T
he Declaration of Independence remains one of the
most powerful political documents in human history,
an assertion of rights and equality that continues
to inspire democratic movements worldwide. But
while it galvanized a rebellion against tyranny, at bottom
the declaration was a statement of principles rather than a
blueprint for governance. It did little to establish an alternative
to British monarchy, nor did it answer thorny questions of
administration or state power. A stable political framework was
all the more important given the astonishing and unexpected
geographical changes brought by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
The American delegation to those treaty negotiations won a
western boundary for the nation at the Mississippi River. This
made the United States one of the largest nations in the world
at its founding.
Those western territories were home to Native Americans
who had no voice in the transfer of power from the British to the
Americans. Several tribes northwest of the Ohio River actively
resisted American rule for several years after the Revolution.
The conflict was settled—if temporarily—by the 1795 Treaty of
Greenville, which acknowledged Indian title to lands west of the
Appalachians while simultaneously reaffirming US sovereignty
in the region. This tenuous arrangement did little to stabilize
the larger relationship between American settlers and Native
Americans. Tribes further east also discovered that American
independence brought negative consequences; the Iroquois,
for example, found that their wartime alliance with the British
cost them control over lands in New York and Pennsylvania.
The problems facing the new nation extended far beyond
native–white relations. The resolution of wartime debts,
jurisdiction over western lands, and the admission of new
states were just some of the issues that American independence
left unresolved. Driving all of this uncertainty were more
fundamental questions about the nature of political authority.
With the British no longer in control, how would Americans
govern themselves? What did these former colonists have in
common with one another, and how would they forge a larger
national identity?
Many of the maps in this chapter were designed to confront
those challenges. We open with Abel Buell’s map of the new
nation, a rare picture that both captures the flush of victory and
anticipates the problems ahead. Only a few copies of Buell’smap were made, but its influence was amplified when it was
incorporated into Jedidiah Morse’s bestselling geography
textbook. With this wide circulation, Buell’s map became a
fixture in homes and schools across the country and exposed
Americans to a new common geographical identity. Like rituals
such as the Fourth of July and Washington’s birthday, maps had
the power to cultivate a sense of nationhood. For this reason,
geography became an essential element of the American
curriculum after the Revolution. The first generation of girls to
be formally educated was widely taught to replicate maps of
their nation with great care and artistry, as shown on page 118.
Yet even as a national identity began to coalesce, Americans
struggled to forge a stable administrative state. The first
attempt came with the Articles of Confederation, formed
during the Revolutionary War. Suspicious of centralized power
and monarchy, the framers constructed a weak government
that was based on a contract between the states rather than
a binding union. But the limits of this government soon
became apparent when it was unable to levy taxes or raise an
army. Tasked with improving this system, the framers instead
drafted an entirely new constitution that invested the federal
government with more power. To ensure ratification, they
made several compromises. They included a Bill of Rights and
a bicameral legislature, but also the notorious “three-fifths”
compromise, which enlarged the population of slave states to
strengthen their representation in Congress.
The location of the national capital was itself a
compromise, as detailed on page 106. Maps of Washington,
D.C. became recognizable symbols of this unprecedented
experiment in representative government. The iconic
power of the plan of Washington is apparent in Edward
Savage’s portrait of the president and his family (page 6).
The first family gathers around a table to examine a map
of the proposed national capital, drawing attention to the
future that it represents. At far right a black servant stands
inconspicuously to attention, his role in the scene—and
in the nation—left unclear. The elegance, serenity, and
optimism of Savage’s painting was entirely at odds with the
bitter partisanship of the early national era. Satirical maps of
redistricting in Massachusetts—captured on page 116—struck
a chord with Federalists. They also introduced the American
term of the “gerrymander” to capture a troublesome yetA Nation Realized