A History of America in 100 Maps

River, and at the same time sowed the seeds of American

independence. The colonists believed that the ejection of the

French would lead to more freedom—particularly for trans-

Allegheny settlement—while the British treated the victory

as an opportunity to tighten governance over the colonies

and to extract more wealth to help pay for the late war. These

British regulations and taxes generated colonial discontent

that ultimately led to the revolution in the 1770s.

The English colonists saw themselves as competent self-

regulators, and crackdowns on governance only heightened

their awareness of their political rights. Among the most

consequential of those restrictions is one documented in

the 1775 map of Boston on page 90. In mid-April, British

forces were sent west to confiscate weapons that were

rumored to be stored in the town of Concord. This British

map illustrated the ensuing skirmishes at Lexington and

Concord, where the “shot heard round the world” opened

a war for independence. As one of the earliest maps of the

Revolutionary War, it conveys the individual maneuvers

and operations that led to the Siege of Boston. In 1775,

however, there was little indication that these skirmishes

would lead to a civil war throughout the colonies, much less

a movement for independence that would influence the arc

of world history.

For the next two centuries, Americans were taught to

see the Revolution as a war to secure liberties violated by

the Crown, even as slavery grew more entrenched. What,

then, did the revolutionary rallying cry of liberty actually

mean? In August 1775 King George declared the colonies

to be in open rebellion. A few months later, the governor of

Virginia offered to liberate slaves who remained loyal to the

Crown. The proclamation outraged Southern slaveholders,

who believed that it manipulated slaves in order to suppress

the Revolution. But it also reminds us how central slavery

was to the colonial experience. Indeed, it was the wide-

spread practice of slavery that sensitized Southern colonists

to the violations of their liberties. In other words, notions

of “freedom” were inextricably connected to slavery.

American independence was won in 1782 when General

George Washington—with tremendous French military

support—defeated the British at the Battle of Yorktown.

Sebastian Bauman’s eyewitness map of that event on

page 92 became a symbol of colonial emancipation. The

final map of this chapter was used by the British to negotiate

the boundaries of this new nation, a palpable reminder of

the sheer contingency of history. How would a continued

French presence in the Ohio Valley have shaped that

region, and would it have limited British settlements to the

seaboard? Might negotiations—rather than rebellion—have

kept the colonies part of the British empire? This chapter

demonstrates the degree to which economic and diplomatic

decisions—many of which were made through maps—had

far-reaching consequences in the eighteenth century.