Mapping Our Way into the Past: Spatial Relations in the Editorials on Secession

Doing history well often requires asking the right questions. The simple act of plotting information on a map can provide critical assistance in helping us to raise new questions, while pointing us away from other lines of exploration where the source material can't provide us with what we need. The same visualization process that allows us to "see" the information in a new way, can also serve as a valuable means of conveying the information with greater clarity.

	This data plotting highlights the locations of editorials in the printed version of the Editorials on Secession. A comparison to the map of newspapers published at the same time highlights some important oversights in the selection process.

My current project involves mapping data for a web site about the evolution of opinions in the months leading to the Civil War. As a starting point, I planned to draw on a three-volume series published by the American Historical Association in the 1930s.[1] These volumes comprise 678 editorials published in northern and southern newspapers between Lincoln’s nomination to the presidency and the early mobilization of forces after the firing on Fort Sumter. Admittedly, since they only provide a measure of elite opinion in this period, the editorials are rather limited in what they tell us. Nevertheless, in reading the editorials, one senses that the march toward war—even in those final months—was not as inexorable as the short versions in Ken Burns's Civil War and many textbooks might lead us to believe. One finds a number of editorial voices that were at odds with this narrative line—one finds Unionists in the South arguing for compromise up to March of 1861. Likewise, Democrats and “conservatives” in the North were arguing bitterly against Lincoln's efforts to preserve the Union by force of arms. One of the first questions I wanted to consider in defining the site is the adequacy of the geographical coverage of the editorials. The editors of the original volumes are quite forthright about the problems inherent in selecting less than 700 editorials from the "thousands" of editorials written in each region over this time..[2] However, in reading through the volumes, one detects that the selection of editorials tended to focus on major urban areas, which further narrows the range of opinions included. Mapping seemed like an ideal way of assessing this issue, since it can clearly highlight locations that might have been overlooked. I scanned in the table of contents for the three volumes and converted them to tables that would allow sorting by city and state (Table 1). As a comparison group, I scanned in and converted the Library of Congress list of newspapers from 1860 to a similar table (Table 2).[3]

	This data plotting highlights the locations of newspapers in 1860. Click on image to see detail.

Using Microsoft’s MapPoint 2000 program, I plotted the data points and quantities onto separate U.S. maps organized by metropolitan area (Figure 1 and Figure 2). Even a superficial comparison of the two maps reveals a number of obvious areas of neglect, most notably the near absence of editorials from locations west of the Mississippi. Given that so much Civil War historiography focuses on the clash between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, this certainly comes as no surprise. But given a fresh interest in the campaigns of the West, and a more general interest in the opinions and concerns of Americans at some remove from the battlefield, the map helps to highlight key areas of neglect. Perhaps most striking is the absence of editorials from the cluster of newspapers along the northeastern border between Kansas and Missouri—the site of some of the bloodiest sectional conflicts in the prewar period (so-called “Bleeding Kansas”). It seems hard to imagine that the significant number of newspapers clustered in this area, which undoubtedly reflected a heightened interest arising from their own part in the disagreements over slavery, lacked any salient opinions about the moves toward war. Similarly, one wonders at the absence of editorials from West Coast cities that had more than one newspaper—cities like San Francisco and Seattle—which suggests an intriguing line of analysis about the impressions of American editorial writers who were at a distance from events back East. As a result, the simple act of plotting this information on a map helps point the way back into the archives to mine out the forgotten and excluded editorials that will provide a more complete picture of the period.

Beyond opening up some of the questions to be considered as part of the project, the map provides an interesting means of organizing and presenting the materials that will be included in the web site. A key theme of the site will be to use the editorials and ancillary materials to highlight the internal disagreements taking place within the regions—pointing out voices that sought to pull the nation back from the brink of war, alongside those pushing the two regions toward the battlefield. To do this, I envision developing a taxonomy that would differentiate between pro-and anti-Union sentiments, and ultimately between those favoring conciliation and those supporting armed conflict. By developing a color-coding scheme to represent these divergent viewpoints, the map could provide an important visual cue to these differences, and an immediately accessible point of entry into individual pamphlets. Furthermore, by connecting the map to an animated timeline, I should think the demonstrable shift of newspapers toward a pro-war stance will demonstrate the hardening of opinions and the growing sentiment for war. While this will obviously require greater depth in the selection of articles from particular newspapers, the original editors of the series seem to have been fairly good about publishing series from newspapers that shifted their opinions about war and union, so I should be able to create a useful pilot model for this course.

Notes