OML - Mapping the Republic: Conflicting Concepts


Entry Page
Index of Images
1. Introduction
Conflicting Representations
of the Republic
2. Spaces of Independence:
Mapping the Union
3. Constitutional Spaces:
Mapping States
The Tension of
Spatial Representation
4. Early Republic Gazetteers and Atlases
5. Geographical Atlases
6. Manifest Destiny
and the Popular Mapping of Wars
7. Governmental Mapping:
Topography, Coastal, Geological


Introduction

Maps of the United States of America made by U.S. map makers in the nineteenth century embodied a truly important conflict in how Americans understood and conceptualized the republic. The issue was, which characteristic defined the republic? According to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the republic was a single union comprising " one People" united in their opposition to British tyranny; this federalist concept would underpin the belief in Manifest Destiny and the republic's Westward expansion. Yet according to the Constitution, which took effect in 1789, the heart of the republic was formed by the sovereignty and autonomy of its constituent states; this localist concept would underpin the issue of "states' rights" and the slaughter of the Civil War (1861-1865).

This exhibition explores the two conflicting concepts and their political ramifications by means of early nineteenth century wall maps (sections 2-3). It then examines the tension between these spatial conceptions as it played out in a variety of maps and atlases made by both commercial companies and government agencies in the U.S.A.: geographical gazetteers and atlases from the Early Republic; general atlases from 1820-1860; newspaper broadsides covering both civil and external wars; and, the surveying and mapping of the topography and coasts of the U.S.A. by the Federal government (sections 4-7). Of course, the conflict persists to this day: no matter the degree to which Americans understand the U.S.A. to be a single entity, as represented by the weather maps of U.S.A. Today, they still expect Rand McNally and other publishers to organize their road atlases by individual states!

Credits and Acknowledgments

Mapping the Republic: Conflicting Concepts of the Territory and Character of the U.S.A., 1790-1900 was prepared by Professor Matthew H. Edney in association with the 20th International Conference on the History of Cartography organized by the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, and the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University, under the aegis of Imago Mundi, Ltd.

The exhibit was installed by George Carhart and Casco Bay Framing. Valuable assistance was given by Dr. Harold L. Osher, Yolanda Theunissen, Lance Bergman, and Professor Adam-Max Tuchinsky. The professional assistance of Zip Kellogg, Sara Sikes, and the staff of the Publications and Marketing Department of USM is gratefully acknowledged as is the technical assistance of Affordable Photo. David Cobb and the Harvard Map Collection provided a digital version of the Lewis 1816 map for the exhibition website. All other images were scanned by Grapheteria, Inc. The exhibition poster was generously funded by the Osher Library Associates.

1. John Wallis (English., fl. 1780-1800)
The United States of America laid down
From the best Authorities, Agreeable to the Peace of 1783
Engraving, hand-colored, 46.0cm x 55.0cm
London, 1783
Osher Collection

The political independence of the United States was celebrated in several maps published during the Revolution and, like this one, during the Anglo-American peace negotiations. This map weds the territory of the new republic to its high ideals, expressed in the allegorical title-cartouche. On the left of the cartouche, the Revolution’s military architect, George Washington, ushers forward Liberty. On the right, Wisdom and Justice guide its political architect, Benjamin Franklin. Over all flies the new Stars and Stripes, heralded by an angel who appears about to place an imperial wreath atop the flag pole. A simple, compelling, and idealized political statement emerges about what the moral and geographical character of the United States should be, from the perspective of a British supporter of the Revolution.

This kind of imagery neatly demonstrates the manner in which maps convey political and social as well as geographical meanings.

2. Carl Emil Doepler (German, 1824-1905)
Joseph Hutchins Colton (American, 1800-1893)
[Frontispiece]
Etching transferred to lithograph, 34.0cm x 28.0cm
From: Johnson's New Illustrated (Steel Plate) Family Atlas (New York: Johnson and Ward, 1865)
Osher Collection

	This atlas frontispiece, first published in J. H. Colton’s American Atlas (1855), illustrates the potency of Manifest Destiny in the formation of a national identity for the United States. It depicts the westward expansion of the U.S. from the East (background), across the Great Plains (center ground), to the first settlements hewn from the wooded slopes of the Rockies (foreground). A group of Native Americans—depicted in a highly romanticized manner, as befits an image originally prepared by a German artist for a European audience—witness the inexorable advancement of American civilization, even as they are excluded from it. Carl Emil Doepler’s image reminds us that the identity constructed for the United States in the nineteenth century by maps and atlases was overwhelmingly one of a nation of Northern European-descended Protestant men.
	3. James Wilson (American, 1763-1855) A New American Terrestrial Globe Engraving, hand-colored, 13" (33cm) diameter Bradford, VT, 1811 Osher Collection

	4. W. B. Annin (American, d. 1829) Gilman Joslin (American, 1804-ca. 1886) Joslin's Six Inch Terrestrial Globe, Containing the Latest Discoveries Engraving, hand-colored, 6" (15.25cm) diameter Boston, 1868 Osher Collection
	5. W. B. Annin (American, d. 1829) Gilman Joslin (American, 1804-ca. 1886) Joslin's Six Inch Celestial Globe, From the best Authorities Engraving, hand-colored, 6" (15.25cm) diameter Boston, 1840 Osher Collection
	James Wilson, a Vermont farmer and blacksmith, made the first globes in the United States in about 1810. The larger globe displayed here is his first dated one (1811) [item 3]. Although useful devices for classrooms and libraries, globes were not an important form of geographical representation in nineteenth-century America. Thus, after first publishing his paired terrestrial and celestial globes in the 1820s, Gilman Joslin could continue to simply reissue them with few changes for many decades [items 4-5]. Downplaying their connections with the rest of the world, Americans expressed their political and nationalist desires through their wall maps and atlases.
	Conflicting Representations of the Republic 2. Spaces of Independence: Mapping the Union