1783 A New Map of North America, with the West India Islands. Divided according to the Preliminary Articles of Peace, Signed at Versailles, 20 Jan. 1783
DESCRIPTION
Few maps capture a more important moment in American history: issued in 1783, this monumental map shows the United States at the very moment it emerged from the American Revolution as an independent nation.
Published in London by Robert Sayer and John Bennett on August 15, 1783, the map appeared during the final months of the American Revolution, after the preliminary peace agreement had established the framework for American independence but just weeks before the definitive Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3. The title prominently announces the "UNITED STATES," distinguishing the new republic from the British, Spanish, and other European possessions that still covered much of the continent. It is a remarkable snapshot of North America at a turning point, when thirteen former British colonies had become a nation stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River.
America Redrawn After the Revolution
Original hand coloring emphasizes the political divisions created by the peace settlement. The United States occupies the eastern portion of the continent, extending west to the Mississippi and north toward the Great Lakes. British possessions remain to the north, while Spain controlled Florida and the enormous Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi. The map therefore records not simply the birth of the United States, but the balance of imperial power surrounding it. In the upper right, the text of Article III of the preliminary agreement addresses American fishing rights off Newfoundland and Labrador, an issue important enough to the negotiations to be incorporated directly into the map.
Across the interior is an extraordinary amount of geographical and ethnographic information. Hundreds of rivers, settlements, forts, roads, portages, mountain ranges, hunting grounds, and Indigenous villages and territories fill areas that were still poorly understood by Europeans. The Sioux, Osage, Pawnee, Apache, Blackfoot, Illinois, Cherokee, Choctaw and numerous other Native peoples are identified, often occupying enormous territories that contrast sharply with the political boundaries being imposed by European powers and the new United States. The National Archives describes the map specifically as showing towns, forts, roads, Indigenous tribes, and villages, underscoring how much information Pownall attempted to assemble about the North American interior.
Trade, Exploration and the Spanish Empire
The southern half of the map places the United States within the larger commercial world of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Routes across the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean trace the movement of Spanish shipping between important colonial ports and the rich mining regions of Spanish America. Havana, Veracruz, Cartagena and other settlements appear within a network that carried silver, commodities, people, and military supplies through the Spanish Empire. The numerous islands, shoals, banks, harbors and navigational details also show just how closely the geography of North America was tied to the West Indies and Atlantic trade.
Two large inset maps document geographical questions that had occupied European explorers for generations. The upper inset, "A Particular Map of Baffin and Hudson's Bay," depicts the immense northern waterways through which explorers continued to search for a Northwest Passage. The lower inset records the remarkable journeys of Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino between 1698 and 1701. Kino's overland expeditions to the head of the Gulf of California demonstrated that California was connected to the mainland, helping overturn the famous misconception that had placed California on maps as an island. Both insets were important enough to remain part of the map through its successive revisions.
A Monumental Record of a New Nation
The map grew out of a cartographic tradition extending back to the large North American map prepared by Emanuel Bowen and John Gibson in the 1750s and was repeatedly revised as new surveys, exploration, and political events changed European knowledge of the continent. Thomas Pownall, former governor of Massachusetts and later a member of Parliament, contributed substantial geographical information gathered during his years in North America. By 1783, a map originally rooted in the geography of Britain's American empire had been transformed to record the empire's loss of its thirteen colonies and the arrival of a new country on the map.
At approximately 40 by 46 inches, the map has the scale and visual presence of a wall map. Its elaborate title cartouche is filled with allegorical figures, Indigenous imagery, animals, furs, weapons, and goods representing the perceived resources of the Americas, while a second decorative cartouche surrounds the map's scales. Yet the date gives the map its greatest significance. Printed on August 15, 1783, and explicitly divided according to the preliminary peace agreement, it belongs to the brief period immediately before the Treaty of Paris formally concluded the American Revolution. It captures the political geography of North America at the beginning of the United States, when the borders, alliances, and competing territorial claims that would shape the new nation were only beginning to take form.
CONDITION
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