In June 2015, I presented some of my work at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). One of my main points was that the US Consular Service basically doubled in size during the US Civil War (1861-65) as the Union moved to replace Southern appointees and to increase their ability to monitor Confederate activities abroad.
You can see these changes via the layers on this map. (Well, you should be able to see them. This is my first experiment linking to a map I’ve created in Google Maps Engine. Let’s hope technology cooperates!)
I’m doing my initial mapping here because it’s quick and easy; in the future, I’ll be working with historical base maps. The data for this map is based on the data set created by Walter Burgess Smith (American Diplomats and Consuls…, Foreign Service Institute, 1987).