The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860

Martin Brückner

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469632605
• eBook ISBN: 9781469632612
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A “carto-coded” America — a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful — had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography’s spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence.

Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions.

This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Brückner’s comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.

PART ONE

American Mapworks

Modern maps have, essentially, no origin at all: they simply emerge—fully formed, as if from the mind of Zeus—onto computer screens and chain bookstore remainder tables. They are maps of something—Tuscany or Antarctica or Philadelphia—but not maps by anyone. At best, a connoisseur can glance at an atlas and derive its corporate parentage . . . but we still know nothing, imagine nothing about the hands that prepared it.—Ken Jennings, Maphead

Unlike today, when ubiquity and anonymity define the life of modern cartography, American maps made between 1750 and 1860 thrived on being recognized for naming not only their creators but the process and expectations of creation. Take, for example, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (1816; Figure 4). Created by Samuel Lewis, best known today for his work depicting the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition, this map was one of the first domestic cartographic giants. Measuring six by seven feet, the map announced its title and the names of its makers in bold letters: the designer (Lewis), the engravers (William and Samuel Harrison), and the publisher (Emmor Kimber). The map’s eponymous accompaniment, a previously published proposal, delineated the map’s parentage in more detail. It acknowledges that Lewis underwent “six years of labour and trouble” to create the map from “Surveys and the most Authentic Documents,” to have it “Engraven in the best Style” by Philadelphia copperplate engravers, and to give the map a material design that would allow it to become at once a wall map, a folio “Atlas,” and a loose collection of map sheets. Having hailed the collaborative and material nature of the map’s handiwork, the proposal identified three ways in which the map could be handled. Asserting the map’s scientific authority (“correct”), market value (“twenty dollars”), and political purpose (to create a “parental likeness of” and “feeling for” the United States), it positioned the Lewis map as a versatile artifact that was brimming with meanings imbued by the activity of mapmaking long before its actual use.¹

FIGURE 4. Samuel Lewis, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (Philadelphia, 1816). 172 × 187 cm. David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com

Published in broadsides and newspapers, biographical accounts like this are important reminders that most American maps had prosaic beginnings. Since the 1720s, short advertisements rather than spectacular displays of prints announced the birth of a map in American towns and villages. Ranging from laconic one-liners to wordy essays, these announcements served as proxies for the yet-absent and frequently bulky real thing. As newspaper ads certified the existence of a particular map, they took on the role of the unceremonious calling card, introducing the map to American society while nudging it toward its future useful life. At the same time, map advertisements frequently called attention to the new map’s already extensive past: to the period when it had been an idea, a draft, and a raw print; to the labor, technology, and people required to create it; to the time when it was a work in progress, under construction, and a prototype. In short, newspaper ads and magazine reviews called attention to the period in a map’s social life when it was becoming a map, when it was still one step removed from being the finished product and consumer good that was poised to enter offices, schools, and homes and ultimately attract the scrutiny of post-production map users.²

Unassuming and mostly overlooked today, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century map advertisements—and American newspapers published hundreds, if not thousands, similar to the ones introducing the Lewis map (Figure 5)—provide a conceptual framework for readjusting the view of a map’s material biography. On the one hand, the brief reference to “Surveys” and “Authentic Documents” invites us to think about the map’s origins as described by Bruno Latour’s model of “science in action.” During the long eighteenth century, every map had its beginnings in a dynamic course of action that originated with the accumulation of the surveyors’ information, consisting of numerical and visual data. In what amounted to a two-way traffic system, the locally gathered materials traveled to and from imperial centers—Latour calls Paris and London the “centers of calculation”—where royal geographers vetted the geodetic information, compared it with extant maps and geographic descriptions, and after careful selection eventually transferred the once-raw data into the designs and material formats of the printed map.³

FIGURE 5. “Proposals by Emmor Kimber . . . for Publishing by Subscription, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America . . . by Samuel Lewis,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, July 12, 1815, 4. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society

Between 1750 and 1860, the city of Philadelphia was the North American center of calculation, hosting as well as controlling the American flow of geographic information and cartographic representation. Renowned surveyors and geographers who were active during this period (these included Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Edward Kern and Alexander von Humboldt) shared their information with the city’s professional class of mapmakers. To follow Latour’s model—and this has been done expertly by historians working in the fields of the history of science, historical geography, and cartography—the recovery of a map’s social life and meaning hinges on the people who generated a map’s geodetic archive, on the surveying methods, and on the institutional practices surrounding the transfer of data to map sheets, including the choice of scale and projection. In this type of analysis, the value of a map emerges through the lens of knowledge production. Under scrutiny is the means by which American mapmakers gained access to geodetic and geographic information, circulated it, and ultimately selected good from bad data during the construction of a new map.⁴

Yet, American map advertisements seemed to be much more interested in reporting the economic calculus of printmaking rather than data collecting as the defining framework documenting the formative period of maps. To follow the language used in the ads promoting the Lewis map, both the mapmaker and publisher were emphatically less concerned about geodetic source materials than with print technology (“engraving”), map paper (“six sheets”), terms of sale (“fifteen Dollars” for a colored atlas, “twenty dollars” if cloth-backed, colored, varnished, and equipped with hanging rollers), and commercial availability (“No. 93, Market Street—Philadelphia”). In view of the ads’ prevailing economic and material rhetoric, the map’s epistemological foundation closely resembled the analytical model of the “communication circuit” posited by print historian Robert Darnton when describing the history of early modern book production. Adapted to American cartography, this model locates the value of maps at the fulcrum of map authorship and publishing. Accordingly, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America would be a cumulative product shaped by surveyors, government officials, and local draftsmen, as well as by the many actions undertaken by engravers, printers, plate suppliers, papermakers, map painters, shopkeepers, shipping agents, and the many clerks, wagoners, or boatmen handling maps as cargo. A map’s form and meaning would come alive inside a social world defined by division of labor and unevenly structured patterns of exchange. It would have been shaped and paced by politics, technology transfers, social customs, and even the seasons. Of course, one more factor was the map consumer, whose tastes and interests mapmakers and map publishers hoped to identify in the early stages of production. Although the ads touted the Lewis map as being ready-made for a general public that was hungry for geographical knowledge, it also claimed to be custom-made, addressing the needs of special interest groups such as teachers, parents, and patriots. In this model, a map’s material biography—especially when adjusted to the time before its actual sale—emerged from a panoply of actions and decisions, involving intensive collaboration, speculation, economic calculation, technological innovation, intellectual influence, and copyright concerns.⁵

Part 1 reconstructs the early life of maps as they emerged from within the communication circuit of early American print culture. Samuel Lewis’s New and Correct Map of the United States of North America came to life at a watershed moment in the history of the American map industry (Chapter 1). The Lewis map still reflected an older tradition of mapmaking in which maps were the products of single authorship, handmade paper, line engraving, and copperplate printing. Moreover, they were mostly the products of personal fundraising, occasional government patronage, and a limited distribution system. Published in 1816, the Lewis map literally bore the imprimatur of an artisanal business model established during the 1740s and 1750s by Philadelphia-based surveyors and cartographers such as Lewis Evans. The latter’s maps emerged from workshops that were steeped in the art of pictorial printmaking. Defined by the dual status of intellectual originality and material singularity, they strongly reflected the mapmaker’s personal skill as well as the printer’s work habits or the papermaker’s competence. Artisanal maps, as we will see, were by and large considered fair use objects, plagiarized at will, and thus led the double life of being at once rare original imprints and mass-produced copies.

The symbolic and social value of maps changed irreversibly at the turn of the nineteenth century when Mathew Carey and John Melish introduced the business model of the manufactured map (Chapter 2). During the decades spanning the 1790s and 1810s, respectively, Carey and Melish revised the artisanal approach to mapmaking by assuming the role of the full-time map publisher. They thus adopted a sophisticated approach familiar in Europe but untested in America. By centralizing all communications involved in the early phase of a map’s life, they were able to coordinate access to the existing geodetic archive of published maps. For Carey, the labor of centralization involved keeping the production of a map within the limits of the city of Philadelphia. Though a printer himself, he subcontracted all aspects of fabrication to local craftsmen and their shops, so that his manufactured maps spent their early life in the relatively disinterested hands of map designers, draftsmen, printers, and colorists hired by Carey and paid by the finished piece. Melish, by contrast, went one step further when he consolidated all phases of mapmaking under one roof. The social life of his maps was defined by their proximity to all relevant workstations during production, including packaging and shipping. Significantly, although both Carey’s and Melish’s map businesses proved to be economic failures in the short term, their model was responsible for jump-starting a domestic map industry that catered to a growing and increasingly diverse audience, with the result that, for the first time in American history, domestically produced maps outsold foreign imports.

During the decades that followed the publication of the Lewis map, four technological innovations profoundly changed the pattern of production. Machine-made paper, lithographic printing, transportation, and steam-powered presses altered both the face of the American map industry and the very face of American maps (Chapter 3). Adapting the business models explored by Carey and Melish, a new generation of Philadelphia map publishers, in particular Henry Schenck Tanner and S. Augustus Mitchell, experimented with a new form of map authorship based on production teams and practices that anticipated the modern business model of vertical integration. By pooling the knowledge of map designers, engravers, and colorists familiar with different printing techniques, as well as by controlling the construction of special map paper and sales networks, antebellum map publishers introduced new designs that altered the familiar look of maps and their materiality. Indeed, the art of mapmaking became gradually tied to the art of map packaging; a single map design would support multiple material formats, from erasable pasteboards and atlas maps to multicolored wall maps and handkerchief maps.

By the 1850s, industrial-style production methods set new printing records, prompting one publisher to boast of having sold “millions of maps, charts, and other works.” As industrial maps flooded the American market—and these were the ones responsible for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that American maps were “in every house and shop”—they multiplied their social contacts in new and different ways: their lives were increasingly shaped by itinerant map sellers, who, with map in hand, canvassed America’s urban institutions and rural farmsteads; the form and content of unsold maps took into account feedback from individual readers and cultural institutions; and, above all, with the introduction of lithography, the very foundation of map production became radically mobilized, allowing a print-on-demand infrastructure to emerge in major printing centers while enabling the widespread distribution of mapmaking facilities in small print shops that were emerging in the nation’s peripheries.⁶

Throughout Part 1, the social life of maps emerges from a much-overlooked production process that was contingent on social exchanges taking place at the intersection of mapmaking and the dynamics of print capitalism. Although this claim is familiar to historians of cartography and pictorial printing, Part 1 addresses a pervasive oversight in the historiography and interpretation of early American print culture. Studies in the history of the American book, the American library, or the American periodical press occasionally reference maps but have been hesitant to engage with maps more fully, despite the fact that maps and map books were best sellers, that they were cataloged in free or subscription libraries, and that maps were regularly inserted into popular magazines and newspapers. Providing a detailed, albeit locally inflected, account that links American map production to American print culture more generally, Part 1’s historical surveys and empirical information allow us to think about maps as a vital component of the American communication circuit. More specifically, the chapters of Part 1 show how early American maps accrued meaning and cultural significance as they passed through dozens of hands long before becoming “the map”—before settling into the role of “miniature,” “parental likeness,” or “large...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface. Introducing the Social Life of American Maps
• Part One: American Mapworks
• Part Two: The Spectacle of Maps
• Part Three: The Mobilization of Maps
• Epilogue. Cartoral Arts and Material Metaphors
• Appendix 1: Price Table—Maps and Their Sales Prices, 1755–1860
• Appendix 2: Inventory of “John Melish Geographer and Map Publisher”
• Graphs
• Index