Virginia in 1856 - Richmond, Norfolk, Alexandria

Sidney E. Morse of New York published this map of Virginia in 1856 for his General Atlas of the World, a scarce work whose maps rarely appear on the market, and this particular sheet marks the first time it has been offered for sale at all. Morse, son of the noted geographer Jedidiah Morse, had made his name two decades earlier by developing the cerographic, or wax-engraving, printing process that first appeared in his Cerographic Atlas of the United States of 1842, a technique that made accurate, affordable maps available to a far wider American public than steel engraving ever had. The map depicts Virginia five years before secession, at a moment when the sectional tensions inflamed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act two years earlier were already sharpening the divide between the state's eastern slaveholding counties and its more industrial, less plantation-dependent counties in the mountainous west.

Richmond, the state capital and center of Virginia's political and plantation economy, anchors the map along the James River. Norfolk, the state's principal Atlantic port, sits at the mouth of the Chesapeake's tidewater rivers, its navy yard already one of the most important in the country. Alexandria, on the Potomac just south of Washington, had been retroceded from the District of Columbia back to Virginia only a few years earlier in 1846 and appears here as a busy river port tied closely to the capital's commerce. County lines drawn by Morse's cerographic process trace the state's full antebellum extent from the tidewater across the Blue Ridge to the mountainous west that would break away during the coming war.

This map suits a Virginia family, a Richmond or Alexandria transplant, or a collector drawn to Morse's innovative but scarce cerographic atlas maps. The store also carries Jeremiah Greenleaf's 1842 Virginia, printed from older Burr plates via traditional steel engraving; that earlier sheet predates both the Kansas-Nebraska tensions and Morse's wax-engraving technique on display here. It is available unframed in a range of sizes, from a small accent print to a large statement piece.