IMPERIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE 97Oswald heavily annotated his copy of the map
to make sense of the competing claims of the British
and the Americans. The most important of these
annotations are his thin red lines, which mark the
boundaries of the new United States. But Oswald also
included the thick yellow and red lines to reference
French and British territorial claims prior to the end
of the French and Indian War. He included these
historical lines to note the last legal definition of
boundaries in North America, a point of reference
for subsequent negotiations. In the same vein,
he prominently emblazoned “Six Nations” across
the western part of Virginia and north through the
Great Lakes. This was a reference to earlier treaties
that “gave” the British suzerainty over the Iroquois
lands (the Iroquois might have interpreted that
arrangement differently). By attributing sovereignty
to the “Six Nations,” Mitchell was in fact laying claim
for the British.
Ironically, this British claim gave the new United
States a boundary much further west of the original
colonies. The American delegation to the Paris peace
negotiations included John Jay, Benjamin Franklin,
and John Adams. They successfully pressed the British
to relinquish claims of territorial sovereignty all
the way west to the Mississippi River, considerably
enlarging the new nation.
This “red line” copy of the map used in the peace
negotiations was given to King George III, a record
of lost colonies. As Matthew Edney has observed,
there is no small irony in the fact that a map designed
in 1755 to protect and extend the British empire in
North America was ultimately used to dismember it.
In fact, one wonders whether the map—in depicting
geographical coherence—might have implicitly
suggested a nation long before one materialized in
the Revolution. In this respect, maps have the power
to suggest what might be as well as what is.
By 1791 the Mitchell map had been reprinted
twenty-one times in four languages, and pirated
many times more; it circulated widely in Europe
and North America, and was used to negotiate
boundary disputes into the early twentieth century.
Just as powerful is the symbolic influence it has
exerted down to our own day, for it remains the
first recognizable picture of the nation. With its
articulation of emerging states along the seaboard,
as well as its geographical reach into the trans-
Mississippi West, the map looks familiar to us. This
gives it a particular hold over our imagination, and
is perhaps yet another reason why one early map
scholar called it the most important map in
American history.