1853 Map of the United States from Meyer’s Atlas, with Capitol Inset — One Year Before the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
General-Karte der Nord-Amerikanischen Freistaaten.
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Description
With an extended New Mexico and extra Santa Fe label. Pre-Gadsden borders.
This is sheet 150 from Meyer’s Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas, drawn by Carl Radefeld and published by the Bibliographisches Institut in Hildburghausen in 1853.
Its title — General-Karte der Nord-Amerikanischen Freistaaten, General Map of the North American Free States — is the standard German rendering of the United States, but in the political context of 1853 the word Freistaaten carries an unintended charge: within a year of this map’s publication, the Kansas-Nebraska Act would detonate the sectional crisis over slavery, Bleeding Kansas would follow, and the question of which territories would enter the Union as free states and which as slave states would drive the country toward civil war. This map shows the United States at its last moment of relative political equilibrium.
The Map in Detail
The map covers the full continental United States and its territories, from Oregon Territory in the northwest to Florida in the southeast, with Mexico to the south and Canada along the northern border. The political geography reflects the settlement reached by the Compromise of 1850: California, admitted as a free state in 1850, appears in yellow on the Pacific coast; Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory, created by the same compromise, occupy the vast interior southwest; the Indian Territory is clearly delineated in the center of the continent; and the established states of the east are colored and bounded with care.
The great expanse of unorganized territory to the north — the land that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would carve into Kansas and Nebraska territories the following year, opening both to the possibility of slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty — appears here simply as Missouri Territory, placid and unmarked by the conflict that was coming.
An inset in the lower left presents a detailed floor plan of the United States Capitol in Washington, then in the midst of the major expansion that would add its famous dome — a dome that would still be under construction when the Civil War began.
Historical Context
The year 1853 was the eye of the storm. The Compromise of 1850 had temporarily defused the crisis over the territories won from Mexico in the recent war, and the country was governed by the hapless Franklin Pierce, whose presidency would prove incapable of containing the forces gathering beneath the surface. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 1854 — passed the year after this map was published — repealed the Missouri Compromise, opened the northern territories to slavery by popular sovereignty, and triggered the violence in Kansas that gave the period its name.
Radefeld, drawing this map in Hildburghausen for a German readership following American affairs in their newspaper atlas, captured the United States at the precise moment before that rupture. The Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas was designed to give educated German readers a cartographic companion to the news, and American territorial politics were very much in the news in the early 1850s — the country’s explosive growth, its internal contradictions, and its uncertain future were subjects of intense European interest.
Publication History and Census
Published as sheet 150 of Meyer’s Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas by the Bibliographisches Institut in Hildburghausen in 1853.
Cartographer(s):
Carl Christian Franz Radefeld (1788–1874) was among the most prolific German cartographers of the nineteenth century, working primarily for the Bibliographisches Institut founded by Joseph Meyer — first at Hildburghausen, later at Leipzig — for which he served as principal cartographer across several decades. His most substantial contributions were to Meyer’s geographical publishing programme: the Grosser Hand-Atlas and the Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas, the latter an innovative reference work designed to help newspaper readers locate and understand the geography of current events as they unfolded. The concept of the Zeitungs-Atlas — an atlas organized around the news rather than around conventional regional divisions — was itself a reflection of the mid-nineteenth century’s appetite for timely geographical information, driven by the acceleration of events during the revolutionary and nationalist upheavals of the 1840s and 1850s. Radefeld’s maps for Meyer’s publications were engraved to a high standard and widely distributed through the Bibliographisches Institut’s extensive retail network, making his work among the most commonly encountered German cartography of its era.
Joseph Meyer (May 9, 1796 – June 27, 1856) was a German businessman and publisher of maps and atlases. After an active early career in business, which included early investments in railways, Meyer founded the publishing house Bibliographisches Institut in Gotha in 1826, which moved to Hildburghausen two years later. Initially, the publisher focused on reliable sellers like Bibles and encyclopedias, but gradually moved into maps and atlases and became especially known for its ‘Meyer’s Groẞer Hand-Atlas.’ After Joseph’s death, his son continued the business and continued to find great success, moving to Leipzig in 1874, with periodic bumps in the road due to wars and economic crises. The company survived both world wars and was divided along with Germany, but after 1991 moved back to its original location in Leipzig. In 1984, the company merged with a competitor to form Bibliographisches Institut & F. A. Brockhaus AG, which survives today.
Condition Description
Very good. Wear along margins.
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