Military Map of the United States & Territories Showing the Location of the Military Posts, Arsenals, Navy Yards, & Ports of Entry.

Description

In addition to its depiction of Arizona as a Confederate Territory, “This [map] is interesting for it must be one of the first to show the three new territories, Colorado (formed Feb. 28, 1861) and Dakota and Nevada (formed March 2, 1861). It gives the old boundaries of Oregon and Washington territories, as they were before the admission of Oregon as a state on February 14, 1859” – TWS. Streeter 3910; Stephenson 10.

Published in Philadelphia by P.S. Duval & Son in 1861, this large and handsomely colored military map of the United States was compiled and issued at the precise moment when the country it depicts was coming apart: states seceding in the South, three new territories being organized in the West, military posts and arsenals being seized or defended, and the first battles of an unexpected war already underway. The supplement inset at the lower right — titled Supplement to P.S. Duval & Son’s Military Map, Showing the Locations of the Present Military Operations — confirms that the map was published after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, and situates it within weeks or months of the events it records.

No comparable map captures the Union at quite this moment of maximum instability.

The Map in Detail

The main map presents the full extent of the United States and territories in vivid original hand color, with states and territories differentiated by wash — free states in pink, slave states and border states in teal and green, new territories in yellow and blue — conveying at a glance the political geography of a country in the process of splitting. Military posts, arsenals, navy yards, and ports of entry are marked throughout the sheet, their locations compiled from public documents and listed in the detailed marginal panels that flank the map on both left and right sides. These columns are an inventory of federal military infrastructure at the outbreak of war: forts and garrisons from Maine to California, navy yards from Portsmouth to Pensacola, customs houses and ports of entry along every coast. A scale of miles, an explanations key, and railway lines add further layers of strategic utility.

Three insets accompany the main map. At lower center, a detailed plan of Pensacola and Perdido Bays records one of the earliest flashpoints of the Civil War: Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay remained in Union hands throughout the conflict, a small but symbolically important Federal position on Confederate soil. At lower right, two further insets present the Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Washington D.C. theater in enlarged detail, showing the road and railway networks across which the war’s earliest campaigns would be fought. The supplement inset at upper right, titled Showing the Locations of the Present Military Operations, places Union and Confederate positions in the mid-Atlantic region as they stood at the time of publication — a real-time addition to a map already dense with strategic information.

The Western territories deserve particularly close attention. Among the first maps to show the three territories created in the opening months of 1861 — Colorado (formed February 28) and Dakota and Nevada (both formed March 2) — the map records a federal government simultaneously organizing new administrative units in the West and fighting for its survival in the East. The old boundaries of Oregon and Washington territories are preserved as they stood before Oregon’s admission to statehood on February 14, 1859. And in the Southwest, Arizona Territory is shown in the brief seven-month configuration during which the Confederate government held effective control, following Colonel John R. Baylor’s defeat of Union forces at the Battle of Mesilla in July 1861.

Historical Context

The Confederate interest in Arizona was strategic on multiple fronts. The territory offered a potential corridor to California — its gold and silver mines and Pacific seaports being prizes the Confederacy badly wanted — and its population of Native Americans, whom the Confederate government intended to enslave, represented a further resource. Following the secession ordinance adopted at the Mesilla convention in March 1861 and Baylor’s military victory in July, the Confederate Territory of Arizona was formally proclaimed, covering the southern half of the present-day states of Arizona and New Mexico.

The Confederacy’s hold lasted until March 1862, when General John Potts Slough defeated Baylor’s forces at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a battle sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West for the decisiveness with which it ended Confederate ambitions in the Southwest. The territorial government fled to San Antonio, and Arizona continued to be represented in the Confederate Congress until 1865, but effective Confederate control had ended. The present map was published during the brief window in which that control was real.

The map’s eastern theater is equally charged. Fort Sumter had fallen on April 14, 1861. Virginia seceded on April 17. The First Battle of Bull Run would come in July. The supplement inset showing current military operations places the map in the summer or early autumn of 1861, when the war’s geography was still being established, and no one yet understood its scale or duration. The marginal lists of military posts and forts that would, within months, change hands, be besieged, be destroyed, or be built from nothing read, in retrospect, as a roster of the war’s coming geography.

Publication History and Census

This map was compiled by P.S. Duval & Son, Philadelphia, 1861, from public documents and issued at the outbreak of hostilities, with the supplement showing current operations added to reflect the rapidly developing situation.