive Atlas: Geographical, Historical & Commercial (New York: F. Hunt, 1835). 42. Lydia Sigourney to Emma Willard, October 1828, Willard Papers, Reel 1, Frame 639. Another review can be found in “History of the United States or Republic of America,” American Journal of Education 3 (1828): 672–80. 208

Notes to Pages 24–28

43. O. D. Cooke to Emma Willard, June 8, 1830, Willard Papers, Reel 2, Frame 40; Marcius Willson, “Report on American Histories” (New York: M. H. Newman, 1847), 3–4. 44. Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 11. On pedagogical reform, see Willard to Jane Hart, March 10, 1848, Willard Papers, Reel 3, Frame 280; Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 4; and Willard to Austin W. Holden, September 5, 1846, Willard Papers, Reel 3, Frame 117. 45. Joseph Priestley, A Description of a System of Biography, and A Description of a New Chart of History. Priestley quoted in Headrick, When Information Came of Age, 124. 46. Azel Storrs Lyman, Lyman’s Historical Chart (Cincinnati: National Publishing Company, 1875); Humphrey Phelps, “Pictorial View of the World” (New York: H. Phelps, 1847). 47. Phelps, “The World at One View” (ca. 1847); “Geography of the United States—Upon a New Plan” (New York, 1832). 48. Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, 140. 49. Emma Willard, Willard’s Map of Time; A Companion to the Historic Guide (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1846). George Callcott estimates that one-third of historical articles in Poole’s index from 1800 to 1860 incorporated universal history. 50. Willard’s “Picture of Nations” probably first appeared in Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History (1839). On the sketch, see Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 15. Daniel Calhoun, “Eyes for the Jacksonian World: William C. Woodbridge and Emma Willard,” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (Spring 1984): 20. Rosenberg and Grafton connect her images to Stephen and Daniel Dod’s A Chronological, Historical, and Biographical Chart (1807) and Friedrich Strass’s Strom der Zeiten (1804). Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, 144–45. 51. Callcott, History in the United States, chap. 1; on historicism, see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness.” 52. Willard, letter to Jane Hart, October 18, 1847; quote from letter to Hart, March 10, 1848, Willard Papers, Reel 3, Frames 232–36 and 280–84. 53. Positive reviews of her chronographer can be found in Fowler, “Educational Ser-vices,” 150 54. Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 16. 55. “Notices of Books: A System of Universal History, in Perspective,” American Annals of Education 6, no. 1 ( January 1836): 40–41, as well as “Literary Notices: A System of Universal History, in Perspective,” American Ladies Magazine 9 ( July 1836): 422–23. Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 12–13, 16. 56. Willard, Guide to the Temple of Time, 21–22; Willard reflected on the meaning of her graphics in Universal History in Perspective (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1857), iii–vi. On recent efforts of geographers to map time, see Irina Ren Vasiliev, Mapping Time, Cartographica Monograph 49 (North York, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 57. Emma Willard, Last Leaves of American History, Comprising Histories of the Mexican War and California (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849). 58. On the role of Greek history and politics on American culture, see Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 59. Michael Kammen, Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), chap. 3. On the use of trees to depict history and cosmology, see Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 186–87; the use of arboreal imagery as a mnemonic device in Native American culture is mentioned in Peter Nabokov, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vii–viii; Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, chap. 4. Notes to Pages 29–37

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60. Letter of A. S. Barnes to Willard, October 25, 1866, Willard Papers, Reel 4, Frame 669. A. S. Barnes to Willard, May 9, 1845, Willard Papers, Reel 3, Frame 1. A letter from Barnes in December 2, 1863, carried letterhead extolling Willard’s work as the standard for schools. William Hunt, “Mrs. Emma Willard,” Leaves from the American Biographical Sketchbook (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1848), 224–31. Lydia Sigourney praised Willard’s visualization of history; Sigourney to Willard, December 20, 1844, and December 16, 1859, Willard Papers, Reel 2, Frame 1071, and Reel 4, Frame 137. 61. William Dalston, “Chronological Chart of American History” (New York: William B. Dalston, ca. 1881). 62. Quote from Emma Willard to Miss Foster, November 5, 1848, reprinted in J. Lord, The Life of Emma Willard (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 228. 63. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 173. 64. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175. 65. Willard, Abridged History of the United States, or Republic of America (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1860), 417. 66. Willard, Abridged History of the United States, v. Chapter 2 1. Eugene Doll, American History as Interpreted by German Historians from 1770 to 1815 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949), 479, 491; Ralph H. Brown, “Early Maps of the United States: The Ebeling-Sotzmann Maps of the Northern Seaboard States,” Geographical Review 30, no. 3 ( July 1940): 471–79. 2. Lynn S. Mullins, “The Rise of Map Libraries in America during the Nineteenth Century,” Geography and Map Division/Special Libraries Association, no. 63 (March 1966): 2–11; John Wolter, “Geographical Libraries and Map Collections,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent, Harold Lancour, and Jay E. Daily (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1973), 9:236–66; and Wolter, “The Emerging Discipline of Cartography” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1975). 3. Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress (Washington, DC: William Duane, April 1802); Robert Rutland, introduction to The 1812 Catalogue of the Library of Congress: A Facsimile (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1982); Richard W. Stephenson, “Congress’ First Map Collection,” in Federal Government Map Collecting: A Brief History, ed. Stephenson (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 1969). 4. Richard W. Stephenson, “America’s First Federal Map Library,” Meridian: Map & Geography Round Table 1, no. 1 (1989): 3–15; Newman McGirr, “The Activities of Peter Force,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 42/43 (1942): 35–82. Secretary of State Marcy ended Force’s access to these records in 1853; Lawrence C. Wroth, The First Century of the John Carter Brown Library: A History with a Guide to the Collections (Providence, RI: Associates of the John Carter Brown Library, 1946); Thomas Adams, “The Map Treasures of the John Carter Brown Library,” Map Collector 16 (1981): 2–8; Robert Karrow, “Map Collecting in North America,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 6 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 5. F. A. P. Barnard, “Memoir of Edward B. Hunt, 1822–1863,” read before the National Academy of Sciences, August 1864, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1886) 6. Anne Marie Claire Godlewska, “Jomard: The Geographic Imagination and the First

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Notes to Pages 37–44

Great Facsimile Atlases,” in Winearls, Editing Early and Historical Atlases; Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographical Thought from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. chap. 4; J. B. Harley, “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12–13. 7. The Articulate Traveler Johann Georg Kohl, Chronicler of the American Continents: A Library of Congress Exhibition (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993), 4. 8. John Wolter, “Johann Georg Kohl in America,” in Progress of Discovery: Johann Georg Kohl, ed. Hans-Albrecht Koch, Margrit B. Krewson, and John A. Wolter (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt Graz, 1993), 134–35. 9. Wolter cites Kohl as originating the technique, though Willard used color to mark voyages in her 1828 atlas. Wolter, “Johann Georg Kohl in America,” 154n18. 10. Kohl’s three maps of exploration are in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. John Blair, The History of the Rise and Progress of Geography (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Ginger, 1784). Kohl’s reports are in Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1855), app. 64; Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), apps. 65 and 66; Wolter, “Johann Georg Kohl in America,” 138–40. 11. See Henry Stevens’s own effort at cartographic history: Historical and Geographical Notes on the Earliest Discoveries in America 1453–1530 with Comments on the Earliest Charts and Maps (New Haven, CT: Office of the American Journal of Science, Tuttle Morehouse and Taylor; London: Office of the Author No. 4 Trafalgar Square, 1869), 9. Albert Theberge; e-mail to author, October 29, 2010. Kohl, A Descriptive Catalogue of Those Maps, Charts and Surveys Relating to America, Which Are Mentioned in Vol. 333. of Hakluyt’s Great Work, by J. G. Kohl (Washington, DC: Henry Polkinhorn, 1857). 12. J. G. Kohl, “Substance of a Lecture Delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on a Collection of the Charts and Maps of America,” in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Cornelius Wendell, 1857), 125–26. 13. John Cloud, e-mail to the author, March 2, 2011, and “Mapping the New Coasts of War,” paper given at the meeting of the Philip Lee Phillips Society, “Re-Imagining the U.S. Civil War,” May 20, 2011, Washington, DC. 14. The “Sketches of the Rebellion” were made for public consumption, but copies were also found in the collections of William Tecumseh Sherman and James Garfield, both at the Library of Congress. The maps were one of several wartime collaborations between Henry Lindenkohl and the lithographer Charles G. Krebs. See, for example, their “Military Map of South-Eastern Virginia,” issued several times over the course of the war (and drawn by Adolph Lindenkohl). 15. Theberge, e-mail to author, June 19, 2010; Richard Stephenson, Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1989), 48–49. For maps modeled on the Coast Survey’s “historical sketches,” see E. W. A. Rowles, The Comprehensive Series, Historical-Geographical Maps of the U.S. (Chicago: Modern School Supply Company, 1919); and American Military History (originally published 1969 by the Office of the Chief of Military History, US Army). 16. Emma Willard to William L. Marcy, September 3, 1854, Papers of Emma Hart Willard,

Notes to Pages 44–50

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Reel 3, Frames 790–93. Justin Winsor, “The Kohl Collection of Early Maps,” in The Kohl Collection of Maps Relating to America [Belonging to the Department of State] (Cambridge, MA: Library of Harvard University, 1886); reprinted as The Kohl Collection (Now in the Library of Congress) of Maps Relating to America (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 17–18. John Hessler has recently discovered that just as Kohl was tracing these maps, Henry David Thoreau was engaged in a similar effort on a smaller scale. In 1855, Thoreau traced several early maps of American discovery in order to reproduce contemporary knowledge of the early Northeast that he discussed in Cape Cod and The Maine Woods and extensively in the Canadian Notebook. It is unclear whether Thoreau and Kohl ever met. John Hessler, “From Ortelius to Champlain: The Lost Maps of Henry David Thoreau,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, n.s., 18/19 (2010–11): 1–25. 17. Kohl, “Substance of a Lecture,” 94–95, 107. 18. Kohl, “Substance of a Lecture,” 95–97. On early facsimiles, see Godlewska, Geography Unbound, 142–46. 19. Dietrich Denecke, “Johann Georg Kohl: His Place in Geography and His Geographical Perspective,” in The Articulate Traveler, 22. 20. Michael Conzen, “Commentary,” in The Articulate Traveler, 25; Fergus J. Wood, “J. G. Kohl and the ‘Lost Maps’ of the American Coast,” American Cartographer 3, no. 2 (1976): 107–15. 21. “Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, Ordered by the Hon. Jeff ’n Davis, Secretary of War.” This was produced by Selmar Siebert, with subsequent editions by Julius Bien. “Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practical and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, Made under the Direction of the Secretary of War, in 1853–56. According to Acts of Congress of March 3, 1853, May 31, 1854, and August 5, 1854,” 36th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate, vol. 11 (Washington, DC: George W. Bowman, 1861). Gouverneur K. Warren, “Memoir to Accompany the Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, Giving a Brief Account of Each of the Exploring Expeditions since A.D. 1800, with a Detailed Description of the Method Adopted in Compiling the General Map” (1859). Warren acknowledged Kohl on page 16. 22. Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540–1861 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957–63), 4:2, 67, 84. 23. Ralph Ehrenberg, Rocky Mountain Map Society lecture, Denver, April 20, 2010; John Rennie Short, Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 29–30 and chap. 8. 24. G. Malcolm Lewis, “Encounters in Government Bureaus, Archives, Museums, and Libraries, 1782–1911,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, ed. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 34–38; Kohl, KitchiGami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway (London: Chapman and Hall, 1860). 25. Report upon United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, in Charge of First Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler . . . under the Direction of the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army. . . . in Seven Volumes and One Supplement (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875–89), vol. 1, “Geographical Report,” 481–512. 26. [Ainsworth Spofford], Special Report of the Librarian of Congress to the Joint Committee on the Library concerning the Historical Library of Peter Force, Esq. (Washington, DC, 1867), quote on 8; Richard W. Stephenson, “Maps from the Peter Force Collection,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 30, no. 3 (1973): 183–204. 212

Notes to Pages 50–55

27. Richard W. Stephenson, “The Henry Harrisse Collection of Publications, Papers, and Maps Pertaining to the Early Exploration of America,” Terra Incognitae 169 (1984): 37–55; Stephenson, “America’s First Federal Map Library,” 9–10. 28. Winsor, “The Kohl Collection of Early Maps.” 29. Philip Lee Phillips, A List of Maps of America in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901). 30. “Report of Colonel Lawrence Martin, Chief of Division of Maps, Library of Congress,” October 1, 1928, 9, and also report of November 5, Huntington Library, Rare Book Department, uncataloged. 31. The interest in and prices for antiques—as for maps—rose precipitously in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York: Knopf, 1980); Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (New York: Broadway Books, 2001). 32. Historical Map of the United States, Showing Early Spanish, French, & English Discoveries and Explorations, Also Forts, Towns, and Battlefields of Historic Interest (Chicago: Rufus Blanchard, 1876), David Rumsey Collection; Rufus Blanchard, Historical Atlas of the United States (Chicago: T. Kane & Co., ca. 1893). 33. Harper’s Weekly, November 17, 1877, 908; William Cullen Bryant and Sidney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States: From the First Discovery of the Western Hemisphere by the Northmen, to the End of the First Century of the Union of the States (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1876–81); Stevens, Historical and Geographical Notes. 34. Robert H. Labberton, An Historical Atlas, Containing a Chronological Series of One Hundred and Four Maps, at Successive Periods, from the Dawn of History to the Present Day (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1880); Townsend MacCoun, An Historical Geography of the United States (New York: Townsend MacCoun, 1889; Silver, Burdett, 1890, 1892, 1901); Labberton, Outlines of History (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1871). 35. Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, Guide to the Study of American History (Boston and London: Ginn and Company, 1896); J. Franklin Jameson praised Hart’s efforts in American Historical Review 2 (1896–97): 357; Lester Cappon, “Channing and Hart: Partners in Bibliography,” New England Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1956): 318–40. 36. Albert Bushnell Hart, Epoch Maps Illustrating American History (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1891). 37. Channing and Hart, Guide, 170. The guide listed four suitable historical atlases: Hart and MacCoun’s atlases, Scribner’s Statistical Atlas (1883), and Lucien Smith’s Historical and Chronological Atlas of the United States (1881), which integrated chronology and geography as Willard had. On borders and national identity, see Colin Williams and Anthony D. Smith, “The National Construction of Social Space,” Progress in Human Geography 7 (1983): 502–18, esp. 513. 38. Greg Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 66; see also Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974). 39. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction (New York: Wiley & Putman, 1845); Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 260–61. Notes to Pages 55–63

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40. Lossing to Francis Lieber, March 27, 1862, and August 31, 1871, Papers of Francis Lieber, Huntington Library. 41. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past, 145, 182–83, 231; Neil Harris, “Iconography,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 197. Hart, Harper’s Atlas of American History, with Map Studies by Dixon Ryan Fox (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920). Allen C. Thomas, A History of the United States (1903 [1893]), iv. Horace Elisha Scudder’s History of the United States (New York and Chicago: Taintor Brothers & Co., 1884) also emphasized maps; Johnston, History of the United States (New York: Henry Holt, 1885), v; Ridpath’s histories were popular from the 1890s through the 1910s. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past, 137–38. 42. Francis Lieber to Samuel Tyler, November 5, 1859, and January 16, 1860, in Lieber Papers, Huntington Library. See Lyman’s Historical Chart (1844–75) and George Putnam’s tables of history; Samuel Willard, A Synopsis of History (New York: Appleton, 1878), and Ludlow’s Concentric Chart of History (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, ca. 1885). Some were inspired by the centennial, such as Symbolical Centenary Chart of American History (1876), and others by apocalyptic visions, such as S. Hawes, The Black and Terrible Year (Indianapolis: S. Hawes, 1872). 43. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), chap. 3, “Freedom in an Age of Nation Making”; Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 ( June 2000): 807–31; Abraham Lincoln, “Message to Congress,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 5:527. Marguerite Shaffer has argued that the territory became central to national identity and state administration after the Civil War. This shift was evident in the creation of national parks, where dramatic scenery and sacred places were treated not just as leisure destinations but as defining spaces of the American homeland. If Shaffer is correct, that after the Civil War “the nation became a unique geographical entity,” we should not be surprised by the spread of maps that emphasized its territorial growth and development. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 121–22. 44. William A. Koelsch, “‘A Profound Though Special Erudition’: Justin Winsor as Historian of Discovery,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 93 (1983): 62–64. Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884–89). 45. Koelsch, “‘A Profound Though Special Erudition,’” 65–66; Edward Channing, “Justin Winsor,” American Historical Review 3, no. 2 ( January 1898): 198; John K. Wright, “Daniel Coit Gilman, Geographer and Historian,” Geographical Review 51, no. 3 ( July 1961): 396–97. 46. Clara LeGear, “Early Years in the Map Division, Library of Congress,” in Stephenson, Federal Government Map Collecting. 47. Koelsch, “‘A Profound Though Special Erudition,’” 82. 48. H. B. Adams “New Methods in the Study of History,” Journal of Social Science 18 (May 1884): 259–60; Wright, “Daniel Coit Gilman,” 398–99. 49. John K. Wright, “J. Franklin Jameson and the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States,” in J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute, ed. Ruth Anna Fisher and William Lloyd Fox (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 68, and Jameson’s 1903 letter proposing the atlas on 77–79. Jameson to Gilman, February 14, 1902, in An Historian’s World: Selections from the Correspondence of John Franklin Jameson, ed. Elizabeth Donnan and Leo F. Stock (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956); Scott Nesbit, “Layers of the Past: 214

Notes to Pages 63–71

Or, the Atlas as Digital Infrastructure,” February 20, 2010, in author’s possession. Ian Tyrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1023. 50. Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, published by Carnegie Institution of Washington and the American Geographical Society of New York (Baltimore: A. Hoen & Co., 1932), xv. 51. John K. Wright, “Sections and National Growth: An Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States,” Geographical Review 22, no. 3 (1932): 353–60. 52. Paullin also reproduced old city maps and plans—most of which had never been printed—to show the influence of custom and history over urban development and land use. 53. Paullin, introduction, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States. 54. Wright, “Sections and National Growth,” 353, 356–57; Wright, introduction to Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, xi. 55. Wright, “J. Franklin Jameson,” 75; William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas (New York: Henry Holt, 1911). Paullin worked on the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States for sixteen years, which prompted a bit of ribbing by his colleagues. After a decade of service, Jameson commemorated Paullin in a manner that captured the difficulty of mapping the past. As Jameson wrote, Columbus “Saw South America before Cabral, But wholly missed the Panama Canal. . . . Oh, what a glorious feather in his cap, Had he put U.S.A. upon the map!” Donnan and Stock, An Historian’s World, 276. 56. Charles O. Paullin to Frederick Jackson Turner, November 13, 1928, Box 40, and May 23, 1929, Box 42, in Turner Papers, Huntington Library. Turner’s successor at the Huntington, Max Farrand, praised Paullin’s atlas in a letter of November 3, 1932, Box 49, Turner Papers. This geographical turn was also influenced by Ellen Churchill Semple’s Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) expanded and reprinted with Clarence Fielden Jones as American History and Its Geographic Conditions (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933). Jones designed a companion volume of maps to explore the influence of geography over discovery, settlement, and conflict. 57. Harper’s Atlas of American History, with Map Studies, by Dixon Ryan Fox (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920); Hart and Isaac J. Cox, The March of Man; A Chronological Record of Peoples and Events from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1935). 58. William Estabrook Chancellor and Fletcher Willis Hewes, The United States: A History of Three Centuries, 1607–1904: Population, Politics, War, Industry, Civilization (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904). 59. The Histomap (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1925). Chapter 3 1. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping, 1, 7. 2. Abraham Bradley, “A map of the United States, exhibiting the post-roads, the situations, connections & distances of the post-offices stage roads, counties, ports of entry and delivery for foreign vessels, and the principal rivers” (1796 and 1804), American Philosophical Society; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 70, 101. 3. Ritter, Sechs Karten von Europa (1806), in Palsky and Friendly, “Visualizing Nature,” 222, and Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping, 70; William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1978), Notes to Pages 71–80

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191; Arnold Henry Guyot, “Carl Ritter: An Address to the Society,” Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (1860): 25–63; Gilles Palsky, Des Chiffres et des Cartes: Naissance et development de la cartographie quantitative francaise au XIXe siècle (Paris: Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1996). 4. Anne Marie Claire Godlewska, “From Enlightenment Vision to Modern Science? Humboldt’s Visual Thinking,” in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 237, 250–52, 267. On Humboldt’s influence, see Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire; Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Dawson, 1978); Edward Carter III, ed., Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999); and Hugh Richard Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. Quoted in A. Petermann and Thomas Milner, eds., The Atlas of Physical Geography (London: Wm. S. Orr, 1850). 6. Wyld’s map also appeared in “A General Atlas, Being a Collection of Maps of the World and Quarters, Their Principal Empires, Kingdoms, &c. Containing Fifty-Two Maps and Charts” (Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner and M. Carey and Son, 1818). 7. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping, 70–72; Arthur H. Robinson and Helen M. Wallis, “Humboldt’s Map of Isothermal Lines: A Milestone in Thematic Cartography,” Cartographic Journal 4 (1967): 119–23. James Rodger Fleming notes that Simon DeWitt suggested charting temperature well before Humboldt, but nothing came of this. Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 19; Godlewska, “From Enlightenment Vision to Modern Science?,” 253–55. 8. On Dwight, see James H. Cassedy, American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 5–6, 12; Benjamin Silliman, A Sketch of the Life and Character of President Dwight, Delivered as a Eulogium, in New Haven, February 12, 1817, before the Academic Body of Yale College, Composed of the Senatus Academic, Faculty, and Students (New Haven, CT: Maltby and Goldsmith, 1817). 9. Edward L. Lach, Jr., “William Channing Woodbridge,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); William D. Walters, “William Channing Woodbridge: Geographer,” Journal of Social Studies Research 16–17, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 43. 10. Woodbridge, School Atlas to Accompany Woodbridge’s Rudiments of Geography (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cooke & Sons, 1824); a colored and slightly adapted edition of the map appeared in Woodbridge, Modern Atlas, on a New Plan, to Accompany the System of Universal Geography (Hartford, CT: Belknap & Hammersley, 1837), David Rumsey Collection. The first use of Humboldt’s comparative length of rivers and size of mountains was probably in Woodbridge’s Larger Atlas, a collaboration with Emma Willard and Samuel Goodrich (Peter Parley) (Hartford, CT: Samuel G. Goodrich, 1822). 11. This reflects a curious reversal in intellectual history, with ideas embraced first by schoolteachers and textbook authors rather than scientists. Michael Robinson, “Why We Need a New History of Exploration,” Common-Place 10, no. 1 (October 2009). 12. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, translated from German by E. C. Otte (New York: Harper, 1851–75). The German edition was published from 1845 to 1862. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 13. Dr. Heinrich Berghaus’ physikalischer Atlas (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1845–48); Jane Camerini, “Heinrich Berghaus’s Map of Human Diseases,” in Medical Geography in Historical 216

Notes to Pages 80–86

Perspective, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (London: Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine, 2000). 14. The Physical Atlas: A Series of Maps & Notes Illustrating the Geographical Distribution of Natural Phenomena, by Alexander Keith Johnston, Based on the Physikalischer Atlas of H. Berghaus (Edinburgh and London: A. K. Johnston, 1848, 1850, 1856); Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping, 65–67. Americans were exposed to these maps through George W. Colton, Colton’s Atlas of the World, Illustrating Physical and Political Geography. Accompanied by Descriptions Geographical, Statistical, and Historical (New York: J. H. Colton and Company, 1856 [by subscription 1854]); Johnson’s New Illustrated Steel Plate Family Atlas, with Descriptions Geographical, Statistical, and Historical: Compiled, Drawn, and Engraved under the Supervision of J. H. Colton and A. J. Johnson? (New York: Johnson and Browning, formerly successors to J. H. Colton and Company, 1860); Cornelius S. Cartee, A.M., A School Atlas of Physical Geography, Illustrating, in a Series of Maps Compiled from the Celebrated Atlases of A. Keith Johnston, and of Milner and Petermann, the Elementary Facts of Geology, Hydrology, Meteorology, and Natural History, and Designed to Accompany Cartee’s “Elements of Physical Geography” (Boston: Hickling, Swan, and Brown, 1856). 15. Ronald L. Numbers, “Medical Science before Scientific Medicine: Reflections on the History of Medical Geography,” in Rupke, Medical Geography, 217. 16. Saul Jarcho, “Yellow Fever, Cholera, and the Beginnings of Medical Cartography,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 25, no. 2 (April 1970): 138. 17. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 73–76. 18. Tom Koch, “Social Epidemiology as Medical Geography: Back to the Future,” GeoJournal 74 (2009): 99–106. 19. “Chart Shewing the Progress of the Spasmodic Cholera,” in Amariah Brigham, A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera; Including an Historical Account of Its Origin and Progress, to the Present Period. Compiled from the Most Authentic Sources (Hartford, CT: H. and F. J. Huntington, 1832); Tom Koch, Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2005), 65. 20. For other maps that committed the same “error” see “Chart of the Progress of the CholeraMorbus. 1831,” in Report of Spasmodic Cholera, Prepared by a Committee under the Direction of the Counsellors of the Massachusetts Medical Society (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1832); An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Indian or Spasmodic Cholera. With a Particular Description of the Symptoms Attending the Disease. Illustrated by a Map, Showing the Route and Progress of the Disease from Jessore near the Ganges, in 1817, to Great Britain in 1831 (New Haven, CT: L. H. Young. 1832). 21. “The Traveller’s Pocket Map of New York” (Philadelphia: H. S. Tanner, 1830); “Map of the Canals & Railroads of the United States, Reduced from the Large Map of the U.S. by H. S. Tanner” (Philadelphia, 1830); “The World on Mercator’s Projection Exhibiting the Progress of the Epidemic Cholera,” in H. S. Tanner, A Geographical & Statistical Account of the Epidemic Cholera: From Its Commencement in India to Its Entrance into the United States (Philadelphia: Published by the author, 1832); John B. Osborne, “Cholera,” in Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, philadelphiaencyclopedia.org; Tom Koch, Disease Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap. 6. 22. John Osborne, personal correspondence, May 11, 2011. A Discourse Commemorative of the Life and Character of Samuel Jackson, M.D., Late Professor of the Institutes of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, by Joseph Carson, M.D., delivered October 7, 1872 (Philadelphia: Collins, Printer, 705 Jayne Street, 1872); “Collection of 20 Holograph Letters Addressed to Notes to Pages 86–89

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Samuel Jackson from Various Correspondents, Chiefly Physicians, Asking Advice Relating to the Epidemic of Cholera,” College of Physicians, Philadelphia. 23. Saul Jarcho, “The Contributions of Heinrich and Hermann Berghaus to Medical Cartography,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 24 (1969): 412–15, and “Some Early Demographic Maps,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49, no. 9 (September 1973): 837–44. 24. David Meredith Reese, A Plain and Practical Treatise on the Epidemic Cholera as It Prevailed in the City of New York in the Summer of 1832 (New York: Conner & Cooke, 1833); Koch, Disease Maps, 125–27. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boylston Prize Dissertations for the Years 1836 and 1837 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1838), introduction and 5; Cassedy, American Medicine, 61; Lorin Blodget, Climatology of the United States, and of the Temperate Latitudes of the North American Continent (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857), 459. 25. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 142. 26. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 142–50, 165; Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic, 2002), chaps. 3 and 6. 27. Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic Cholera, Together with a Report of the City Physician on the Cholera Hospital (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, City Printer, 1849). See also Sanitary Survey of the Town of Lawrence (Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, 1850); T. Heber Jackson, “Account of the Asiatic Cholera, as It Prevailed in Columbia, Lancaster County, Pa., in the Autumn of 1855,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 58 (1855): 336–47. 28. Th. H. Buckler, A History of Epidemic Cholera, as It Appeared at the Baltimore City and County Alms-House, in the Summer of 1849, with Some Remarks on the Medical Topography and Diseases of This Region (Baltimore: Printed by James Lucas, Corner of Calvert-st. and Lovely Lane, 1851). 29. Buckler, History of Epidemic Cholera, quote on 41. 30. Koch and Kenneth Denike, “Crediting His Critics’ Concerns: Remaking John Snow’s Map of Broad Street Cholera, 1854,” Social Science and Medicine 69 (2009): 1246–51; Koch, Disease Maps, chaps. 8–10; Mark Monmonier, Spying with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 155; John B. Osborne, “The Lancaster County Cholera Epidemic of 1854 and the Challenge to the Miasma Theory of Disease,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133, no. 1 ( January 2009): 5–28. 31. Camerini, “Heinrich Berghaus’s Map of Human Diseases,” 202–6; Koch, Disease Maps, 135–39. 32. Koch, Cartographies of Disease, 87–101. 33. Frank A. Barrett, “Daniel Drake’s Medical Geography,” Social Science and Medicine 42, no. 6 (1996): 794. 34. Daniel Drake, A Systematic Treatise, Historical, Etiological, and Practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America, as They Appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian, and Esquimaux Varieties of Its Population (Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith & Co., Publishers, 1850), viii; Michael Dorn, “(In)temperate Zones: Daniel Drake’s Medico-Moral Geographies of Urban Life in the Trans-Appalachian American West,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 55 (2000): 256–91. 35. Edward H. Barton, Account of Epidemic Yellow Fever Which Prevailed in New-Orleans during the Autumn of 1833, with an Appendix Containing an Extensive Meteorological Account of the Year and the Mortality; And a Chart of the Temperature and of the Atmosphere (Philadelphia: Joseph R. A. Skerrett, 1835 [inside title page reads 1834]). 218

Notes to Pages 89–93

36. Edward H. Barton, “Sanitary Report of New Orleans, La.,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 2 (1849): 591–610. 37. E. H. Barton, Report to the Louisiana State Medical Society, on the Meteorology, Vital Statistics, and Hygiene of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Davies, Son & Co., 1851). Barton noted Drake’s work on page 291. 38. E. H. Barton, letter to J. C. G. Kennedy, reprinted in Kennedy, “The Origin and Progress of Statistics,” Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (1860); also reprinted in Kennedy, Review of the Report of the Senate Committee on the Returns of the Seventh Census (Washington, DC: Gideon and Company, 1852). Barton’s “Sanitary Maps” can be found in “Reports on Epidemics,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 5 (1852). 39. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 3, quote on 100–101. 40. Report of the Sanitary Commission on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853; Published by Authority of the City Council of New Orleans (New Orleans: Printed at the Picayune Office, 1854), and reprinted as E. H. Barton, The Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, Contained in the Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855). 41. Lloyd Stevenson noted Barton’s inclusion of the ships, and Kelman connected the ships to the possible introduction of infected mosquitoes into New Orleans. Lloyd G. Stevenson, “Putting Disease on the Map: The Early Use of Spot Maps in the Study of Yellow Fever,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 20 (1965): 226–61, esp. 258; Kelman, A River and Its City, 90–92. 42. Koch, Disease Maps, 203. Barton originally published the chart of mortality in his Report to the Louisiana State Medical Society (1851). In another effort, “Table of the Deaths in New Orleans in the year 1853,” Barton identified classes of diseases (both epidemic and endemic), separated the time of mortality by month, then identified the sex, color, age, and nativity of its victims. This was followed by a meteorological table for the year that included temperature, dew point, and barometric, wind, and rainfall readings: the sheer complexity of the chart suggests interdependence. 43. Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 47. 44. Stevenson, “Putting Disease on the Map,” 225; Barton’s discussion of the map begins on page 397 of the Report. Union control over the city during the Civil War allowed General Benjamin Butler to impose strict standards of sanitation and quarantine on incoming ships, which may explain the temporary absence of yellow fever. Howard Palmer Johnson, “New Orleans under General Butler,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (April 1941): 47–49. 45. Sanitary, Meteorological and Mortuary Report of the Philadelphia County Medical Society for 1855: With an Account of the Prevalent Diseases in the Consolidated City during the Year; Accompanied with a Geological Chart of the County. Presented to the State Society at Its Annual Session, Held in Philada. May, 1856, by Wilson Jewell, M.D. (Philadelphia: T. K. and P. G. Collins, Printers, 1856). George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1958]), 217–19. Some suspected a relationship between disease and geology: “A Geological Map of Highland Co.,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 5 (1852), map after 452; John Lea, Cholera: With Reference to the Geological Theory: A Proximate Cause—a Law by Which It Is Governed—a Prophylactic (Cincinnati, 1850). 46. “Report on the Special Committee on Government Meteorological Reports, by Richard H. Coolidge, M.D.,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 12 (1859): 63–72.

Notes to Pages 94–98

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47. Robert C. Davis, “Social Research before the Civil War,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 73. 48. On a smaller scale, the General Land Office requested that its twenty regional offices begin to collect observations about the weather in 1817. Fleming, Meteorology, 6, 13–17. 49. Samuel Forry, The Climate of the United States and Its Endemic Influences: Based Chiefly on the Records of the Medical Department and the Adjutant General’s Office, United States Army (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1842), quotes on 20–22; Fleming, Meteorology, 68; James H. Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), chap. 3. 50. James D. Dana, “Biographical Memoir of Arnold Guyot, 1807–1884,” Biographical Memoirs 2 (1886): 309–48, quote on 315. Arnold Guyot, The Earth and Man, or Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in Its Relation to the History of Mankind (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1848). Guyot, “Carl Ritter: An Address to the Society.” 51. Fleming writes that the project was proposed by James Coffin in 1846 to resolve the long-standing debate over the nature and causes of storms. Others give more credit to Henry and Guyot. The first US-made map of meteorological data was the Franklin Institute’s chart of wind patterns. Fleming, Meteorology, 59, 75–77. On Henry’s enthusiasm for Blodget’s work on mapping storms and other aspects of meteorology, see The Papers of Joseph Henry, ed. Nathan Reingold (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; New York: Distributed by Braziller, 1972–ca. 2007), vol. 8, letters of Henry to Robert Hare, April 27, 1852; Henry to Edward Sabine, May 7, 1852; Henry to Alexander Dallas Bache, June 25 [ July 9], 1852; Henry to Sabine, July 4, 1852. 52. Lorin Blodget, “Agriculture Climatology of the United States Compared with That of Other Parts of the Globe,” in Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1853. Agriculture. (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 327–448. This concern for agricultural research is captured in John Jay, “A Statistical View of American Agriculture” (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1859), his address before the AGSS. Jay recommended the expansion of the agricultural schedules in the upcoming census. 53. “Report on the Prominent Features of General Climate in the United States, as Exhibited in the Distribution of Temperature and of Rain, and in Explanation of the Illustrative Charts,” in Army Meteorological Register: For Twelve Years, from 1843 to 1854, Inclusive, Compiled from Observations Made by the Officers of the Medical Department of the Army at the Military Posts of the United States. Published by the Authority of Ho. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1855); Papers of Joseph Henry, vol. 9, introduction, xxvi. 54. This account is taken from The Papers of Joseph Henry. See introduction to volume 9 (xiii–xxvii); and sources throughout that volume, especially letters from Henry to Lawson, February 20, 1855; Lawson to Henry May 25, 1854, and April 5, 1856; Henry to Millard Fillmore, January 25, 1855; Lawson to Jefferson Davis, May 10, 1856; and Henry, “Statement of Professor Henry in Reference to Lorin Blodget” (mid-February 1855); Fleming, Meteorology, 110–15. 55. Nicolaas Rupke and Karen E. Wonders, “Humboldtian Representations in Medical Cartography,” in Rupke, Medical Geography, 171–72. 56. G. S. Dunbar, “Isotherms and Politics: Perception of the Northwest in the 1850s,” in Prairie Perspectives 2, ed. A. W. Rasporich and H. C. Klassen (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 80–101. 57. Papers of Joseph Henry, 9:xxvii–xxviii. Fleming, Meteorology, 107; Arnold Guyot, “Biographical Memoir of James Coffin,” Biographical Memoirs 1 (1877): 257–64. James Coffin, “A Report on the Winds of the Northern Hemisphere,” Proceedings of the American Association 220

Notes to Pages 98–106

for the Advancement of Science, vol. 1 (1848), 34–35 (Philadelphia, September 1848), and Winds of the Northern Hemisphere, in vol. 6 of Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1854). Coffin collected data on wind direction and force, rainfall, and barometric pressure to identify patterns. He was charged by Henry with collecting data on winds from 1854 to 1859 from army posts, published as Results of Meteorological Observation (1861). 58. Henry to Arnold Guyot, July 29, 1854, 9:118; Henry to James Coffin, April 13, 1855, 9:237–38; Henry to James Coffin, March 14, 1856, 9:323; Henry to Sir John Herschel, February 22, 1858, 10:10–13; Henry to Asa Gray, 10:20 (May 22, 1858), all from The Papers of Joseph Henry. Henry, “Meteorology in Its Connection with Agriculture,” in the Reports of the Commissioner of Patents. Agriculture (1856–1859), 357–74, and reprinted in “Scientific Writings of Joseph Henry,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Publications (reprinted 1887), maps on 72, 288. Fleming, Meteorology, 127–28. 59. Blodget, Climatology of the United States. Dunbar, “Isotherms and Politics.” 60. Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ geographischer Anstalt (1856); G. M. Lewis, “Regional Ideas in the Cis-Rocky Mountain West,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 38 ( June 1966): 135–50; G. M. Lewis, “William Gilpin and the Concept of the Great Plains Region,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 1 (March 1966): 33–51; Fleming, Meteorology, 133; Slotten, Patronage. 61. In the 1850s, pressure to make farming a federal priority led to a discussion over a separate Bureau of Agriculture. The first attempt failed in 1856, probably due to sectional conflict. Lincoln established the department in 1862, after secession gave the Republican Party freedom to shape the federal government. Papers of Joseph Henry, 9:324n7; A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 113–14. See also John Jay, “A Statistical View of American Agriculture.” 62. J. G. Kohl, “Substance of a Lecture Delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on a Collection of the Charts and Maps of America,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Cornelius Wendell, 1857), quotes on 124. 63. “The Washington Map of the United States, by M. F. Maury” (Washington, DC: H. G. Bond, 1860). All were engraved by W. H. Holmes but issued by various publishers from 1860 to 1868. This discussion is based on copies in the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, the American Geographical Society Library, and the David Rumsey Collection. 64. John A. Wolter, “The Heights of Mountains and the Lengths of Rivers,” Surveying and Mapping 32, no. 3 (September 1972): 312–29. 65. The 1861 inset map of agricultural staples added a technique of representing distribution through the use of color. Presumably, this was done by J. D. B. DeBow, former superintendent of the census and the editor of DeBow’s Review, whose name was added to the map next to Traill Green. 66. Maury, Physical Geography of the Sea (1855); Stephen Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Charles Lee Lewis, Matthew Fontaine Maury: Pathfinder of the Seas (New York: AMS Press, 1969 [1927]); Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 67. On this feud, see Slotten, Patronage, 98; Fleming, Meteorology; Frances Leigh Williams, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Scientist of the Sea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 145–52; and Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of American Science, 1846–1876 (New York: Knopf, 1987), chap. 13. For indications of a tension between Notes to Pages 106–109

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Bache and Maury as early as 1850, see Maury to Bache, December 26, 1850, in Rhees Collection, Box 15 RH 1842, Huntington Library. 68. Henry’s allies vilified Blodget for years. John LeConte opposed Blodget’s nomination to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cataloged the latter’s personal and professional sins to Bache in 1861. His account indicates that Blodget’s offense was furthering his own work rather than that of the Smithsonian. LeConte to Alexander Dallas Bache, February 6, 1861, Rhees Collection, Box 25 RH 1687, Huntington Library. 69. Lewis, Matthew Fontaine Maury, 124. 70. As in Calvin and Robert P. Smith, “Naval and Military Map of the United States” (Philadelphia: J. Baker, 1862), David Rumsey Collection. 71. “Johnson’s New Illustrated and Embellished County Map of the Republics of North America,” first issued in 1857 (New York: A. J. Johnson, 1859). The 1860 edition was published by J. H. Colton. 72. Louis Agassiz, Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander von Humboldt, under the Auspices of the Boston Society of Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 1869), 25–26. 73. Logan also included a barometric chart and a scale of river systems. “Map of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys,” in Thomas M. Logan, Report on the Medical Topography and Epidemics of California, Transactions of the American Medical Association 12 (1859): 81–134; Kenneth Thompson, “Climatotherapy in California,” California Historical Quarterly, 50, no. 2 ( June 1971): 111–30. 74. J. M. Toner, M.D., Contributions to the Study of Yellow Fever, a Paper Read before the American Public Health Association, New York, November 12, 1873, on the Natural History and Distribution of Yellow Fever in the United States, with Chart Showing All the Localities, and the Elevation of Each Place above Sea-Level, Where It Has Appeared, from A.D. 1668 to A.D. 1874. Reprinted from the Annual Report, Supervising Surgeon, US Marine-Hospital Service, 1873. 75. Joseph Henry also offered to map lines of equal temperature for the Railway Surveys. Henry to Jefferson Davis, August 5, 1858, in Papers of Joseph Henry, vol. 10. Henry’s map was compiled from army topographical surveys. See Henry, Meteorology in Its Connection to Agriculture (Washington, DC, 1858), 479. “Isothermal Chart of the Region North of the 36th Parallel &c. &c. between the Atlantic & Pacific Oceans,” compiled under the direction of Isaac I. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory (New York: Sarony Major & Knapp, Lith., 1859). Stevens had been an associate of Bache at the Coast Survey and acted as commander of the northernmost party of the Pacific Railroad Survey. Bruce, Launching of American Science, 204. 76. “Map of the World Exhibiting the Isothermal Zodiac or Belt of Equal Temperature around the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth,” in Gilpin, The Central Gold Region. The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America (Philadelphia: Sower, Barnes & Co., 1860); later published as Mission of the North American People (1873), quotes on 119, 170. On Gilpin’s use of Humboldt, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 40–41. Thomas Karnes, William Gilpin, Western Nationalist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). 77. “Extracts of an Address by Colonel William Gilpin, Delivered at Kansas City, November 15, 1858; on the Gold Production of America and the Sierra San Juan,” reprinted in Gilpin, The Central Gold Region, 192–93, and also in Guide to the Kansas Gold Mines at Pike’s Peak (Cincinnati: E. Mendenhall, 1859), 36–37. 78. Lewis, “Regional Ideas and Reality in the Cis-Rocky Mountain West.” Quote from Henry to Sir John Herschel, February 22, 1858, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 10:12. 222

Notes to Pages 109–114

79. Valencius, Health of the Country, 168. 80. J. W. Foster, The Mississippi Valley: Its Physical Geography, Including Sketches of the Topography, Botany, Climate, Geology, and Mineral Resources; and of the Progress of Development in Population and Material Wealth (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1869), vi. The most ambitious study of the influence of climate was Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: J. W. Parker and Sons, 1857–61). John Draper also used isotherms to assess the influence of climate on history in the 1860s. Donald Emerson, “Hildreth, Draper, and ‘Scientific History,’” in Historiography and Urbanization: Essays in American History in Honor of W. Stull Holt, ed. Eric F. Goldman (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), 139–70; Donald Fleming, John William Draper and the Religion of Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950). 81. John Disturnell, Influence of Climate in North and South America: Showing the Varied Climatic Influences Operating in the Equatorial, Tropical, Sub-Tropical, Temperate, Cold and Frigid Regions, Extending from the Arctic to the Antarctic Circle: Accompanied by an Agricultural, and Isothermal Map of North America (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1867), quote on 328. Disturnell requested work with a federal agency that might draw on his skill in these fields. Disturnell to Alexander Dallas Bache, March 11, 1861, Rhees Collection, Box 26, Huntington Library. 82. Lorin Blodget, “Alaska: What Is It Worth?,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education, February 1868, 185–91; Blodget, “Isothermal Lines of Alaska,” in U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1869 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870); Blodget, “Climatological Map of the State of Ohio,” in Henry Francis Walling, New Topographical Atlas of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati: Stedman, Brown & Lyon, 1872), 35; R. Blanchard, “Sectional Map of Illinois, Showing Botany, Topography, and Geology of the State” (Chicago, 1869); Tackabury’s Atlas of the Dominion of Canada (Montreal: George N. Tackabury, 1875). 83. Charles Denison, Rocky Mountain Health Resorts: An Analytical Study of High Altitudes in Relation to the Arrest of Chronic Pulmonary Disease (New York: Riverside Press, 1880 [map 1877]); Denison, Descriptive Circular of the Annual and Seasonal Climatic Maps of the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1885); Denison, Climates of the United States in Colors (Chicago: W. T. Keener, 1893); Gregg Mitman and Ronald L. Numbers, “From Miasma to Asthma: The Changing Fortunes of Medical Geography in America,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 25 (2003): 391–412; Mitman, “Geographies of Hope,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 19 (2004): 93–111. 84. Koch, Disease Maps, chap. 7, esp. 119–21; Fleming, Meteorology, 173. Congress also appropriated funding in the early 1850s for a system of communication to warn of advancing storms. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 122. Chapter 4 1. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 464; Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neeley, Jr., “Francis Bicknell Carpenter (1830–1900): Painter of Abraham Lincoln and His Circle,” American Art Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 66–89. 2. Patricia Cline Cohen, “Statistics and the State: Changing Social Thought and the Emergence of a Quantitative Mentality in America, 1790 to 1820,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38, no. 1 ( January 1981): 35–55. 3. The earliest use of the term was by Andre-Michel Guerry, in his Essai sur la statistique morale de France (1833). Notes to Pages 114–122

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4. Arthur M. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 158–59; Palsky, Des Chiffres et des Cartes; Jeremy Crampton, “The Double Invention of Thematic Mapping and Government Rationality,” International Conference on the History of Cartography, June 2003; Palsky and Friendly, “Visualizing Nature and Society,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. Jim Akerman and Robert Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 248. 5. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping, 36. The literature on the history of statistical thinking largely does not engage with cartography: see, for example, Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), with the important exception of Palsky and Friendly, “Visualizing Nature and Society.” On the culture of information in Europe, see Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Reason in the Age of Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 6. Francis Lieber to Joseph Henry, October 22, 1847, in The Papers of Joseph Henry, 7:212–14. 7. Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 27–29, 54, 110, and Albert Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Use as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1944): 469–82. 8. This discussion of the politics of the 1850 census relies on Margo Anderson’s The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 35–45. 9. The 1854 report recommended a permanent Census Office, which was not created until 1902. Paul J. FitzPatrick, “Leading American Statisticians in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Statistical Society 52, no. 279 (September 1957): 309. Interestingly, though DeBow—like Kennedy—began as an ardent nationalist, through the 1850s he became more defensive about the South and eventually advocated the reopening of the slave trade. See Anderson, The American Census, 56. 10. Edward D. Mansfield, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Statistics, for the Year 1857 (Columbus, OH, 1858), 64–65; L. L. and Jessie Bernard, Origins of American Sociology: The Social Science Movement in the United States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1943), 783, 794–95; Patrician Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Margo J. Anderson, ed., Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2000), 124. 11. Joseph Camp Griffith Kennedy, “The Origin and Progress of Statistics,” Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society 2 (1860): 92–120, quotes on 94 and 121. 12. Kennedy quote appears in J. K. Wright, Geography in the Making: The American Geographical Society, 1851–1951 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952), 47. 13. Wright, Geography in the Making, 19. Kennedy to Alexander Dallas Bache, May 28, 1862, and May 30, 1862, Rhees Collection, Box 31 RH 1633 and 1634, Huntington Library. 14. Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. DeBow: Magizinst of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 74–75; and Statistical View of the United States (Report of the Seventh Census) (Washington, DC: Beverly Tucker, 1854). 15. Moses Greenleaf, A Survey of the State of Maine, in Reference to Its Geographical Features, Statistics and Political Economy; Illustrated by Maps (Portland, ME: Shirley and Hyde, 1829); and Atlas Accompanying Greenleaf’s Map, and Statistical Survey of Maine (New York: Engraved

224

Notes to Pages 123–126

by W. Chapin; Portland, ME: Published by Shirley & Hyde, 1829). Edgar Crosby Smith, ed., Moses Greenleaf: Maine’s First Map-Maker (Bangor, ME: Printed for the De Burians, 1902). 16. “Statistical Map of North America: To Illustrate M. de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with the Census of 1840” (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841); Edward C. Biddle, Industrial & Political Map of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1844). For rare maps of census data prior to the war, see “Population of the United States,” Scientific American, 8, no. 1 (September 18, 1852), and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (1853): 264. 17. Herman Friis, “Statistical Cartography in the United States Prior to 1870 and the Role of Joseph C. G. Kennedy and the U.S. Census Office,” American Cartographer 1, no. 2 (1974): 131–57. On Kennedy’s admiration of Edward Barton, see his “Origin and Progress of Statistics.” 18. Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt Uber Wichtige Neue Erforschungen auf Dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie von Dr. A. Petermann, vol. 1 (1855); table 11 maps the average population density of slaves in each state and territory based on the figures from the 1850 census: Volks-Dichtigkeit der Sklaven im J. 1850—Tafel 11. Petermann used a similar approach to map Native Americans in the West. Jan Smits, Petermann’s Maps: Carto-Bibliography of the Maps in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, 1855–1945 (‘t Goy-Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2004), 41. 19. J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Service of Salmon Portland Chase (New York: D. Appleton, 1874), 141; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1976), 162–64. 20. “Nebraska Territory! Defence of the Missouri Compromise. Protest against Its Violation. Great Meeting at the Tabernacle. Citizens of New-York in Council,” New York Daily Times, January 31, 1854, 1. 21. The map appears in the New Hampshire Statesman, April 1, 1854, issue 1714, column C; originally published in the New-York Independent (drawn by George Colton). 22. John Jay, America Free, or, America Slave: An Address on the State of the Country (New York: Office of the New York Tribune, 1856), 9. The map also appeared in the Republican campaign pamphlet, “The Border Ruffian Code in Kansas” (ca. 1856). 23. Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Bros., 1857), chap. 1 and 320–21. See also the Rocky Mountain Club, “Political Chart of 1856, with a Comparative Statistical View of North and South,” http://lincolnat200.0rg/items/show/166. 24. “Map of the United States” (New York: G.W. Elliott, 1856). “Map of the United States” (1857), engraved by W. and A. K. Johnston, Edinburgh. Calvin Smith was among the first private mapmakers to acquire data from the 1860 census, which angered his rival John Colton, one of the oldest and best-known map publishers in the United States and the author of the Kansas-Nebraska map described above. See J. H. Colton to O. M. Hatch, Secretary of State of Illinois, March 30, 1861, David Rumsey Collection. 25. Friis, “Statistical Cartography,” 131–33. 26. Bache was also a member of the Blockade Strategy Board, a group that met secretly in the summer of 1861 to plan naval strategy along the Confederate coast. I am indebted to John Cloud for sharing his knowledge of the Coast Survey and for identifying that agency as the author of the slavery maps. 27. A serial number identifies the map as one of the survey’s experiments. John Cloud, conversation with the author, September 26, 2008. On the survey’s wartime work, see Albert Theberge, The Coast Survey, 1807–1867, http://www.lib.noaa.gov/noaainfo/heritage/coast surveyv011/CONTENTS.html; and A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government:

Notes to Pages 127–135

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A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1957), chap. 7. 28. Not all associated with the Coast Survey opposed slavery. Isaac Stevens, former head of the survey (1849–53) and governor of Washington Territory (1853–57), sent several letters to Bache from his post in South Carolina protesting David Hunter’s order of emancipation. Stevens was equally concerned with the enlistment of freed slaves into the Union army and urged Bache to oppose the policy. Hunter to Bache, May 13, 1862 (two letters), Rhees Collection, Box 31, RH 2350 and 2351, Huntington Library. 29. Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), chaps. 10–13. 30. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 142–43. 31. Richard Orr Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 7–8 and 68. 32. For contemporary maps, see Richard Stephenson, Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2002), 192. McClellan praised the Coast Survey’s topographic mapping of the Potomac region and urged Bache to extend the agency’s work inland. McClellan to Bache, January 10, 1862, Rhees Collection, Box 30 RH 1786, Huntington Library. Various editions of the Virginia map are located in the Library of Virginia, the Library of Congress, and the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee. 33. Margo Anderson also treated the Virginia map in “From Tables to Maps: The Publication of Census Data in the Era of the Civil War,” paper delivered to the Social Science History Association, October 24, 2008, Miami, FL. On Bache’s Southern leanings prior to the war, see Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of American Science, 1846–1876 (New York: Knopf, 1987), 274. The Virginia slave map has been integrated with the vote over secession at http://www.virginia memory.com/docs/hires/april_4_1861_vote.pdf. 34. New map printing techniques are discussed extensively in the Coast Survey’s annual reports, especially in those immediately preceding the Civil War. See especially appendices 19 and 20 of The Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1860 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1861). 35. Curry, A House Divided, 72. Joseph Henry, “Eulogy on Prof. Alexander Dallas Bache,” in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1870 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871). 36. Clay speech of January 7, 1833, in Gales & Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress (Washington, DC: Gales & Seaton, 1833), vol. 9, pt. 1, 82. 37. On the rise of nationalism in the Civil War, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), esp. 181; and J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 38. On Civil War maps, see Richard W. Stephenson, Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1989), and Stephenson, Virginia in Maps. 39. Horace Thayer’s “Statistical and Military Map of the Middle and Southern States”— published just after Virginia seceded—included a small inset map with population data for whites, free blacks, and slaves on each state. Like the prewar maps, Thayer took a step toward translating census figures into cartographic form but did little to convey the “topography” of slavery. See also Horace Thayer, “Seat of War” (ca. 1861) at the Library of Congress. 226

Notes to Pages 135–140

40. On Lincoln’s request for statistics, see Anderson, The American Census, 67. The case for Lincoln’s continued commitment to colonization is made most recently by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). 41. Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 1, 1862. Kennedy also supplied data from the 1860 census to the cabinet in order to estimate the number of black men eligible for military service. Letter of Kennedy to the Secretary of the Interior, February 11, 1863, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), series 3, 43–45. 42. Francis Bicknell Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 11–13, 25; Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neeley, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 110–26. For a brief treatment of the painting, see Barry Schwartz, “Picturing Lincoln,” in Picturing History: American Painting, 1770–1930, ed. William Ayres (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 135–55; and Holzer, Boritt, and Neeley, “Francis Bicknell Carpenter.” 43. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 25–28. 44. “Map of the State of Virginia, Compiled from the Best Authorities, at the Coast Survey Office. A. D. Bache. Supdt., July 1863,” compiled by Walter L. Nicholson. Various editions of this map can be found at the Library of Congress and the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee. See also appendix 11 of The Report of the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1862 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 150–51. 45. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 215–16. 46. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 353; Lincoln was the first to order an artist’s proof of the engraving made of the painting by Alexander Hay Ritchie, which widely circulated the image and helped to make it such a popular, even iconic, representation of Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Holzer, Boritt, and Neeley, The Lincoln Image, 122–23. 47. Adolph von Steinwehr, “Map Showing the Distribution of Slaves in the Southern States. Projected & Compiled by A. von Steinwehr” (ca. 1861), reprinted in The Effect of Secession upon the Commercial Relations between the North and the South and upon Each Section (New York: Office of the New York Times, 1861). I thank Margo Anderson for alerting me to this pamphlet, which reprinted articles from the Times, probably during February, when Virginians first debated—then defeated—the possibility of secession. Steinwehr’s map was also reprinted in Harper’s Weekly, accompanied by a description that observed the widely differing levels of dependence upon slavery in the South. Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863, 141–42. See also Calvin Smith, “The New Naval and Military Map of the United States” (1862). Both the Steinwehr and Smith maps can be found in the Map Division of the Library of Congress. Late in 1861, Harper’s Weekly featured maps of slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, which also indicates the popularity of the Coast Survey’s mapping technique. See covers of Harper’s Weekly for November 23 and December 14. 48. It is unclear whether Steinwehr’s map of slavery preceded the Coast Survey’s. The former was smaller, perhaps intended for newspaper reproduction. Steinwehr immediately went to work for the survey on his arrival in the United States, and this association probably continued when he returned on his second trip. After the war, he produced an important map of the nation’s river systems for the Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874), authored school geographies, and drew maps for several atlases, including The Eclectic Historical Atlas (Cincinnati: Wilson, Hinkle, & Co., 1874). Notes to Pages 141–143

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49. The Effect of Secession, 70 and passim. 50. The Effect of Secession, 71. 51. “The Configuration of Our Country Prophetic of the Issue of Our National Controversy,” The Independent: Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 13, no. 652 (May 30, 1861): 4. 52. Earl B. McElfresh, Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 8. 53. Sidney E. Morse, A Geographical, Statistical and Ethical View of the American Slaveholders’ Rebellion (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1863). 54. Frederick Law Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (London: Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1861); Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861); Arthur M. Schlesinger, introduction, The Cotton Kingdom (New York: Knopf, 1953); The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, ed. Charles E. Beveridge and David Schuyler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3:328–33. 55. American Historical Review 23 (October 1917): 114–19; Laura Wood Roper, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Western Texas Free-Soil Movement,” American Historical Review 56, no. 1 (October 1950): 58–64; Olmsted, A Journey through Texas; Or, A Saddle-Trip on the South-Western Frontier; with a Statistical Appendix (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857). 56. Olmsted to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., March 25, 1861, and Adams to Olmsted, March 29, 1861, in Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 3:330–33. Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London from 1861 to 1868, and highly sensitive to British influence in the sectional conflict. Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), chaps. 1–3. 57. Olmsted tried—through Secretary of State William Seward—to gain access to the new census data but found the returns insufficiently organized and digested (Kennedy’s preliminary census report was not published until 1862). He thus relied on the 1850 census and estimated that the slave population had grown by approximately 25 percent; the actual increase was just under 24 percent. Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom, 1:8. 58. H. Gray Funkhouser, “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data,” Osiris 3 (1937): 375. In reprinting The Cotton Kingdom, Schlesinger and the Modern Library inexplicably omitted the map. Perhaps Schlesinger saw nothing particularly original about it, which suggests how ordinary such graphic knowledge became in the twentieth century. Yet Olmsted’s map was one of the first of its kind. 59. Olmsted initiated several projects in the Civil War, including an assessment of soldiers’ quarters after the Union defeat at Bull Run in July 1861. This experience led him to begin measuring not just the condition of Union camps, but the soldiers themselves, through extensive statistical measurements. These efforts are covered in the next chapter. 60. John William Mallet, Cotton: The Chemical, Geological, and Meteorological Conditions Involved in Its Successful Cultivation. With an Account of the Actual Conditions and Practice of Culture in the Southern or Cotton States of North America (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862). On the reception of Mallet’s report in Britain, see Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 11 (1860–62): 340–52. 61. “Map of the Cotton Regions of North America Showing the Geological[,] Climatological[,] and Agronomic Conditions of the Plant by Dr. Jno. Wm. Mallet” (1862), in Mallet,

228

Notes to Pages 144–150

Cotton. On Mallet’s geological mapping, see M. Tuomey, Second Biennial Report on the Geology of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL: Printed by M. D. J. Slade, 1857). 62. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 262–63. 63. Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, by a Cotton Manufacturer (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1861), quote on 4; Marshall Bertrand Dalton, Edward Atkinson (1827–1905), Patron of Engineering (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1950), 13. See also Richard H. Abbott, Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). 64. Map in Edward Atkinson, Report to the Boston Board of Trade on the Cotton Manufacture of 1862 (Boston, 1863). 65. Lorin Blodget, Climatology of the United States, and of the Temperate Latitudes of the North American Continent (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1857). 66. A simplified version of Mallet and Atkinson’s map can be found in William J. Barbee, The Cotton Question: The Production, Export, Manufacture, and Consumption of Cotton (New York: Metropolitan Record Office, 1866). 67. Atkinson, Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, 26. 68. Atkinson, Report to the Boston Board of Trade, 17. 69. Atkinson was also behind the Free Labor Cotton Company, a brief experiment to cultivate cotton with free black labor behind Union lines in late 1863. See Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1934), chap. 1. 70. Boston Daily Advertiser, May 14, 1863, issue 126, column A; “The Cotton Question— Mr. Atkinson’s Report,” Littell’s Living Age 77 (1863): 464–65. 71. Benson Lossing, Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America (Philadelphia: G. W. Childs, 1866–68), 1:83–85. 72. Bruce, Launching of American Science, 276. Chapter 5 1. E. Leigh, M.D., Bird’s-Eye Views of Slavery in Missouri (St. Louis: For sale by Keith & Woods, C. C. Bailey, James M. Crawford, C. Witter, 1862). 2. Edwin Leigh, “The Bird’s-Eye Views,” in “Illiteracy in the United States; Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia, Submitted to the Senate June, 1868, and to the House, with Additions June 13, 1870,” 41st Congress, 2nd Session (1868), 815. 3. Leigh, “The Bird’s-Eye Views,” 817. 4. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xi. 5. 34th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Ex. Doc. No. 96, Statistical Report on the Sickness and Mortality in the Army of the United States, Compiled from the Records of the Surgeon General’s Office; Embracing a Period of Sixteen Years, from January, 1839, to January 1855, prepared under the direction of Brevet Brigadier General Thomas Lawson, surgeon general, US Army; by Richard H. Coolidge, M.D., assistant surgeon, US Army (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, Printer, 1856). The report was updated in 36th Congress, 1st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 52, Statistical Report on the Sickness and Mortality in the Army of the United States, Compiled from the Records of the Surgeon General’s Office; Embracing a Period of Five Years, from January, 1855, to

Notes to Pages 151–159

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January, 1860, prepared under the direction of Brevet Brigadier General Thomas Lawson, surgeon general, US Army; by Richard H. Coolidge, M.D., assistant surgeon, US Army (Washington, DC: George W. Bowman, Printer, 1860). Coolidge was the key figure in the relationship between the surgeon general, the Smithsonian, and the AMA. 6. Charles J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, Being the General Report of Its Work during the War of the Rebellion (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868), chap. 17; Stanhope Bayne Jones, The Evolution of Preventive Medicine in the United States Army, 1607– 1939 (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, 1968), 102–3. 7. Robert C. Davis, “Social Research before the Civil War,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 79. 8. Quote from Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, 451–53. John S. Haller, “Civil War Anthropometry: The Making of a Racial Ideology,” Civil War History 16, no. 4 (December 1970): 309. 9. E. B. Elliott, Mortality and Sickness of the U.S. Volunteer Forces of the U.S. Government, during the Present War (New York: Wm. C. Bryant & Co., 1862). 10. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers (New York: Published for the US Sanitary Commission by Hurd and Houghton; Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1869). Portions of Gould’s study were first published through the Sanitary Commission Statistical Bureau as Ages of U.S. Volunteer Soldiery (1866). A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1957), 103. Stillé, History, quote on 462. 11. Congressional Globe, July 13 and 19, 1866, quote from Vermont Senator George Edmunds on 3928. Indiana Senator Henry Lane used the data to argue that colored troops could be used in military occupational forces during Reconstruction. See Congressional Globe, July 9, 1866, 3669. 12. Davis, “Social Research,” 77. Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 91. 13. Michael Les Benedict, Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). On the political influence of this faction, see Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 14. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 15. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4, 121–22. Atkinson’s ideas about statistical reasoning can be found in his “Course of Lectures on the Currency, Resources and Indebtedness of the United States, Delivered before the American Geographical and Statistical Society. Lecture 2, On Cotton, by Edward Atkinson, Delivered Dec. 14, 1865,” reprinted in DeBow’s Review (1866). Marshall Bertrand Dalton, Edward Atkinson (1827–1905), Patron of Engineering (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1950), 18. 16. On Gilman, see American National Biography (online); Gilman’s eulogy of Ritter is in Art. XXII—Geographical Notices, American Journal of Science and Arts, March 1860, 221–33. 17. Gilman, Art. VI.—Geographical Notices—No. XV, American Journal of Science and Arts, May 1861, 60; Gilman, Art. XXVII—Geographical Notices—No. I, American Journal of Science and Arts, May 1848, 305. Nearly ten years earlier, David Wells had embarked on a similar enterprise. In 1850, he began publishing the Annual of Scientific Discovery, which publicized new 230

Notes to Pages 159–162

scientific discoveries for Europeans and Americans. Like Gilman, Wells was interested in the organization and communication of knowledge. Bruce, Launching of American Science, 245. 18. Daniel Coit Gilman Papers, Box 1.49, Johns Hopkins University. August Petermann recognized Gilman’s Notices as the best geographical work in the United States. Petermann to Gilman, August 4, 1860, in Fabian Franklin, The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910), 370–71; letters of Petermann to Gilman (1876), Gilman Papers, Box 1.37. Abraham Flexner, Daniel Coit Gilman: Creator of the American Type of University (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1946), 52. 19. But these efforts were uncoordinated: the Coast Survey was housed in the Treasury Department, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs within Interior (with many advocating its return to the War Department). Thus Gilman proposed a national repository for geographical information. Gilman, “Annual Address: The Last Ten Years of Geographical Work in this Country,” delivered January 31, 1871, Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 3 (1872): 114. 20. “National Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean; made by the authority of the Hon. O. H. Browning, Secretary of the Interior. In the Office of the Indian Bureau, Chiefly for Government Purposes, Under the Direction of the Commissr of Indian Affairs and Hon. Chas. E. Mix, Chief Clerk of the Indian Bureau,” William J. Keeler, Civil Engineer (1867) (website image, 1868), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. For earlier Indian reservation maps, see the US Topographical Bureau, “Map Showing the Lands Assigned to Emigrant Indians West of Arkansas and Missouri” (1836) and J. Calvin Smith’s privately produced “New Map for Travelers through the United States of America” (New York: Sherman and Smith, 1846). 21. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge created a corridor for American westward expansion and induced tribes to settle on reservations, take up farming, and accept government assistance. The Treaty of Fort Laramie included promises to close military forts along the Bozeman Trail and open Sioux access to the Powder River region, while creating a Sioux reservation west of the Missouri River. Colin G. Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1996), chap. 8. 22. Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of an American Institution, 1865–1900 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1978); Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy: Third Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 105–8. 23. Wheat, Mapping the Trans-Mississippi West, 5:211–13. In 1884, the Indian Affairs Bureau issued the first of its annual maps of Native Americans: “Map Showing the Location of the Indian Reservations within the Limits of the United States and Territories,” under the direction of the Hon. Hiram Price, commissioner of Indian affairs; Paul Brodie, draughtsman, 1884; from 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Serial Set No. 2287. In this same address, Gilman championed Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s map of the West (see website and chapter 2), which was not explicitly thematic but which remained the most authoritative map of the West for several years. 24. Daniel C. Gilman, “Annual Address: Geographical Work in the United States during 1871,” delivered January 30, 1872, Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 4 (1873): 143; Daniel C. Gilman, On the Structure of the Earth with Some Reference to Human History (Princeton, NJ, 1871), 4. In 1869, the International Statistical Congress encouraged the creation of statistical maps and diagrams and prioritized the standardization of methods used to illustrate statistical work. Fulmer Mood, “The Rise of Official Statistical Cartography in Austria, Prussia, and the United States, 1855–1872,” Agricultural History 20, no. 4 (October 1946): 216. Notes to Pages 163–165

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25. Walker’s leading role in the memorializing the Union is evident in letters written to John Page Nicholson, folder marked “1881–1889,” Nicholson Collection, Huntington Library. 26. Lacey and Furner, The State and Social Investigation, 29; Constitution, Address, and List of Members of the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science, with the Questions Proposed for Discussion: To Which Are Added Minutes of the Transactions of the Association, July 1866 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1866). 27. Jarvis’s work on disease led him both toward statistics and public health, especially insanity. He led the American Statistical Association from 1851 to 1882 and was an advisor to the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Censuses. James Garfield, “The American Census,” Journal of Social Science 2 (1870): 31–55. Garfield proposed questions regarding family relations, marital status, languages spoken, and parents of foreign birth. His proposal failed, but some changes were adopted: “Chinese” was added as a subcategory of “colored,” the category of “foreign parentage” was introduced, and an increase in census publications was authorized. Margo Anderson, ed., Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2000), 129. 28. On the tension between Walker and Kennedy, see James Phinney Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (New York: Henry Holt, 1923), 111–13. 29. Michael J. Lacey, “The World of the Bureaus: Government and the Positivist Project in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Lacey and Furner, State and Social Investigation, 128, 137. John Wesley Powell credited Walker with stimulating his interest in ethnology. 30. Asher & Adams’ New Commercial, Topographical, and Statistical Atlas and Gazetteer of the United States (New York: Asher & Adams, 1872), preface. Walker to Asher, Adams & Higgins, March 2, 1871, Rhees Collection, Box 2, Huntington Library. Walker was also impressed with the statistical work of J. M. Toner, who founded the American Public Health Association in 1872. Walker to Gilman, January 16, 1872, Gilman Papers, and Facts of Vital Statistics in the United States; With Tables and Diagrams. Extracts from an Address by J. M. Toner, M.D. Published in the Circular of Information of the United States Bureau of Education for March, 1872. 31. Walker to Gilman, June 16, 1871, Gilman Papers. Ann Cherie Edwards, “Walker’s 1870 Statistical Atlas and the Development of American Cartography” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969), 31. 32. Gilman praised Walker’s early statistical maps in his “Geographical Work in the United States during 1871,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 4 (1873): 119–44, esp. 139–43; quote on 141. 33. Walker, Statistical Atlas, introduction; Walker to Gilman, January 16, 1872, February 5, 1872, and February 14, 1872, in Gilman Papers. Secretary of the Interior to James Blaine, June 5, 1872, reprinted in US Congressional Serial Set, v1563, session vol. 5, H.Exec.Doc.9. 34. Report of the Ninth Census—Volume 1. The Statistics of the Population of the United States Embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality, Sex, Selected Ages, and Occupations to Which Are Added the Statistics of School Attendance and Illiteracy, of Schools, Libraries, Newspapers and Periodicals, Churches, Pauperism and Crime, and of Areas, Families, and Dwellings. Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census, June 1, 1870, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior by Francis A. Walker, Superintendent of the Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872). Most of the population maps were drawn by A. von Witzleben. Twenty-five thousand copies of the Report were printed. 35. Jeremy W. Crampton, “GIS and Geographic Governance: Reconstructing the Choropleth Map,” Cartographica 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 41–53; Mark Monmonier, “The Rise of the National Atlas,” Cartographica 31, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 4–5.

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Notes to Pages 165–170

36. Walker, Report of the Ninth Census—Volume 1, xiii–xix; Walker, “Our Population in 1900,” Atlantic Monthly 32 (1873): 487–95; Walker, “Political Geography and Statistics,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. (1888), 23:818. Margo Conk [Anderson], “The Census, Political Power, and Social Change: The Significance of Population Growth in American history,” Social Science History 8, no. 1 (1984): 84. 37. Walker, Report of the Ninth Census—Volume 1, xii, xviii, xix. Because population figures of the Ninth Census were disputed, the 1890 enumeration adjusted the 1870 population to 39.8 million, the number now accepted. Anderson, Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census, 129. 38. Walker, “Political Geography and Statistics,” 818, 821–22. Walker was not alone with this concern. Physician Joseph Toner, a founder of public health, believed Americans exhibited “unmistakable signs of physical degeneracy.” Toner, Facts of Vital Statistics in the United States, with Tables and Diagrams by Joseph M. Toner (1872), 6. 39. “Historical Notes Respecting the Area and Political Organization of the United States and Its Geographical Divisions, with the Statistics of Areas, Families, and Dwellings,” in Report of the Ninth Census, 573–92. 40. Walker to Surgeon General J. K. Barnes, October 27, 1870, in Report of the Ninth Census, vol. 2, “Vital Statistics.” See also reply from assistant surgeon general, February 28, 1872. Walker admired Elliott’s work at the Sanitary Commission and hired him to prepare the life tables for the Statistical Atlas. Walker, “Ezekiel Brown Elliott,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 24 (May 1888–May 1889): 447–52. 41. John Cloud, “The 200th Anniversary of the Survey of the Coast,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 39, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 27; James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 130–31. 42. The third volume of the Report of the Ninth Census also included crop maps that were the first of their kind. 43. See Atlas of the State of Illinois (Chicago: Warner and Beers, 1876); Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Indiana (Chicago: Baskin, Forster & Co., 1876); Historical Atlas of the State of Wisconsin (Milwaukee: Snyder, Van Vechten, 1878); Edwards, “Walker’s 1870 Statistical Atlas,” 35–37. 44. Statistical Atlas of the United States Based on the Results of the Ninth Census 1870 with Contributions from Many Eminent Men of Science and Several Departments of the Government; Compiled under Authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M.A. Superintendent of the 9th Census, Professor of Political Economy and History, Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College ( Julius Bien, Lith., 1874), quote on 1. Three thousand copies of the atlas were printed. 45. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 258; Statistical Atlas, 3. 46. Statistical Atlas, introduction; Walker, “Political Geography and Statistics,” 821–22; “Francis A. Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States,” North American Review 121, no. 249 (October 1875): 442. 47. Anderson, Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census, 28–29. 48. Francis A. Walker, The Indian Question (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874). Julius Bien lithographed this map, as well as those in the Statistical Atlas and the provost-marshal’s report. 49. J. A. Allen, The American Bisons, Living and Extinct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1876) and vol. 4, no. 10 of the Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard

Notes to Pages 171–179

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College. William T. Hornaday, “The Extermination of the American Bison,” in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Year Ending June 30, 1887 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1889), 369–548 (map facing p. 548). 50. Authorship of these maps can be hard to discern. As Cleveland Abbe wrote, “As my four charts in Walker’s ‘Statistical Atlas’ of 1873 have by some been attributed to Schott and by others to Jackson and again to General Myer, it is proper to state that documents signed officially by high authorities sometimes originate with subordinates and are merely communicated over official signatures.” This included the rain chart, the temperature chart, and the hypsometric chart. Cleveland Abbe, “Biographical Memoir of Charles Anthony Schott, 1826–1901,” in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs (1915), 8:105n. 51. The map was drawn in 1873 for the commissioner of mining statistics, Rossiter Raymond. 52. On the Atlas of Finland, see Helen M. Wallis and Arthur H. Robinson, eds., Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 (Map Collector Publications, in association with the International Cartographic Association, 1987), xv and 323–24; and Monmonier, “The Rise of the National Atlas.” 53. US Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau, Statistics, Medical and Anthropological, of the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau: Derived from Records of the Examination for Military Service in the Armies of the United States during the Late War of the Rebellion of Over a Million Recruits, Drafted Men, Substitutes, and Enrolled Men. Compiled under Direction of the Secretary of War by J. H. Baxter, A.M., M.D., Colonel and Chief Medical Purveyor United States Army, Late Chief Medical Officer of the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), quotes from 2:93, 71. 54. The report and its maps were reviewed in New York Medical Journal 24 (1876): 70–73; Philadelphia Medical Times, June 10, 1876, 441–42; Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, August 1876, 140–41; and Dublin Journal of Medical Science 62 ( July–December 1876): 471–74. On the use of the report, see H. P. Bowditch, “The Relation between Growth and Disease,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 32 (1881): 371–77. 55. Crampton, “GIS and Geographic Governance,” 42; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 56. Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1, 34, 108, 142, 188–89. 57. Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 135. 58. Walker, Statistical Atlas, 5; [ J. E. Hilgard],”The Advance of Population in the United States,” Scribner’s 4, no. 2 ( June 1872): 214–18. 59. Mood, “The Rise of Official Statistical Cartography,” 209; Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1971), 108–12. 60. Walker to Turner, January 31, 1894, Box 1, Folder 53; Wilson to Turner, August 23 1889, and December 10, 1894, Box 1, Folder 30; Turner to Wilson, December 24, 1894, Box 1, Folder 61, Frederick Jackson Turner Papers, Huntington Library. 61. Billington credits Walker with coining the phrase “frontier line.” 62. Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12; David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 71, 76. Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 234

Notes to Pages 179–187

1986); and Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in NineteenthCentury Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 63. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 251, 259, 260. In 1874, Congress began publishing the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. In 1883, Scribner’s—which published the Statistical Atlas of the Tenth Census—issued a Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States, as a supplement to its Campaigns of the Civil War. 64. Quote in “Francis A. Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States,” 441. John Andrew Doyle, History of the United States (New York: Henry Holt, 1876), and Walker, Making of the Nation, 1783–1817, in a series edited by John Burgess (New York: Scribner, 1910). W. H. Brewer, “Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States,” American Journal of Science and Arts 110 (August 1875): 83–88. 65. Wright, Geography in the Making, 387; and Gilman to JHU Board of Trustees, August 23, 1875, quoted in Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Gilman, 203. 66. Gilman to A. D. White, April 5, 1874, quoted in Franklin, The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman, 156. 67. Virginia: A Geographical and Political Summary, Embracing a Description of the State, Its Geology, Soils, Minerals and Climate; Its Animal and Vegetable Productions; Manufacturing and Commercial Facilities; Religious and Educational Advantages; Internal Improvements, and Form of Government. (Richmond, VA: R. F. Walker, 1876), 53, 56, 64, 85, 195. See also Jed. Hotchkiss, The City of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia, and the Surrounding Country, Their Condition, Resources and Advantages and the Inducements They Offer to Those Seeking Homes or Places for Business, Investments, Etc. (Staunton, VA: Spectator Steam Printing House, 1878). The Brock Collection at the Huntington Library includes British and American letters to the Virginia Board of Trade requesting copies of Hotchkiss’s guide. 68. “Map of Virginia,” Geological Map of Virginia, and “Commercial Map of the World Showing Location of Virginia,” in Hotchkiss, Virginia. 69. Sheet of five maps [ca. 1875] in Hotchkiss Collection 208, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. 70. The Virginias, a Mining, Industrial and Scientific Journal, Devoted to the Development of Virginia and West Virginia (Staunton, VA: Printed by S. M. Yost & Son, 1880), Huntington Library. The journal was superseded by The Industrial South. J. B. Thomas, “Jedediah Hotchkiss, Gilded Age Propagandist of Industrialism,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84, no. 2 (April 1976): 189–202. 71. Thomas, “Jedediah Hotchkiss”; Joseph T. Lambie, From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway (New York: New York University Press, 1954), chap. 2; Sean Patrick Adams, “Partners in Geology, Brothers in Frustration: The Antebellum Geological Surveys of Virginia and Pennsylvania,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 5–34. 72. Hotchkiss, “The Coal Fields of West Virginia and Virginia,” The Virginias, no. 2 (February 1880). 73. Anderson, Encyclopedia of the Census, 130. 74. Alain Desrosieres, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 196. Monmonier, “Rise of the National Atlas,” 5; Keller, Affairs of State, 312. 75. Nation 41, no. 1059 (October 15, 1885): 327–28, reviewing Fletcher W. Hewes and Henry Gannett, Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States: Showing by Graphic Methods Their Notes to Pages 187–194

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Present Condition and Their Political, Social and Industrial Development (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883). 76. Francis Amasa Walker, Discussions of Economics and Statistics (New York: Henry Holt, 1899). Conk [Anderson], “The Census, Political Power, and Social Change,” 88. US Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909). 77. Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), quote on 154. 78. Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 ( June 2000): 807–31. Conclusion 1. Francis Amasa Walker, introduction to Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Results of the Ninth Census 1870 with Contributions from Many Eminent Men of Science and Several Departments of the Government; Compiled under Authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M.A. Superintendent of the 9th Census, Professor of Political Economy and History, Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College ( Julius Bien, Lith., 1874), 4. 2. Jeremy Crampton has observed that the prevalence of software has shrunk the level of experimentation in thematic mapping or at least made output more uniform. Jeremy W. Crampton, “GIS and Geographic Governance: Reconstructing the Choropleth Map,” Cartographica 31, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 41–53. 3. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 147. 4. Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions; By the Residents of Hull-House, a Social Settlement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895). 5. Michael Heffernan, “The Politics of the Map in the Early Twentieth Century,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29, no. 3 (2002): 207–26. 6. Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 86, 343–46; quote on 91. 7. Gilles Palsky, “Emmanuel de Martonne and the Ethnographical Cartography of Central Europe (1917–1920),” Imago Mundi 54 (2002): 111–19 8. Jeremy Crampton, “The Cartographic Calculation of Space: Race Mapping and the Balkans at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919,” Social and Cultural Geography 7, no. 5 (October 2006): 736. 9. Gelfand, The Inquiry, 199; Crampton, “The Cartographic Calculation of Space”; Palsky, “Emmanuel de Martonne,” 113. Charles Seymour, “Geography, Justice, and Politics at the Paris Conference on 1919,” in Bowman Memorial Lectures (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951). 10. Quoted from several firsthand accounts in John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 45. 11. http://www.patchworknation.org/; http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map; http://dsl.richmond.edu/. 12. I thank Abby Rumsey and Seth Masket for helping me think through these concepts of digital information. See also Gleick, The Information.

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Notes to Pages 194–202

INDE X

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. AAAS. See American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) abolitionism, 123, 140, 146 Ac ko mok ki, 53–54 Adams, Charles Francis, 135, 147 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 70, 188 Addams, Jane, 199 African Americans, 166–67, 168, 169–70, 176, 191, 191. See also slavery Agassiz, Louis, 110–11 “Agricultural Map” (Disturnell), 115 agriculture, 83, 107, 112, 221n61. See also cotton production AGSS. See American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGSS) Allen, Joel: “Map of North America,” 179 AMA. See American Medical Association (AMA) American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 43, 101, 102 American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, 83 American Climatological Association, 116 American Economic Association, 166 American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGSS), 125, 126, 133, 163, 164, 167

American Geographical Society, 50, 71, 200 American Historical Association, 70 American Historical Review, 70 American Journal of Science and Art, 162, 188 American Medical Association (AMA), 93, 94, 98 American Nation series, 61, 63–64, 74 American Revolution, 4, 11, 13, 14, 17, 61, 63 American Social Science Association (ASSA), 160–61, 162, 165, 166 American Statistical Association (ASA), 98, 125, 166 “American Temple of Time” (Willard), 24–26, 35 American Universal Geography (Morse), 17 Anderson, Benedict, 38 anthropology, 182, 188 Army Meteorological Register (Blodget), 102–5, 103, 105 Arrowsmith, Aaron, 42, 53; “Map of the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains,” 54 ASA. See American Statistical Association (ASA) Asher & Adams, 166 ASSA. See American Social Science Association (ASSA)

237

Atkinson, Edward, 146, 151–55, 157, 161, 229n69; “The Cotton Kingdom,” 152, 152–55 atlases, historical. See historical cartography Atlas Lesage. See Genealogical, Chronological, Historical and Geographical Atlas Atlas of Finland, 181 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Paullin and Wright), 71–73, 74, 198 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 43, 44–46, 109, 126, 133, 135, 136, 148, 155, 199, 225n26 Balogh, Brian, 7, 195 Baltimore, 90–92, 91 Bancroft, George, 14, 21, 33, 43, 52, 59, 84, 110 Barton, Edward, 93–98, 107, 111, 116; “Chart Exhibiting the Annual Mortality of New Orleans,” 97; “Sanitary Map of the City of New Orleans,” 94–97, 95, 96 Bates, Edward, 142 Baxter, Jedediah, 160, 181–82 Baym, Nina, 208n32 Beecher, Henry Ward, 141 Behaim, Martin, 71 Bender, Thomas, 7, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 31 Bennett, James Gordon, 132 Benton, Thomas Hart, 52 Berghaus, Heinrich, 85, 89, 92; Physikalischer Atlas, 85–86 Bernue-Dubourg, Jacques: Carte Chronographie, 16 Biddle, Edward: Industrial and Political Map of Pennsylvania, 126–27 Bien, Julius, 102, 181, 182, 187 bird’s eye views, 157–58 Bismarck, Otto von, 200 bison, mapping of, 179 Black, Jeremy, 12, 14, 15 Blaine, James, 169 Blair, John, 45 Blake, William, 180 Blanchard, Rufus: “Historical Map of the United States,” 57–59, 58 Blockade Strategy Board, 225n26 Blodget, Lorin, 89; Army Meteorological Register, 102–5, 103, 105; and census reports, 126; and climate mapping, 101–4, 106–7, 111, 112, 114, 151, 152, 159, 173; conflict with Henry, 102, 110, 222n68; “Hyetal or Rain Chart,” 105; influence of, 115, 151, 152, 153; “Isothermal Chart,” 102, 103; and “Washington Map,” 109

238

Index

Boggs, S. Whittemore, 71 Bolingbroke, Lord, 22 borders. See boundaries Boston Emancipation League, 151 boundaries, 7, 13–14, 15, 57, 60, 67, 185–86, 201 Bowman, Isaiah, 71, 200–201 Bradford, T. G.: A Comprehensive Atlas, 28 Bradley, Abraham, 19 Brigham, Amariah: “Chart Shewing the Progress of Spasmodic Cholera,” 87, 87–88 British Museum, 42, 50, 55 Brown, John, 125, 151 Brown, John Carter, 43 Bruce, Robert, 155 Bryant, William Cullen, 59 Buchanan, James, 125 Buckler, Thomas, 98; “Map of the Medical Topography of Baltimore,” 90–92, 91 buffalo, mapping of, 179 Butler, Benjamin, 140 Cabot, Sebastian, 25, 46 Cameron, Simon, 142 Carnegie Institution, 70, 71 Carpenter, Francis Bicknell: First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, 119–20, 120, 141–43, 227n46 Carte Chronographie (Bernue-Dubourg), 16 “Carte des lignes Isotherms” (Humboldt), 81, 82 cartograms, 58 cartography. See maps census: of 1790, 122; of 1840, 123; of 1850, 123–24, 132; of 1860, 140; of 1870, 165–89, 167, 168, 170; of 1880, 193; of 2010, 201; disease maps, 172; establishment of the Census Board, 123; and mapping, 3, 6, 115, 126–28, 165–95, 167, 168, 170; reform of, 165, 193; and state power, 184; vital statistics, 172 Census Act, 193 Centennial Exposition, 57, 166 Channing, Edward, 67, 69; Guide to the Study of American History, 60, 68 “Chart Exhibiting the Annual Mortality of New Orleans” (Barton), 97 Chart of Biography (Priestley), 16–17 “Chart of the Inhabited World” (Woodbridge), 83, 84 “Chart of the World” (Wyld), 81 “Chart Shewing the Progress of Spasmodic Cholera” (Brigham), 87, 87–88

Chase, Salmon P., 128, 142 Chicago School of Sociology, 199 cholera, 3, 86–93, 171, 198 choropleth maps, 169, 172 “Chronographical Plan of Willard’s History of the United States” (Willard), 36, 36–37 “Chronological Chart of American History” (Dalston), 37 Cincinnati, 92–93 cities and urbanization, 61, 169, 174 Civil Rights Bill (1866), 160 Civil War: First Confuscation Act, 140; mapping of, 37, 47–49, 61; and Maury, 110; and national identity, 140; number of fatalities, 187; secession crisis, 39, 133–37, 143–47, 199; use of maps during, 119–20, 140–45, 155; vital statistics of soldiers, 159–60 Clark, William, 28, 53, 54 Clay, Henry, 139 climate and weather: average temperature, 81, 86, 102, 104, 107, 114, 153, 198, 199; and cotton production, 150–51, 152–53; data collection, 99, 101; and diseases, 89, 90, 98–99, 111, 116, 219n42; influence of, 115; mapping of, 5, 79–80, 81–86, 98–108, 111, 114–15, 150–51, 199; meteorology, 79, 99, 101, 102, 116–17, 198–99; rainfall, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 114, 199; weather forecasts, 199 “Climatic Map of the Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains” (Denison), 116 “Climatological Map” (Disturnell), 115 Coffin, James, 104, 109, 126 color, use on maps, 72, 101, 180 “Colored Population Map” (Walker), 168 Colton, George, 129 Colton, J. H., 110, 225n24 Columbus, Christopher, 25, 51, 71 Comprehensive Atlas, A (Bradford), 28 Conn, Steve, 208n34 Conzen, Michael, 52 Cooper, James Graham, 107 Corps of Topographical Engineers, 53, 109, 136, 161 Cosa, Juan de la, 51, 71 “Cotton Kingdom, The” (Atkinson), 152, 152–55 “Cotton Kingdom, The” (Olmsted), 146, 147–49, 148, 149 cotton production, 146–55, 199 Crampton, Jeremy, 236n2 crime, statistics of, 122–23

Dalston, William: “Chronological Chart of American History,” 37 Daly, James, 111 Dana, James Dwight, 111 D’Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon: Ten maps for Rollin’s Ancient History, 13 Darby, William: View of the United States, 16 dasymetric mapping, 170, 172, 174 Davis, Jefferson, 52, 112, 136 DeBow, J. D. B., 111, 126, 153, 224n9; Statistical View of the United States, 124, 126, 127 DeBow’s Review, 124, 143 Delisle, Guillaume, 60 Democratic Party, 65, 124, 125, 128 Denison, Charles, 115–16, 199; “Climatic Map of the Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains,” 116; Rocky Mountain Health Resorts, 116 “Density of Population” (Walker), 170 “Diagram of the Rise and Fall of Political Parties in the United States” (Donnell), 65 digital information, 202 Digital Scholarship Lab, 201–2 diplomacy, 200–201 discovery and exploration, 44–47, 52, 53, 55, 57, 69, 198 diseases: in the census, 172; cholera, 3, 86–93, 171, 198; and climate and weather, 89, 90, 98–99, 111, 116, 219n42; environmental causes of, 83, 88–99, 111, 116, 198; germ theory, 98, 116, 198; mapping of, 3, 5, 79–80, 86–98, 172, 178, 181–82, 183, 198; in the military, 181–82, 183; statistics on, 159–60; syphilis, 182, 183; yellow fever, 3, 86–87, 89, 90, 93–98, 111, 171, 198 Disturnell, John, 115; “Agricultural Map,” 115; “Climatological Map,” 115 Donnell, Henry Clay: “Diagram of the Rise and Fall of Political Parties in the United States,” 65; “Presidential Elections of the United States,” 64–65 Doolittle Report, 163 Douglas, Stephen, 128, 151 Drake, Daniel, 92–93, 98, 107, 111, 114, 116 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 130 Dupin, Charles, 122, 126, 128 Dwight, Timothy, 81–83 Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Robinson), 6 Earth and Man (Guyot), 101 Ebeling, Daniel Christoph, 42, 50–51

Index

239

Eckert, Max, 203n3 education: geography textbooks, 17; grammar books, 17; and historical cartography, 15–16, 60–70; history teaching, 21–22, 60–70; mapping of literacy, 158–59, 176–78; statistics of, 122–23; Willard’s role in, 18–23, 33, 37; for women, 18, 21, 37, 84 Elliott, Ezekiel Brown, 159–60, 172, 182, 233n40 Elliott, George: “Map of the United States,” 132 emancipation, 140–43, 151–52 Emancipation Proclamation, 119–20, 141, 152 epidemics. See diseases Epoch Maps Illustrating American History (Hart), 61, 62 exceptionalism, American, 33 exploration. See discovery and exploration facsimile maps, 43–44, 51, 58–59, 68, 71, 198 Faden, William, 42 Farr, William, 92 Faust, Drew, 187 Fidler, Peter, 53–54 Fifteenth Amendment, 143 Fillmore, Millard, 141 First Confiscation Act, 140 First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (Carpenter), 119–20, 120, 141–43, 227n46 Force, Peter, 42–43, 52, 55, 111 “Foreign Population Map” (Walker), 167 Forry, Samuel, 99–100, 102, 104; The Climate of the United States and Its Endemic Influences, 99–100, 100 Foster, J. W., 115 Fourteenth Amendment, 143 Fox, Dixon Ryan, 73–75 France, 4, 13–14, 122–23, 200 “Frances A. Henshaw’s Book of Penmanship,” 19–21 Frankfurt Treaty, 200 Franklin, Benjamin, 44 Free Soil Party, 151, 165 Freedmen’s Bureau, 160 “Freedom and Slavery, and the Coveted Territories” ( Jay), 129, 130 Fremont, John, 52, 129, 132, 140, 141 French Revolution, 4, 13–14 Friendly, Michael, 6 frontiers. See boundaries Fugitive Slave Law, 48, 140

240

Index

Gallatin, Albert, 25, 84 Gallaudet, Thomas, 83 Gannett, Henry, 75 Garfield, James, 165, 193, 194, 232n27 Genealogical, Chronological, Historical and Geographical Atlas, 15 “General Map of the United States” ( Johnston), 132 geographic information systems (GIS), 6, 181, 199, 201–2 Geographical Grammar (Guthrie), 17 geography: importance of, 107; interdependence with history, 14–18, 19, 22–23, 30, 35–38, 49, 51, 53, 57–58, 61, 63, 68, 70, 71–76, 162; meanings and concepts of, 3–4, 6, 12, 21, 29, 31, 34, 44, 80, 81, 84, 101; textbooks and school, 17, 20, 27–28 Geography for Beginners (Willard), 27 Geography Made Easy (Morse), 17 George Cram, 57 germ theory, 98, 116, 198 Gilbert, Humphrey, 25 Gillis, James, 111 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 55, 70, 75, 155, 160–65, 166–69, 173, 188 Gilpin, William, 112–15, 116, 144, 189; “Hydrographic Map,” 112; “Map of the Basin of the Mississippi,” 112; “Map of the World Exhibiting the Isothermal Zodiac,” 113 Girard College, 136 GIS. See geographic information systems (GIS) Gleick, James, 199 Godkin, E. L., 161 Godlewska, Anne, 6 Goffart, Walter, 12, 15, 16, 27 Goodloe, Daniel, 146, 147, 148 Goodrich, Samuel, 22 Goodwin, Doris Kearns: Team of Rivals, 119 Google Books, 202 Google Maps, 1, 2 Gould, Benjamin, 160, 182 governance, 2, 3, 6, 7, 97–99, 117, 123, 155, 159–63,165–66, 179, 184, 194–95, 200–201 Grafton, Anthony, 33 Graham, Henry S., 133 grammar books, 17 Grant, Ulysses S., 161, 165, 166 Green, Traill, 109 Greenleaf, Moses, 126 Guerry, Andre-Michel, 122–23, 128 Guide to the Study of American History (Channing and Hart), 60, 68

Guthrie, William: Geographical Grammar, 17 Guyot, Arnold, 43, 44, 100–102, 104, 111, 162, 172, 173, 188; Earth and Man, 101 Hale, Horatio, 25 halftone engraving, 64 Halley, Edmund, 81 Hammond, James Henry, 146 Harper’s Weekly, 59, 227n47 Harris, Sharon, 208n32 Harrisse, Henry, 15, 55, 56 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 60–61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73–75; American Nation series, 61, 63–64, 74; Epoch Maps Illustrating American History, 61, 62; Guide to the Study of American History, 60, 68 Harvard College, 42, 43 Hase, Johann Matthias, 204n1 Hayden, Ferdinand, 54, 158, 188 Helper, Hinton, 132, 145 Henry, Joseph: and Blodget, 101–2, 110; and the census, 173; and climate mapping, 104–6, 107, 112, 115, 151, 199; and Kohl, 50; and Maury, 109–10, 114; and the telegraph, 199; “Wind and Timber Map,” 106 Henshaw, Frances A., 19–21, 24 Hergesheimer, Edwin, 133–35 Hewes, Fletcher, 75 Hilgard, Julius, 72, 185, 190 “Histomap” series, 75 “Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States in 1811” (Ramsay), 16–17 Historical Atlas (Shepherd), 73 Historical Atlas of the United States, 76 historical cartography, 11–40; concept of, 12–14; and education, 15–16, 60–70; historical atlases, 15–16, 23–28, 59–60, 71–76; interdependence of history and geography, 14–18; maps of North American discovery, 44–47, 52, 53, 55, 57, 198; and national history, 56–70; and national identity, 12, 16, 23, 61, 75, 198; and nationalism, 4, 37–40; and politics, 64–68; and slavery, 65; and sovereignty, 12, 13–14, 24, 39, 68, 198; and territorial growth, 11–12, 34–35, 37, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67 “Historical Geography” (Smith), 65–67, 66, 67 “Historical Map of the United States” (Blanchard), 57–59, 58 “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion” (United States Coast Survey), 47–49, 48, 49, 211n14

historicism, 33 history: education, 21–22, 60–70; interdependence with geography, 14–18, 22–23, 38, 63, 162; professionalization of, 59, 60–61, 70 History of the United States ( Johnston), 64 History of the United States (Willard), 23–24, 34 Hitchcock, Charles, 109, 180 Hitchcock, Edward, 107, 109 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 6, 89 Homestead Act, 164, 189 Hornaday, William Temple, 179 Hotchkiss, Jedediah, 189–93, 199; “Map of the Shenandoah,” 192; “Map Showing Distribution and Density of Negro Population in VA,” 191; “Map Showing Distribution and Density of Population in VA,” 190 Howard, O. O., 145 HTML, 202 Hull House, 199 Humboldt, Alexander von, 8, 80–86; and the atlas of Spain, 51; and average temperature, 81, 198; “Carte des lignes Isotherms,” 81, 82; influence of, 3, 23, 29, 30, 44, 83, 86, 100, 102, 106, 110–11, 115, 188; and isotherms, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 112; Kosmos, 85; and the meaning of geography, 44, 80, 81, 84, 199; and the natural sciences, 5, 80–83, 99, 202 Hunt, Edward, 43, 56, 75 Hunter, David, 140 Huntington Library, 56 “Hydrographic Map” (Gilpin), 112 “Hyetal or Rain Chart” (Blodget), 105 identity, national. See national identity illiteracy. See literacy, mapping of immigration, 6, 7, 65, 146, 158, 166–67, 167, 169, 171–72, 174–76, 175, 176, 178, 187, 189, 194 Immigration Restriction League, 194 Imperial Library, 50 Industrial and Political Map of Pennsylvania (Biddle), 126–27 Inquiry, the, 200–201 International Geographical Congress, 188 International Statistical Congress, 125, 164, 231n24 Internet, 202 isolines, 81, 82, 107 “Isothermal Chart” (Blodget), 102, 103 “Isothermal Chart” (Woodbridge), 83–84, 85

Index

241

isotherms, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89, 99–100, 102–4, 107, 111–14, 115, 116, 153 Jackson, Samuel, 88–89 James, William, 187 Jameson, John Franklin, 5, 70–71, 73, 74 Jarvis, Edward, 160, 165, 172, 232n27 Jay, John, 129; “Freedom and Slavery, and the Coveted Territories,” 129, 130 Jefferson, Thomas, 42, 54, 202 Jewett, Charles, 102 John Carter Brown Library, 56 Johns Hopkins University, 70, 162, 163, 188 Johnson, Andrew, 163 Johnston, Alexander: History of the United States, 64 Johnston, Alexander Keith, 86, 92; “General Map of the United States,” 132 Jomard, Edme Francois, 43, 44 Journey through Texas (Olmsted), 147 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 50, 112, 128–30, 145, 151, 153 Keeler, W. J.: “National Map of the Territory of the United States,” 164 Kelman, Ari, 94 Kennedy, Joseph Camp Griffith, 97, 123–26, 127, 132–33, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 165 Kilpatrick, Judson, 142 Kimball, Frederick, 192 King, Clarence, 54, 158 Koch, Tom, 7 Kohl, Johann Georg, 44–47; influence of, 60, 68, 71; on isotherm maps, 107–8; “Map of the Discovery of the East Coast,” 46; “Map Showing the Progress of Discovery on the West Coast of the U.S. and Vancouver Island,” 45, 45; maps of North American discovery, 41, 44–47, 52, 53, 55, 57, 69, 73, 198; and national archive of maps, 41, 49–52, 56, 59, 75; and Native American maps, 54; Union sympathies of, 48; use of color, 72 Kosmos (Humboldt), 85 Kossuth, Lajos, 28 Kruse, Christian, 13, 14 Labberton, Robert, 59 Lafayette, Marquis de, 28 land use, 73, 74. See also agriculture Lawson, Thomas, 99, 102, 159 LeConte, John, 222n68 Lee, Robert E., 137

242

Index

Leigh, Edwin, 157–59; “A View of the Relation of Slaves to Agricultural Wealth in Missouri,” 157–58 Lewis, Malcolm, 114 Lewis, Meriwether, 28, 53, 54 Lewis, Samuel, 54 Library of Congress, 71, 164; Manuscripts Division, 70; map collection, 5, 42–43, 50, 54, 55–56, 75 Lieber, Francis, 15, 64, 123 Lincoln, Abraham: and Carpenter’s painting, 119–20, 142–43; and cotton production, 153; election of, 133, 135; Emancipation Proclamation, 119–20, 152; joined Republican party, 130; and the secession crisis, 135, 136, 137; and slavery maps, 120, 122, 136, 139, 140–45, 151, 155; on territory, 68; and U.S. Sanitary Commission, 159 Lindenkohl, Adolf, 47 Lindenkohl, Henry, 47, 48, 72 Lippmann, Walter, 200 literacy, mapping of, 2, 5, 107, 158–59, 171, 176–78, 177 lithography, 79, 85, 127 Logan, Thomas, 111 logo-maps, 38 London Times 199 Lossing, Benson, 63, 155 Louisiana Purchase, 28 Louisiana State Medical Society, 94, 97 Lovejoy, Owen, 141 Loyal Publication Society, 147 Lyman, Azel, 30, 64 MacCoun, Townsend: New Historical Atlas, 59–60 Madison, James, 122 Maier, Charles, 68, 195 Maine, statistical history and atlas of, 126 Mallet, John, 149–51, 152, 153, 154; “Map of the Cotton Regions of North America,” 149–51, 150 “Map of North America” (Allen), 179 “Map of the Basin of the Mississippi” (Gilpin), 112 “Map of the Cotton Regions of North America” (Mallet), 149–51, 150 “Map of the Discovery of the East Coast” (Kohl), 46 “Map of the Medical Topography of Baltimore” (Buckler), 90–92, 91 “Map of the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains” (Arrowsmith), 54

“Map of the River Systems” (Steinwehr), 180, 181, 189 “Map of the Shenandoah” (Hotchkiss), 192 “Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean” (Warren), 53–54 “Map of the United States” (Elliott), 132 “Map of the World Exhibiting the Isothermal Zodiac” (Gilpin), 113 “Map of Virginia” (United States Coast Survey), 133–37, 134, 138, 142, 143 “Map of white population and Indian reservations” (Walker), 180 maps: collecting of, 41–43, 49–52, 55–56; concept of: 6, 8, 12, 13, 57, 186, 201–2; facsimiles of, 43–44, 51, 58–59, 68, 71, 198; national archive of, 41–43, 49–52; printing technology for, 56–57, 60. See also historical cartography; statistical cartography; thematic mapping “Map Showing Distribution and Density of Negro Population in VA” (Hotchkiss), 191 “Map Showing Distribution and Density of Population in VA” (Hotchkiss), 190 “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States” (United States Coast Survey), 119–22, 121, 137–45 “Map Showing the Illiteracy of the Population” (Walker), 177 “Map Showing the Progress of Discovery on the West Coast of the U.S. and Vancouver Island” (Kohl), 45, 45 “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to Aggregate Population” (Walker), 175, 176 “Maps of the Pacific Coast” (Walker), 178–79 Marcy, William, 50 Marsh, George Perkins, 188 Martin, Lawrence, 56, 71 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 43, 44, 104, 108–10, 111, 127 Maverick, Samuel, 27 McClellan, George, 135, 136, 137 medical geography, 86–98, 99, 111, 116. See also diseases Meitzen, August, 164, 166 Melish, John, 72 Mercator, Gerhard, 60 Meteorological Register, 99 meteorology, 79, 99, 101, 116–17, 198–99 migration, 185. See also territorial growth Mill, John Stuart, 146 Missouri, maps of, 157–58

Missouri Compromise, 128, 129, 130, 151 Mitchell, John, 71 Mittheilungen, 162 mnemonics, 15, 19, 21, 27, 60 Morse, Jedediah, 17–18, 19, 23, 75; American Universal Geography, 17; Geography Made Easy, 17 Morse, Samuel F. B., 84 Morse, Sidney Edwards, 145 Motley, John Lothrop: Rise of the Dutch Republic, 22 Napoleon Bonaparte, 43 Narrative and Critical History of America, 68 national archive of maps, 5, 41–43, 49–52, 55–56, 59, 75 National Era, 146 national history, 56–70 national identity, 18, 21, 31, 181, 200–201; and boundaries, 14, 201; and Civil War, 140; and historical cartography, 4, 7, 12, 16, 23, 61, 75, 198 National Intelligencer, 52 “National Map of the Territory of the United States” (Keeler), 164 National Origins Act, 194 national parks, 214n43 nationalism, 4, 21, 37–40, 195 Native Americans: after the Civil War, 163–64; Doolittle Report, 163; history of, 208n34; mapping of, 164, 179, 180; maps made by, 53–54; portrayal in historical maps, 24–26, 47, 54, 72, 75; Treaty of Fort Laramie, 163, 231n21; Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 163–64, 231n21 natural sciences, 80–81, 83–84 Naval Observatory, 4, 104, 108, 109–10 Newberry Library, 56 New Hampshire Statesman, 129 New Historical Atlas (MacCoun), 59–60 New Orleans, 93–97 New York Herald, 132 New York Public Library, 56 New York Times, 143, 145, 199 New York Tribune, 129, 142, 152 North American Review, 187–88 Office of the Surgeon General, 88, 98, 102, 106, 159–60, 162, 172, 182; Meteorological Register, 99 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 145–49, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 228n57, 228n59; “The Cotton Kingdom,” 146, 147–49, 148, 149; Journey through Texas, 147

Index

243

244

Ortelius, Abraham: Parergon, 12 Osborne, John, 89 Osler, William, 93

quantitative thinking, 89, 123, 125–26, 160, 181, 187 Quetelet, Adolphe, 123, 125, 126, 160

Pacific Railway Surveys, 52–53, 112 Palmer, William, 136–37, 143 Palsky, Gilles, 6 Parergon (Ortelius), 12 Paris Peace Delegations, 200–201 Parley, Peter. See Goodrich, Samuel Patchwork Nation, 201 Paullin, Charles, 215n55; Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, 71–73, 74, 198 Penn, William, 63 Perry, Commodore, 38 Pestalozzi, Johann, 18, 29 Petermann, August, 92, 107, 127–28, 132, 133, 158, 162, 164, 188, 200; Physical Atlas, 81; Volks-Dichtigkeit der Sklaven, 128 Phillips, Philip Lee, 55, 56 Physical Atlas (Petermann), 81 Physikalischer Atlas (Berghaus), 85–86 pictorial histories, 61–64 “Pictorial View of the World, The” (Willard), 30 “Picture of Nations” (Willard), 31–33, 32 Pierce, Franklin, 44, 124, 141 Pinkerton, John, 18 place names, 46 Plan for Improving Female Education (Willard), 18 Playfair, William, 17, 29 Pocahontas, 63 “Political Map of the United States” (Reynolds), 129–32, 131 politics and historical cartography, 64–68 population: center of, 185, 190; density, 169–70, 170, 174–79; maps of, 69, 72, 74, 83–84, 123, 127–28, 132–40; rate of growth, 171–72, 174. See also census Powell, John Wesley, 25, 54, 75, 158 pragmatism, 187 Prescott, William Hickling, 22 “Presidential Elections of the United States” (Donnell), 64–65 Preuss, Charles, 52 Priestley, Joseph, 29–30, 31, 33, 42; Chart of Biography, 16–17 printing technology, 56–57, 60. See also lithography promotion, maps used for, 115–16, 157, 189–93 Proposition 8, 1, 2 Ptolemy, Claudius, 12, 59

railway surveys, 52–53, 112 Raleigh, Walter, 25 Ramsay, David, 11, 17–18, 21, 24, 64, 75; “Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States in 1811,” 16–17 Rand McNally, 57, 116; “Histomap” series, 75 realism, 63–64, 187 Reese, David, 89 Report of the Ninth Census (Walker), 167, 168, 169–73, 170, 174 Republican Party, 64, 128–30, 132, 143, 151, 161, 166, 184, 194, 221n61 Republic of America (Willard). See History of the United States (Willard) Reynolds, William: “Political Map of the United States,” 129–32, 131 Ridpath, John Clark, 64 Ripley, James Wolfe, 136 Rise of the Dutch Republic (Motley), 22 Ritchie, Alexander Hay, 227n46 Ritter, Karl, 44, 80, 100, 162, 188 rivers, 180 Robinson, Arthur, 80; Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography, 6 Rocky Mountain Health Resorts (Denison), 116 Rogers, William Barton, 189, 192 Rosenberg, Daniel, 33 Ross, Dorothy, 13 Ross, Edward, 187

Index

Sanford, Dred Scott v., 130 “Sanitary Map of the City of New Orleans” (Barton), 94–97, 95, 96 Schott, Charles, 107, 111, 172–73, 179 Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, 185 Seaton, William Winston, 52 secession crisis, 39, 65, 68, 110, 112, 122, 133–37, 143–47, 155, 199, 206n23, 221n61 Series of Maps (Willard), 24–28 Seward, William, 135, 142 shading, use on maps, 101, 114, 122, 127, 133–35, 136, 137, 139, 157, 174 Shaffer, Marguerite, 214n43 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 179 Shattuck, Lemuel, 98 Shepherd, William: Historical Atlas, 73 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 185–86 Sigourney, Lydia, 28

Silliman, Benjamin, 162 Simms, William Gilmore, 63 slavery: abolitionism, 123; census data on, 123, 124, 125, 132, 135, 139, 140, 228n57; and cotton production, 146–55; distribution of, 61; emancipation, 140–43, 151–52; mapping of, 3, 5, 65, 119–22, 127–55, 157–58, 199 Smith, Calvin, 225n24 Smith, John, 63; “Historical Geography,” 65–67, 66, 67 Smithsonian Institution, 4, 98, 101–2, 104, 107, 109, 111, 115, 116, 126, 164, 172–73, 194 Snow, John, 92, 97 social inquiry, 6, 159–61, 194 social reform, 125–26 social science, 2, 8, 126, 159–62, 177–78, 187–88, 194 sovereignty, 12, 13–14, 24, 25, 27, 39, 68, 76, 137, 198, 200–201 space, 13, 75 Sparks, Jared, 43, 60 Spofford, Ainsworth, 55–56 Stanton, Edwin, 142 state power, 184, 194–95 Statistical Abstract of the United States (United States Census Office), 193 Statistical Atlas of the United States (Walker), 70, 73, 75, 173–89, 175, 176, 177, 186, 193–94, 197 statistical cartography, 72, 97, 164–95; as argumentative tool, 194; and census data, 126–28, 169–89, 193–94; and cotton production, 146–55, 199; of crime and education, 122–23; Report of the Ninth Census, 167, 168, 169–73, 170, 174; and slavery, 61, 119–22, 127–55, 199; Statistical Atlas of the United States, 173–89, 175, 176, 177, 193–94, 197 “Statistical Map of North America,” 127 Statistical View of the United States (DeBow), 124, 126, 127 statistics, 6, 93–94, 98, 111, 122–27 141, 146, 181, 186–87, 194–95; of crime, 122–23; of education, 122–23; moral, 122–23, 125–26; and social inquiry, 159–61, 184; and social reform, 125–26, 157–58; vital, 159–60, 165, 172, 182, 188. See also census; statistical cartography Steinwehr, Adolphe von, 227n47–48; “Map of the River Systems,” 180, 181, 189 Stevens, Henry, 42, 43, 46, 59, 162 Stevens, Isaac, 112, 226n28 Stillé, Charles, 160

“Stream of Time” (Willard), 34, 65 Sydenham, Thomas, 89 Tanner, Henry Schenck, 88–89 Taylor, Nathaniel, 163, 164 Taylor, Zachary, 123 Team of Rivals (Goodwin), 119 telegraph, 198–99 “Temple of Time” (Willard), 33–34, 38–39 Ten maps for Rollin’s Ancient History (D’Anville), 13 territorial growth: and historical cartography, 11–12, 34–35, 37, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67; and statistical mapping, 172, 214n43 Thayer, Horace, 226n39 Theberge, Albert, 47 thematic mapping: definition of, 1–2; and diplomacy, 200–201; dominance of, 198; and governance, 2, 194–95, 200–201; and map collection, 51–52; and patterns, 80–81; for promotion, 115–16, 157, 189–93; and relationships, 80–81, 83–84; “Washington Map of the United States,” 108–11. See also climate and weather; diseases; statistical cartography Thirteenth Amendment, 136, 143 Thomas, Allen, 64 Thoreau, Henry David, 212n16 Tilton, James, 99 time, 12, 13, 14, 26, 28–34, 75–76 time charts, 29, 63–65 timelines, 12, 16–17, 29–31, 64, 97; tree, 36–37 Toner, Joseph, 111, 232n30, 233n38 Toscanelli, Paolo, 60 transportation, 72. See also railway surveys Treaty of Fort Laramie, 163, 231n21 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 115, 123, 172 Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 163–64, 231n21 Treaty of Versailles, 201 tree timelines, 36–37 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 56, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 198, 199; “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 185–86 Tyler, John, 141 United States Board on Geographic Names, 46 United States Bureau of Education, 161 United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 195 United States Bureau of Statistics, 165, 172 United States Bureau of the Provost-MarshalGeneral, 160 United States Census Office, 4, 116, 193. See also census

Index

245

United States Coast Survey, 4, 41, 43, 44, 46, 50, 55, 109, 126, 179, 188, 194; “Historical Sketch of the Rebellion,” 47–49, 48, 49, 211n14; “Map of Virginia,” 133–37, 134, 138, 142, 143, 155; “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States,” 119–22, 121, 137–45, 155; slave maps, 5, 7, 164, 169, 199; use of shading, 127, 157, 174 United States Department of Justice, 161 United States Geological Survey, 161, 185, 194 United States Indian Bureau, 163 United States Postal Service, 116 United States Sanitary Commission, 136, 140, 147, 148, 159–60, 181–82, 188 United States Signal Service, 116, 194–95 Universal History (Willard), 28, 31 urbanization. See cities and urbanization Venezuelan Boundary Commission, 69 “View of the Relation of Slaves to Agricultural Wealth in Missouri, A” (Leigh), 157–58 View of the United States (Darby), 16 Virginia, 20, 133–39; promotion of,189–93 Virginia Map. See “Map of Virginia” (United States Coast Survey) Virginias, The, 192 vital statistics, 98, 159–60, 165, 172, 182,188 Volks-Dichtigkeit der Sklaven (Petermann), 128 voting behavior, 72, 193–94 Walckenaer, Baron von, 51 Walker, Amasa, 160, 165 Walker, Francis Amasa, 155, 162, 164–95, 202; influence of, 74, 198, 199; Report of the Ninth Census, 167, 168, 169–73, 170, 174; Statistical Atlas of the United States, 70, 73, 173–89, 175, 176, 177, 186, 193–94, 197 Ward, Lester Frank, 187 Warren, Gouverneur Kemble, 54–55; “Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean,” 53–54, 231n23 Washington, George, 108 “Washington Map of the United States,” 108–11 Watson, Elkanah, 171 wealth, mapping of, 171, 176 weather. See climate and weather Webster, Daniel, 43 Webster, Noah, 17–18, 21, 23, 39 Welles, Gideon, 136, 143

246

Index

Wells, David A., 161, 165, 173, 230n17 West Virginia, 135–39 Wheeler, George, 54–55 Whig Party, 65, 123–24, 128, 206n23 Whitbeck, Raymond, 71 White, Andrew Dickson, 188 Willard, Emma, 18–40; “American Temple of Time,” 24–26, 35; “Chronographical Plan of Willard’s History of the United States,” 36, 36–37; and the Civil War, 37, 39; early life, 18; and education, 18–23, 33, 37, 84; Geography for Beginners, 27; and historical cartography, 4–5, 24–28, 75–76; and historical geography, 22–28; History of the United States, 23–24, 34; and the interdependence of geography and history, 14, 49, 63; and isotherms, 81; and Kohl, 41, 44, 49–50, 52; and the mapping of time, 28–33; and mnemonics, 19, 60; and national archive of maps, 49–50, 52, 59; and nationalism, 21, 37–40, 198; and Native Americans, 72; “The Pictorial View of the World,” 30; “Picture of Nations,” 31–33, 32; Plan for Improving Female Education, 18; politics of, 206n23; Series of Maps, 24–28; “Stream of Time,” 34, 65; “Temple of Time,” 33–34, 38–39; and timelines, 30–31; Universal History, 28, 31; “The World at One View,” 30 Willson, Marcius, 27, 28 Wilson, Woodrow, 185, 199–201, 201 Winchester, Simon, 7 “Wind and Timber Map” (Henry), 106 Winichakul, Thongchai, 38 Winsor, Justin, 42, 55, 56, 68–70, 71, 73, 75 Wolfe, James, 63 women: education for, 18, 21, 37, 84; as writers of history, 208n32 Woodbridge, William Channing, 14, 23, 30, 81–84, 104; “Chart of the Inhabited World,” 83, 84; “Isothermal Chart,” 83–84, 85 woodland, mapping of, 180 “World at One View, The” (Willard), 30 World War I, 199–201 Wright, John Kirtland: Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, 71–73, 74, 198 Wyld, John, 83; “Chart of the World,” 81 yellow fever, 3, 86–87, 89, 90, 93–98, 111, 171, 198