Louisiana in 1856 - New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria

Charles Morse published this map of Louisiana from New York in 1856, dividing the state by parish and by the township survey grid in the same period Gray, Colton, and other major houses were producing their own competing Louisiana sheets. Morse's map favors a plainer, more utilitarian engraving style than the ornately bordered maps of his larger competitors, laying towns, roads, rivers, railroads, and lakes over the parish grid with comparatively little decorative embellishment. The map covers Louisiana on the eve of the sectional crisis that would erupt into civil war within five years, a period when the state's plantation economy and river-borne cotton trade were near their antebellum peak. It reflects a railroad network still in its early stages, years before the lines that would later crisscross the state's northern parishes were built.

New Orleans dominates the map as it dominated the antebellum South's cotton and sugar trade, its levees and wharves the endpoint for river traffic drawn from across the Mississippi Valley. Baton Rouge appears upriver as the state capital, a role it had formally held since 1849 after the seat of government moved there from New Orleans. Alexandria, on the Red River in the state's center, marks the effective dividing line between the older, more densely settled parishes to the south and the still-thinly populated cotton frontier opening up to the north and west. The mountains noted in the map's legend refer to the low, wooded hill country of Louisiana's northern parishes, a landscape distinct from the flat delta country around New Orleans that most buyers would associate with the state.

This 1856 Morse edition is a good match for a Louisiana family with antebellum-era roots, a New Orleans or Alexandria transplant, or a collector filling out the run of pre-Civil War Louisiana maps alongside the store's other 1850s editions by Colton and Meyer. Where those two are more heavily bordered, prestige-format atlas maps, this Morse sheet takes a plainer, more working-map approach to the same parish geography, useful for buyers who prefer a less ornamental period style. It ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes.