Cartophilia: Mapping US Slavery

The fourth installment of Cartophilia looks at the groundbreaking and disturbing 1861 visualization of where four million Black people were enslaved in the United States.
arts
Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States, 1861.

Maps and history have always gone together. That’s true everywhere people have pondered old maps to study the past, or drawn new ones to change their current course. But in the United States, no map so dwells in the mind as an emblem of its history—of the legacies of systemic racism that define our past and bedevil our present—like the US Coast Survey’s “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States,” first published in 1861.

The Coast Survey map, which was commissioned by the federal government and distributed widely as the Civil War began, was drawn by cartographer Edwin Hergesheimer. The demographic data to which Hergesheimer gave visual form wasn’t complex: Based on numbers from the 1860 federal census, he used “choropleth” shading to assign to each county in every state across the want-away South (including Missouri, lest we moderns forget that Ferguson and St. Louis were also bastions of bondage) a sum of inky saturation according to the portion of its populace that was enslaved. Those counties that show up blackest—upwards of 80% of their residents were enslaved—were, well, the Blackest. Thus did Hergesheimer’s map conjure a potent visual story—or stories—about the spread of the “peculiar institution” across the US’s first decades of existence, and its precise extent at the start of a war whose combatants the map’s profits went to support. (The banner across its top reads, “Sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army.”)

Among these stories is the shining band that bedecks the map’s middle—from Atlanta across Alabama and on toward Houston—and foreshadows what demographers still call America’s “Black belt” today. Here too are other stories, in the shape of other dark areas on the map, to which students of Black cultural history can point: these regions include the Mississippi’s alluvial delta, in whose cotton fields musicians and laypeople, bending notes on stringed instruments like their forebears from Senegambia, birthed the blues; the bottomlands and islands of South Carolina, still home to Gullah Geechee lifeways; the Tidewater’s plains by the Chesapeake, in Virginia, from whose old plantations hundreds of thousands of people were “sold south,” across the first half of the nineteenth century, to develop the acreage and economy of Dixie.

All these are stories upon which the modern student of America’s past, gazing at this map, can readily alight. But it’s interesting, too, to wonder what its creators—and Abraham Lincoln, who reportedly hung a copy of it in the White House—took from Hergesheimer’s lines and ink. What did Honest Abe and his advisors ponder as they studied its data, there in Lincoln’s war room, throughout the War Between the States? Some of their thoughts may have been military: Did the Union’s generals approach the prospect of pitched battles in the South’s blacker counties differently? Others may have been economic: in 1861, this was a map not merely of demography but of capital—at the Civil War’s start, the bankable value of the South’s nearly four million enslaved humans, some $4 billion dollars, was greater than its real estate. For further consideration of these questions, you’ll have to ask historians. But in that truth, too, and the distance between the stories this map was created to tell and ones it may signal now, lies a great truth common to all maps made in good faith: its stories shift with time, and according to who’s looking. ♦

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