Philadelphia, and San Francisco; few chose the South.
Regional differences surfaced in other ways. Evangelicalrevivals fostered an array of social and moral reforms in the
antebellum era, the most successful of which was temperance.
The map on page 126 reveals the energy that drove the
contemporary war against alcohol. While temperance was a
national crusade, however, most evangelical movements were
concentrated in the Northern states. Samuel Gridley Howe’s
effort to teach geography to the blind (page 128) grew out
of a community of reformers in Boston. Slavery made
the South more paternalistic, less likely to support social
reforms, and downright hostile to more assertive movements
such as abolition.
That reform impulse found political expression in the WhigParty, which had organized against President Jackson’s two-
term Democratic administration from 1829 to 1837. Through
much of the 1840s—even as the nation expanded to the
Pacific Ocean—Whigs and Democrats maintained national
constituencies. But in 1854 Stephen Douglas fractured this
party system by introducing a bill that repealed the prohibition
against slavery in the Louisiana Territory. The prospect of
slavery extending north of the 36° 30' line outraged many
Northerners. They abandoned their Whig and Democrat
homes to organize a new Republican party, committed to
the principle that Congress had the obligation to prohibit
slavery from the western territories. Through the 1850s, John
Jay and other Republicans urgently issued maps to publicize
the geographical threat of slavery (page 140). Jay’s map
demonstrates that it was the fate of slavery in the West, and
not in the South, that drove the sectional crisis.
The Republicans lost the presidential election of 1856.Four years later, they won the electoral college and the White
House without the support of a single slave state. Slaveholders
in the Deep South considered the very election of Abraham
Lincoln a threat to their future; they responded by leaving
the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln made clear that
he would protect slavery where it existed, his aim being to
halt the momentum of secession. For a few weeks he kept
the states of the Upper South in the Union. But in April 1861,
a crisis at Fort Sumter led the president to call up the militia,
which prompted Virginia and three other slave states to join
the Confederacy.
In the first months of the Civil War, Lincoln refused to
attack slavery, and overruled generals who used their military
authority to issue emancipation orders in the South. The
president believed that a conservative policy on slavery was
needed to keep the loyalty of the border states, particularly
Kentucky. But the slow progress of the Union Army led
Lincoln to adopt emancipation as a military measure. Though
highly limited in scope, the Emancipation Proclamation
fundamentally shifted the meaning of the war. What began
as an effort to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union
ultimately ended slavery and redefined American citizenship.
Maps played a crucial and often unexpected role in that
conflict. Here we examine not the many maps designed for
battle but, rather, those that measured the strength of the
rebellion. For Lincoln, a path-breaking map of the distribution
of slavery (page 142) helped him to see that the Confederacy’s
greatest asset was its labor system. Similarly, data-driven
maps (page 146) shaped General William Tecumseh
Sherman’s campaign through Georgia, which ultimately
accelerated Union victory and the destruction of slavery.
The Civil War ended a brutal labor system that had
endured for centuries. But the liberation of four million slaves
was swiftly compromised with the end of Reconstruction.
In state after state, whites violently subjugated the freedmen
and attacked Republican leaders in a manner that ultimately
led to the collapse of Reconstruction governments. The
map on page 148 shows the dynamics of this resistance in
New Orleans, a pattern that extended across the South and
anticipated the future of the entire region: by 1877 the
nation had abandoned Reconstruction and turned its
attention elsewhere.