I’m thinking through the relationship between the US Consular Service and the US Customs Service, as well as the true nature of the US-Canadian border in the late nineteenth century. As an initial exercise, I made a quick map of US Customs posts in 1872, based on the US Register. As you can see, they’re certainly thick on the ground, especially in the northeast. Some of that may have something to do with the fact that James G. Blaine of Maine was the speaker of the House at the time and already in possession of a significant network of people who needed patronage appointments, but it also speaks to the realities of the coastline and the importance of tariffs to the federal government. I look forward to expanding the maps across time and across other agencies.
Category: Mapping
Fellow Travelers
Check out this lovely interactive map and exhibit on the “Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861” from Prof. Konstantin Dierks of Indiana University.
And the Early American Foreign Service Database by Jean Bauer, which covers the period from 1775 to 1825 and offers a range of data visualizations.
Map: Posts in 1860 and 1865
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).