America redrawn: five maps from a German atlas, 1844 to 1853
Five maps from one German atlas have joined the collection, and laid side by side they show a continent being redrawn in less than ten years.
They come from the Hand-Atlas that Carl Flemming published in Glogau, in Prussian Silesia, under the name of "Dr. K. Sohr", a pseudonym most probably of the cartographer Friedrich Handtke. The first edition appeared in 1844. Handtke and his colleague A. Theinert drew the sheets, Flemming lithographed them, and because the atlas was kept up to date edition after edition, its maps of America record each change almost as it happened.
1844: three maps of a world about to change
In Vereinigte Staaten von Nord-America, the United States end at the Rockies. Texas stands on its own as a republic, Mexico still reaches the Pacific and takes in California, and the Oregon Country is a disputed space between the United States and British North America. A table on the sheet lists the states and territories with their area and population after the census of 1840, and sets the growth of New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans and St. Louis between 1820 and 1840 beside it, as the atlas itself puts it, as evidence of the extraordinary increase of the American population.
Mexico, Mittel America, Texas looks at the same moment from the south. Mexico is shown at its greatest extent, with Upper and Lower California and New Mexico among its territories, and the Republic of Texas is coloured apart, with some 8,000 German square miles and over 100,000 inhabitants. Central America still appears as a single federation of five states, although it had already broken apart. Maps that show Texas as a republic, between 1836 and its annexation in December 1845, are keenly collected, in America above all.
Nord America completes the picture for the whole continent: Russian America in the north-west, Danish Greenland, British North America, and below them the same Texas and the same Mexico.
1853: the same continent, redrawn
Then the war of 1846 to 1848. Within a few years of these sheets, Texas had joined the Union, the Oregon boundary was fixed on the 49th parallel, and Mexico had ceded California and the whole South-West.
The later Nord America, dated 1853, is drawn on the same pattern as its predecessor, and the difference is immediate: the United States now run from ocean to ocean, and only Alaska, still Russian until 1867, recalls the older map.
Californien, Oregon, Utah und Neu-Mejico shows the new West in its first political form. California is already a state; Oregon Territory still runs up to the British border, before Washington was split off; Utah reaches from the Rockies to the California line; and New Mexico still ends at the Gila River, before the Gadsden Purchase moved the border south. Within a year or two this map, too, was out of date.
One story in five sheets
Each of these maps can be had on its own, and each is worth having. But together they tell one of the great stories of the nineteenth century in the plainest possible way: the same atlas, the same hands, the same lithographic press in Glogau, and between one edition and the next, half a continent changes hands. We would be glad to offer the five as a group to a collector or institution who would like to keep that story together.