The Modifiability of US Commercial Lithographic Maps

I’ve been looking afresh at an old friend—Phelps & Watson’s New Map of the United States (New York: Phelps & Watson, 1860)—that demonstrates how portions of lithographic works can be easily modified, replaced, or moved around on the stone.

click here for high-res image

The Leventhal Map Center has the same map, but dated 1861.

This one of a series of ornate wall maps of the USA and the world that were published by a number of intertwined New York businesses in the 1840s and 1850s: Phelps & Ensign; Ensign, Thayer & Co.; Ensign, Bridgman, & Fanning; Phelps, Fanning, & Co.; and Phelps & Watson. All were printed lithographically and then hand colored.

Phelps & Watson’s New Map of the United States was printed from two plates, producing a large upper sheet and a smaller lower sheet. The whole is framed by an ornamental border, with vignettes and leafy vines. The lower sheet bears an array of state seals and, most prominently, a wood engraving by the New York firm of Lossing-Barritt of John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776” (1832, now in Yale University Art Gallery) [n1]. A key to Trumbull’s work and a few more seals are on the upper sheet. The upper sheet features an ornate title image and the map per se, which ends very abruptly at the lower edge of the sheet and the lower sheet’s reproduction of Trumbull’s image:

The map’s marginal gradations of latitude also end abruptly at the junction of the two sheets.

Plainly, Phelps & Watson’s map was copied from an existing map. What, then, was the original map that Phelps & Watson so crudely mistreated?

The Original Map

The answer, found with remarkable ease, given the distinctiveness of the ornamental border—although the similarity of the title to many other Colton products means that I had to trawl through a lot of other works—was a map copyrighted by the prominent map maker and publisher J. H. Colton in 1848. This map was issued in two equal-sized sheets, a left one and a right. An early impression at the New York Public Library is damaged and has separated into the two sheets:

Click here for high-resolution image. See the appendix for links to other versions of the same map, from 1849 to 1859.

The title, set in the middle of the Atlantic under an ornate vignette of a port scene fronted by a bellicose eagle standing on a Stars-and-Stripes shield (in emulation of the Great Seal of the United States) with naval stores and agricultural produce:

Map of the | United States | of America, | The British Provinces. Mexico. the West Indies and | Central America. with part of New Grenada and Venezuela.

New York. | Published by J. H. Colton, | No. 86 Cedar St. | 1849.

Below this title, and to the right, under a short legend, are the names of the designers responsible for the image:

Map drawn by Geo. W. Colton [n2]

Engraved by John M. Atwood

Border Designd. & Engd. by W. S. Bernard

• all identified as being in New York

Centered in the lower margin, the copyright statement reads:

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1848 by J. H. Colton in the Clerks Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In the Pacific Ocean is an inset map of the Atlantic Ocean, showing “the Routes of the Ocean Steamers.”

The ornate border has several elements:

top: four landscape scenes from the eastern and western United States, from right (east) to left (west), “Valley of the Connecticut from Mt. Holyoke”; “Saratoga Lake, New York”; “Astoria, Oregon”; and “Willammette [sic] Falls”

sides: monuments to Revolutionary generals and battles

bottom: vignettes, from right to left, of the US Capitol, the entry to a port, “Mexicans catching wild cattle,” and the cathedral at the heart of Mexico City.

All told, and bearing in mind the date, this is a map designed to promote US expansion into Mexico in the aftermath of the annexation of California and the discovery of gold there.

A search of the catalogs of the main map libraries in the USA reveal several versions of the map, bearing several dates in the title block, although the copyright statement is not altered (see appendix below). It seems likely that other versions were printed through the 1850s. (For example, an auction house has an 1859 impression with just the Colton imprint.) I will admit that I haven’t had the time to make a minute examination of all of these images to identify more precise changes other than to the imprints. Importantly, I have not found any impressions dated after 1859.

The size of the maps is important. All the catalog records offer slightly different dimensions for the work, and none are clear as to what the recorded dimensions are for (paper, entire image, inner neatline of the border/map extent). Usefully, the NYPL impression that has come apart into its two sheets is cataloged as “74 x 95 cm, sheets 88 x 58 cm”; if the latter dimensions are for the paper size of each sheet, calculations based on the digital image indicate that the former is the inner neatline/map extent:

Creating the 1860 Map

Phelps & Watson did not simply take the two printing surfaces for Colton’s 1849–59 wall map and modify them, as I had expected. I presume that they took freshly printed images from those printing surfaces and transferred them, in parts, to new printing surfaces. In the process, they could make several changes.

1. the eastern edge of the map was also abruptly cropped off, cutting away Cape Breton and Newfoundland at upper right and the Windward and Leeward islands at lower right:

2. Phelps & Watson’s image was thus about 12 cm narrower than Colton’s, while cropping off the bottom part of Colton’s map reduced Phelps & Watson’s map image by another 12 cm in height as well:

It seems that the reduction in the printing area of the map and ornamental border permitted it to be fitted on one large printing surface. With a second printing surface for the lower sheet, Phelps & Watson’s overall map was taller.

3. Adjusting the overall size of the work required Phelps & Watson to adjust the ornamental border. The two inner vignettes in the upper border on Colton’s map were spaced 31cm apart, but on Phelps & Watson’s they are just 19cm apart (from the top-right tip of the flag at Astoria to the hand of the left-hand staffage at Saratoga Lake). In between sections of the ornate border were omitted. At the same time, repeated sections were inserted on the sides, between the Washington Monument in New York and the US Capitol, stretching the border from 19cm to 38.5cm (between the base of the monument and the tip of the right-hand chimney stack on the Capitol).

4. Reducing the width of the Atlantic required Phelps & Watson to create a new title vignette, based on the original, and shifting it further south.

5. To fill in the space above the new title, Phelps & Watson added a whaling scene (rather like an explorer placing a flag in new territory!) and below a scene of colonial trade with native figures, reminiscent of the title cartouche from Thomas Jefferys’ Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England (1755) [another of my favoretist maps]:

Click here For high-resolution image

6. The portion of the inset map of the Atlantic that remained above the lower crop line was obliterated by Phelps & Watson by the key to Trumbull’s painting and the first row of state seals.

7. Phelps & Watson did not alter the small icons of sailing and steam ships, but did add a small vignette, perhaps of indigenous peoples, in the Gulf of Mexico.

8. Phelps & Watson moved the scales, small legend, and the authority names from where they’d been cut off with the eastern most strip of ocean into the Pacific, just above the painting key.

And 9. Phelps & Watson moved the copyright statement from below the ornate border to below Lossing-Barritt’s wood engraving. Below the wood engraving at the right, was also added an indicator of the printer of the whole: “Lang & Laing 117, Fulton St.” in New York (i.e., William Lang and Joseph Laing).

All told, Phelps & Watson used the ability to treat lithographic printing stones as stores of clip-art, to create a map that was less about pure geography—it was just too unconcerned with making neat borders in south and east—than it was about creating a politically balanced image, at the height of the debates that would soon lead to the Civil War, between the individual states, emblematized by all those seals, that were nonetheless part of a Union that had been created through the Declaration of Independence and that was expanding westwards (those planned railroads into the West are prominent) and even southwards into Mexico.

Appendix: Recorded impressions of Colton’s map of the United States, 1849–59

1849, Colton’s address specified as 86 Cedar St., with neither a table of maritime distances nor the inset map of Panama, in the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and Harvard (not imaged)

1849, with a table of distances added, in the David Rumsey collection and NYPL, both very clean impressions because they were issued folded in covers rather than as wall maps on rollers [n3]

1850, with an inset map of the Isthmus of Panama added, showing the proposed rail connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific, at Stanford/Ruderman, NYPL (not imaged), and Boston Public Library (not imaged)

1852, with two publishers added to Colton—John Ball in New Orleans, and W. R. Babcock in Charleston, SC—in LC (very clean copy, dissected on cloth)

1853, with the imprint once again solely Colton in New York, but now 49 Cedar St., at Stanford/Ruderman

1855, at Stanford/Ruderman, now published by “J. H. Colton and Co.” at 172 William St.

1856, at Stanford/Ruderman, c1, c2, and c3

1857, at BPL (not imaged), Harvard in a facsimile issued by the USGS (not imaged)

1859, now with the imprint of “Thayer and Colton” at 18 Beekman St., NY, at Stanford/Ruderman, Yale c1, c2 (neither imaged), and NYPL (not imaged); by this point, steamer routes through the Caribbean to Tehuantepec, an alternative site for a railway to the Pacific.

Notes

n1. Trumbull, who in 1775 had made a map of Boston during the siege, which he sent to George Washington, is famous for his large history paintings installed in 1826 in the newly completed rotunda of the US Capitol. The mural of this scene was not dated; the 1832 reduced version was so, and I presume that was the version copied for this reproduction. Other wood engravings of the 1832 painting can be found on J. M. Atwood, Pictorial Map of the United States, 1849 (New York: Ensign and Thayer, 1849) at Leventhal, and on The Cottage Ornament (New York: Ensign, Bridgman & Fanning, 1858) at OML.

n2. George Woolworth Colton (1827–1901), J H’s elder son and eventual successor.

n3. Yale and BPL have 1849 imprints, but I’m not sure which variants.