Map of the United States With its Territories: Also Mexico and the West Indies

Ensign & Thayer
New York, 1851

Displaying the thirty-one states and several territories of the United States following the Compromise of 1850, this map illustrates the impact of that landmark legislation on the American West. Beginning in 1848, the California Gold Rush incited a wave of westward immigration. Congress negotiated the Compromise in response to this mass movement and the sudden political need to manage the expansion of slavery into land taken in the Mexican Cession. In doing so, it created Texas’ familiar boundaries, conferred statehood upon California, and established the Utah and New Mexico territories. The Compromise established a precarious, temporary truce between supporters and opponents of slavery that transformed the mapping of the country.

J.M. Atwood, Map of the United States with its Territories: Also Mexico and the West Indies, New York: Ensign & Thayer, 1851, Map #93925, Map Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.

Ensign and Thayer’s map reflects the catalyst for such change in California’s “Gold Region,” where yellow shading highlights the importance of the Gold Rush. From 1848 to the end of the 1850s, it created an economic boom of nearly $600 million.[1] In the first seven years, approximately 300,000 people flooded into the new American West. This fundamentally transformed the region and emboldened the U.S. government to quickly draw new boundaries over lands traditionally inhabited by Indigenous peoples and Hispanic settlers.[2]

[left] The Compromise of 1850 created Texas’ familiar boundaries. [right] California’s “Gold Region” created an economic boom of nearly $600 million in the mid-nineteenth century.

Manuscript additions by Texana collector and bibliographer Thomas W. Streeter appear throughout the map, indicating western development, the further subdivision of territories into new states, and the importance of transcontinental travel. In Texas, faint markings chart an incorrect projection of the Southern Pacific Railroad.[3]

The Compromise of 1850 established the Utah Territory [left] and New Mexico Territory [right]. Manuscript additions note the later subdivisions of these territories into states and other information. [click to enlarge]

Patriotic imagery evoking the Great Seal of the United States surrounds a population table that includes every state except California, in addition to the District of Columbia and Oregon Territory. The ornate border also includes the American eagle alongside images representing the prosperity and abundance promised by the United States’ expansion to the Pacific Coast.

Patriotic imagery appears in the map’s border, as well as in a table providing population counts for every state except California.

Having expanded its territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and from Canada to Mexico, calls for the United States to spread further into the Caribbean grew in popularity in the era of so-called American “Manifest Destiny.” Accordingly, the map features a detailed view of Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands, as well as an inset of the West Indies.

The map includes future targets of American imperial power in an inset of the West Indies [left] and other islands near Florida [right].

This map presents an image of an expanding United States that was grappling with intense social and political divisions, especially regarding slavery. A decade after its publication, the outbreak of the Civil War forced the country to reckon with the issues that divided it.

[1] J. S. Holliday, “Reverberations of the California Gold Rush,” California History 77, no. 1 (1998): 9. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25462458. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.

[2] Malcolm J. Rohrbough, “The California Gold Rush as a National Experience.” California History, vol. 77, no. 1, 1998, 19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25462459. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.

[3] “Map of the United States, with its Territories: Also Mexico and the West Indies…1851,” Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. website, accessed January 24, 2020, https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/37335ops/map-of-the-united-states-with-its-territories-also-mexico-ensign-thayer.