Mapping George Washington's America

NARRATOR: War has broken out between Britain and France. George Washington is in the thick of the Genet affair, an event that tests his commitment to American neutrality. In the midst of all this bustle, Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey has the gumption to write directly to President Washington with an oddly personal request. In his letter, Carey asks to borrow some of Washington's maps to reference for a new publication.

While it seems bold to mooch a few maps off the President of the United States, Carey banks on a growing personal and professional relationship with Washington. You see, Carey has a mission. And that mission is to create a new world geography. One that includes among the mighty and ancient nations of the world, a new country, the United States of America.

On this episode of the Secrets of Washington's Archives, we'll talk about Washington's map collections, his contributions to the first American Atlas, and the close attention to detail that characterizes his love of maps. 

And now, your host, Dr. Anne Fertig. 

ANNE FERTIG: Welcome to the Secrets of Washington's Archives, a special podcast celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Washington Presidential Library at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Today, we're talking about George Washington's geographies, but more importantly, and perhaps more interestingly, we're talking about his maps, the maps he owned, the maps he helped create, and the maps that contributed to what would eventually become the United States of America's first Atlas. Joining us today is my wonderful colleague and cartographic Contessa, Dr. Alexandra L. Montgomery. 

Alexandra is the manager of the Center for Digital History here at the Washington Presidential Library, which not only makes her my wonderful colleague, but also my boss here at the Center for Digital History, which is very exciting because the Center for Digital History is the part of the library that brings you wonderful podcasts like this one and also some fun other digital projects like our new maps initiative. So Alexandra, if you could start us off by explaining what it is we do here at the Center for Digital History. 

ALEXANDRA L. MONTGOMERY: Sure thing, Anne. And yeah, just very excited to be here. Well, the Center for Digital History does things like this. But it's so much more. At the Center for Digital History, we do podcasts. We do video series. We also do standalone research-oriented websites that allow you, the general public, to go a little bit deeper and answer questions that you might have about George Washington, about his world, about his place in society. So I want to be clear, the things that we're producing, they're not meant to be for academics only. They're meant for the general public. They're meant for non-specialists. 

So the project that Anne alluded to, which we are just wrapping up phase one of, is called ARGO, which stands for American Revolutionary Geographies Online. It is an online maps portal that you can find at argomaps.org. That's A-R-G-O-M-A-P-S.org. And what it is is an aggregation platform in a sense. So it has digitized images of 18th century maps that are drawn not only from our collection here at the Washington Library, but also from collecting institutions across North America as well as internationally. So right now there are a little over 2000 maps on there. The goal is to get that up to 4000 maps within the end of two years.

But right now, it's a site where you can go to, it's one stop shopping for all of your 18th century map needs. And these are maps of North America made between about 1740 and 1800. We've got rich additional interpretive materials, so you can read about the people that made these maps. You can learn more about what the maps themselves show. You can filter maps by fun things like maps that have animals, maps with cartouches, but also maps that are depicting particular spaces that might be showing, for example, indigenous communities. So we're trying to make a very user-friendly way to access these tremendous sources of information about our past. 

FERTIG: And this is a really kind of special project for the Washington Presidential Library because George Washington himself was a big maps guy, wasn't he? 

MONTGOMERY: Oh, he was. He was a map nerd. That man loved maps. 

FERTIG: But for his entire life, we see in so many different parts of his letters and in his works just a real passion for maps as a tool and as a visual aid. 

MONTGOMERY: Yeah, and one thing I would say about Washington's surveying career is he may have only been a professional surveyor for a short period of time, but he never really stopped being a surveyor. He was still doing surveys even at the end of his life. It was a tool. It was a set of skills that really shaped the way he thought about the world of the land around him, that stayed with him far beyond that relatively short period that you might imagine as a CV line or something on Washington's resume.

FERTIG: Yeah, I believe during the war too, he actually complained about not having maps that were accurate enough. 

MONTGOMERY: Yes.

FERTIG: Which to me says, he's not just somebody who enjoys maps or likes maps as a pretty piece of work, but he's really interested in maps and their accuracy. He's evaluating their maps for their use value for him. So can you talk then a little bit about maps in the 18th century that Washington was making, Washington was reading, Washington was collecting. What was the use of maps in this time period? 

MONTGOMERY: Sure. The late 18th century, the 18th century in general, but the late 18th century in particular was a really important time for maps, especially in the English speaking world. This is a time where we saw the production of maps ramp up to an incredible degree. More maps were being made than ever before. And this is in terms of both manuscript maps, so maps that people were making with a pencil and a piece of paper and then some ink later, and also maps that were being published, engraved. This is a period when a lot more maps are being created. The map making industry has really taken off, and that is reflected in the different ways that people are interacting with maps throughout society. So maps can be many things, like they are today. You know, if you think about what are maps for, what do you use maps for? Think about in a modern sense this is like Google Maps, or maybe if you're old enough to remember this, being a kid or an adult at having a map you bought at the gas station that you have to fold out to navigate somewhere. So there's a very practical use for maps, which is certainly the way maps are being used in the 18th century for practical reasons. 

They are also used in less immediately practical ways. So one of the ways in which maps take off is they start being used as relatively affordable, decorative objects that you're seeing more and more in people's homes. Not everyone could afford the really fine maps that Washington had, but most people could afford a cheap printed map that they could put on the wall in their home. And that's also something that we still do today. I mean, I have several maps in my apartment that I am not using to navigate. They're older maps, so I don't think it would work very well either, but that's not why they're there. They're there for decoration and also to signal something about the kind of person that you are. It's kind of a smart thing put on your wall. That's true now. 

FERTIG: To me, the modern equivalent are, perhaps you've seen at people's houses, the people who put on the maps of places they've lived on the wall that have become very fashionable recently. But also another way to think of these maps and these geographical representations are the views as well that would accompany maps, which were more pictorial representations of what you might see, what we might consider landscapes today, that were used in the same way practically, so you could kind of see, what is it like to be at this particular spot, but also as a form of decoration. 

MONTGOMERY: Yeah. Views are a great example. And there's lots of views on argomaps.org. So I encourage all of our listeners to check that out. You can filter by them. And that's another thing that really runs the gamut. You have very practical views that are obviously meant to be used if you are in a boat and you are approaching an unfamiliar landscape and you need to know exactly how to navigate. And there's some that are indistinguishable practically from landscape art. So this wide range of the ways in which people are interacting with geographic depictions is really fascinating. 

FERTIG: So let's go back to our boy, George Washington. How did he use his maps? 

MONTGOMERY: Washington erred on the side of the practical, is my sense.

In Washington's probate record, this is the document that was produced after he had died, where for estate reasons they have gone through his house and tallied up everything that's in there room by room. That's a tremendously valuable resource for historians and for Mount Vernon specifically. First of all, he has about 57 maps, probably higher than that. That's in terms of discrete maps you can pull out from that list, which is already, that's a very large number of maps. 

FERTIG: And I just want to say, this is not even like counting books of maps or collections of maps. These are like separately listed maps that we can pull out. 

MONTGOMERY: They have their own section. And then there's also views and things. Some of those are on the wall. But there's a special section for maps. And this is listed alongside his books in the context of his study. These are not maps that are hanging on the wall. These are maps that you get the sense, you can only tell so much from a probate record, but the sense is that this is a practical working collection that he is referring to rather than being a piece of artwork for the wall.

So you get the sense that he is someone who is interested in maps for the kind of geographical information they can impart to him. And as you already mentioned, we have lots of quotes from him in his own words, how important accuracy was to him. 

FERTIG: I'm so glad to use that word practical because that is often how we characterize Washington and his reading habits in particular. We often say Washington was a practical reader. And what we usually mean by that is, oh, Washington, he liked nonfiction texts. He liked agricultural texts. He liked military texts. He wasn't reading, perhaps, novels as frequently or as interested in the more entertaining texts of the period. When it comes to his reading habits, he actually did read quite a bit. And he did care about accuracy. And he cared about accuracy in a lot of his books. Some of the rare marginalia we have of Washington is him making corrections in typos in his books, which is very endearing to me. 

MONTGOMERY: I love that so much. That's one of my favorite little Washington facts. He rarely ever writes in his book, but when he does, it's to correct something. 

FERTIG: And when he's talking about books, and we are talking today specifically about a geography, and that geography is titled A New System of Modern Geography. It's by Scottish historian William Guthrie. We actually have a mention of him in his letters where he's complaining about the accuracy of European geographies about America. And what he says in it is he refers to the French writer, Abbé Renal, when he says his work is completely inaccurate. And he says about William Guthrie, something along the lines of, while somewhat better is not wholly accurate itself. And that's so interesting because he's reading this geography and the geography itself comes with maps. These maps were in the original Guthrie edition bound into the book. 

MONTGOMERY: I think of the Guthrie and Geographies generally as a kind of heavily illustrated Wikipedia. 

FERTIG: Yeah, it's a bit of an encyclopedic text about the world. Each country has a historical and a geographical description attached to it, and they're accompanied by these maps. And it was considered to be what Guthrie would have called a compendious text, this idea that this is a compendium of all things known about different parts of the world. And by 1792, there had been over 10 editions of this book published. So in a span of about 15 years since it was originally published, it had gone through numerous editions. And it had come to the United States, where Washington himself had read it, and where he had complained about its accuracy. He had read it, and he was not impressed. He was not, which is why his interaction with Mathew Carey is so particularly interesting where Carey wants to make a new edition of Guthrie. He's not gonna write a whole new text. He's gonna take Guthrie's and he's going to, to use the parlance of the 18th century, improve it. He's gonna have an improved Guthrie's geography. 

MONTGOMERY: And I really can't think of a better pitch. Washington was the person most primed for that kind of pitch. He'd read the Guthrie, he was underwhelmed, and then this guy shows up and he says, “You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna make it better.” And I can just imagine Washington sitting there and being like, “Yes!” 

FERTIG: Yeah, and Carey actually had a relationship with Washington by the time that the Guthrie issue came to light. Lafayette actually introduced Mathew Carey to Washington and Washington started the relationship by asking Carey to send his newspapers to him, which was a very big deal to Washington because his newspapers had a habit of going missing en route. So he had a little bit of trust with Carey when in August of 1793, Carey writes George Washington asking him directly to borrow his maps to incorporate in a new American edition of Guthrie's Geography. And I think that's so important too, it's an American edition. We're not centering the world on London, we're centering it on Philadelphia.

MONTGOMERY: Yes, and I do love that in the maps from this, it's measured from London, and of course in the English speaking context it is traditionally, and now formally because of the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, but these maps are actually calculated from a meridian in Philadelphia. 

FERTIG: So it is a very American-centric view of the map, and not only are these American-centric maps of which 21 were added to Guthrie's original edition, many of which came from Washington's own map collection, but it came with a geography of the world that included America and included an edited version of Guthrie's view of the world, which was very English centric. And in the beginning of this book, Carey actually writes, “The book was exactly calculated to flatter the grossest prejudices of the English nation at the expense of every other part of the human species. The scurrility bestowed upon the other nations was at once the most pitiful, ungenerous, and unjust.” So that's his critique of the original Guthrie and he's going to edit it. 

MONTGOMERY: Tell him, tell him, Carey.

FERTIG: Yeah. And this, our sentiments at Washington himself must have agreed with. And it might seem like a very small thing, but actually it's very important for a very young, brand new nation to be able to define itself on its own terms, historically and geographically, not centering itself any longer on Britain, but on itself, on its own capital. 

MONTGOMERY: It's a tremendously powerful rhetorical move.

FERTIG: So we've talked about Washington's practical reading habits. We've talked about his love of accuracy in his maps and in his books, and also his practice as a mapmaker himself. What do these qualities tell us about Washington's leadership style? And how might these qualities have played into other aspects of his leadership, perhaps in this, the president, 

or as the general of the United States army. 

MONTGOMERY: Well, certainly, I mean, detail-oriented is one of those phrases that always crops up a lot when talking about leadership. I think of it as the job application word, but it's a job application phrase for a reason. And certainly, Washington was that. He was very detail-oriented, very committed to the specifics of things and how things actually worked and how they were put together. And you see that in all aspects of his life. I think also what thinking about the geography tells us is the ways in which he was really cultural creation of the United States as a coherent entity. So we see that in some of his other reading practices that will probably come up in other episodes of this podcast, which you should listen to. But in terms of here, we see him in his role as patron to this project of very literally creating a map of America, of creating a set of geographical understandings of what exactly this new country is. I think that that also really speaks to. Washington's leadership style, but also what it is exactly that he saw that his project was.

FERTIG: I also see it very much, too, of his support of the press. Sometimes we talk about how Washington dealt with criticism from the press, how sometimes he struggled with the press's attacks on him. But this is a very positive example of Washington supporting an American publication business. He's supporting Carey's efforts to create this book, which would eventually become the first American atlas.

And I think that's really significant. Guthrie's itself is not considered the first American atlas, but the maps of America that he made for this atlas that later became Carey's American Atlas, which is considered to be the first American atlas, those same maps which some of which were drawn from Washington's collections, was the first American-made atlas produced here by maps produced here. And that's really significant, and that Washington was a part of that process. And that he saw that process as important for America's cultural development, for its economic development, for its political development, that he understood the intersection of all of these ideals, not just in his presidency and his political role, but also as an American, as it was still being discovered in this era. 

MONTGOMERY: And putting the “United” in the United States. 

FERTIG: Yes.

MONTGOMERY: Which is a major issue and a major project. These are places that had long histories of being independent-ish. They're all under Britain, but in and of themselves, they're independent political entities. And trying to figure out what that means to now be united as one thing that had never existed before. It was not a natural union in any way. I don't think that any of them are actually literally maps that Washington owned. I think they were used as references by Samuel Lewis. 

FERTIG: So how were these maps made? Can you give us a summation of the process from beginning to end? 

MONTGOMERY: Oh boy. Well, it's a very messy process. And messier for some maps than for others. The basic source, the best source, the primary source for any map would be a survey. It would be the actual on the ground process, the kinds of things that Washington did as a young man, where you're out there, you have a chain, which is a term of art for a surveying tool, but it's also literally a chain. Like if you imagine a length of chain, that's a chain. Shocking, I know, but to a standard length, you have a bunch of math tools, tractors, compasses, things like this, and you're basically out there in the field doing trigonometry. Really, I know.

And from these calculations, from the rough sketches that get made out in the field, these are sort of raw materials that later do get turned into maps. But that is sometimes not a straight line. Some maps, especially manuscript maps, really are. They're made directly from surveying notes and sketches. Others are made using those sketches to create new maps. Some, maybe a couple of centuries removed from an actual survey. And there are copies of maps, of copies of maps, of copies of maps, of taking one map. cutting out the parts you like, putting it into a map that has the other bits that you do. 

So it is a process that is always multi-authored, any map that you see, especially, say, a map of North America, a large-scale map. The sources for that map are often even longer than the person who put the map together realized. It is a very messy process. I should also mention the role of informants. A lot of these maps, especially the interior, are not actually based on on-the-ground surveys, but on conversations that map makers would have with indigenous people.

They would ask them, what's over there? And they would either draw them a map or they would give them a verbal description of what might be there. So that kind of information from informants, on the ground surveys, they get turned into sketches, they get turned into maps, they get turned into plates that you can use for engraving. 

FERTIG: So the maps that would have come from Washington's collections were used as a reference for the maps that would have been put into Carey's Atlas. 

MONTGOMERY: And we should stress, these are not maps that Washington himself made. These were of those maps that one assumes, passed his standards for accuracy to make it into his collection that were then being used by Carey and by his map makers. 

FERTIG: And Washington, when he received his copy of Carey, he had his maps bound separately from the text. You had the option, you could find your maps with the text of the geography or you could have it separate, but we know Washington, because we have the book here, actually kept his maps separate perhaps because he wanted to use them a little bit more practically, and then flipping through the geography. So it is a little bit suggestive of that choice. Once he received these maps back from Carey, he sought to use them. And we actually have references from his letters of him asking Carey to add maps to his atlas after the fact. So if you ever come to Mount Vernon and you're looking for this Carey's Geography and Atlas, first of all, it is tucked away in our vault where we keep all of the George Washington books, but. It's actually two books. It's the textual geography, and then it's what they call the atlas itself. 

MONTGOMERY: And I know that this will come up many times on this podcast series, but the thing that I love the most about thinking about these books in the 18th century is the fact that people, they did not come bound. You had to go out and get them bound. And that's just one of those simple things that it's very easy to either not know that or forget about that, because it's a very different kind of relationship than the relationship we have to text today. 

FERTIG: And this one in particular is very interesting because Washington wasn't the only member of his family who had this book. So Washington subscribed to Carey's geography. His nephew Lawrence subscribed. And by subscribed, I mean every time Carey made a new map, it would be sent to them. And then they would receive at the end of the subscription period the entire geography along with it. So Washington had a subscription. He was receiving maps as they were made. Lawrence, who was living with him at the time, had a subscription. His secretary, Bartholomew Dandridge, who was living with them, had a subscription, was receiving these maps. And Martha Washington had a subscription and was receiving these maps.

MONTGOMERY: It's for the whole family. You've got to have your own. 

FERTIG: So we have about four different sets of these maps that are coming in. Everybody had to have their own copy. And once again, they were probably being bound in different and interesting ways. And one of the really cool parts about this book in particular is that Washington's atlas comes with a handwritten index of all of the maps inside. We unfortunately do not think it is Washington's handwriting. 

MONTGOMERY: Yes, listeners, I would just like you all to know that we have spent probably more time than is strictly necessary trying to figure out whose handwriting it is. The jury is still out, but we are trying. 

FERTIG: Yes, it is likely one of his nephews' handwriting, but it catalogs all the maps as they're coming in. Which is just a really cool part of history that we can see little check marks next to each map as they were received when Carey was sending them. 

MONTGOMERY: It's very cool. 

FERTIG: So we know maps are everywhere in the 18th century, and we know Washington himself had a very young career as a surveyor and surveyed throughout his entire life. Why do you think he was so interested in maps? 

MONTGOMERY: I think that there are several good answers to that question. I think that part of it is that in terms of the surveying, I think that there is simply a sense in which Washington had a mind that liked doing that kind of work. There is something that was clearly appealing to him about the kinds of calculations that went into the creation of those kinds of things. It's clear to me at least that he took some pleasure and some joy in that kind of work, which to me explains something about why he continued to actively do surveying work, to do map-making work on his own terms. 

There are many practical reasons why Washington would have been drawn to maps. There's the personal where it just might have been something that tickled him. If you think about his actual life careers, the things that he spent most of his adult life doing, he's a planter, he's a plantation owner, and he is a general. And maps are never more important than they are during war. Maps are crucial to especially 18th century warfare, they're still crucial today. A lot of the mapping technology we have today was developed by the military for this reason. You need to have an accurate sense of the land that you're going into. You need to have an accurate sense of what is the best place to set up a camp? What is the best place to try to provoke an engagement? What are the places to avoid? Where are the choke points? Where could you get stuck? Where could you be trapped? And a lot of people spend a lot of time during the American Revolution, but also basically every other war, trying to answer those questions with the most accurate and detailed answers possible from on the ground. 

Some of the most important people in the military and the Navy at this point are people who can make accurate maps and charts. They are absolutely central to those work. So the fact that Washington was a military man for so much of his life and such a crucial part of who he was, that's another reason why maps would have been important to him, because that is a mindset that is crucial to any kind of success. And then also as a landowner, as a person who is managing land, that's the reason why he had a career as a surveyor in the first place, was because there was a demand to mark out the limits of land and also to discover what new lands could be marked out and acquired through various means. So if you just think about the kinds of jobs that Washington did, they're very geographically map spatially oriented. 

FERTIG: And I think it's also interesting too, as we've discussed on other episodes in the series with his surveying, it's very mathematical work. And he seems to enjoy that. Once again, we've discussed this idea that Washington is often characterized as a practical reader, and he may have very well had a more mathematical mind in approaching problems where hobbies like surveying have a certain enjoyment for him. We know he loves horseback riding, we know he loves going out. There seems to be something about that he intrinsically enjoyed about as well that helped him throughout his career in many ways and that he was able to pursue and develop this hobby. 

MONTGOMERY: Mhm. But we should also be careful to say that not every map Washington owned was strictly practical. Just like his reading habits more broadly it is not in fact true that he was only going to practical items. He was not just reading and looking at maps to get from point A to point B or to figure out how to farm better. For example, one of the maps he owns on his death is a map of India. There is no way in which that map would have been useful or practical to George Washington. And this is something also that we've discussed before and is that Washington was well traveled by the standards of your average 18th century American settler. But he was very poorly traveled by the standards of the founding fathers. By the standards of his peers, he was not. 

He only left North America once. And really, most of his travel throughout the United States was either in the context of war or during presidential tours. So there is a way in which I think we may be going out on a bit more of a limb, but a way in which maps are helping Washington imagine this larger world and learn more about this larger world that he himself did not necessarily experience firsthand. And I think that's very interesting, too, because we've talked so much about this geography, which, Carey added 21 American maps to the original version of this geography, but this geography was largely of the world. It contains maps from all over Europe, it contains maps from Asia, it contains one map of Africa. Unfortunately, Guthrie did not exhibit that same level of specificity with Africa as he did other regions. But this geography is a map of the world, and those 21 American maps seek to place America within that larger world. 

MONTGOMERY: And that brings us back to the project that Washington is so clearly committed to, which is creating a sense of America in the world of its own discrete entity. 

FERTIG: So someone wants to see some of these Guthrie maps for themselves. What should they do to find them? 

MONTGOMERY: Well, have I mentioned argomaps.org? 

FERTIG: I don't think you have enough. You should mention it again. 

MONTGOMERY: Well, argomaps.org, the incredible, revolutionary new maps portal from your friends here at Mount Vernon, as well as the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. We do have some maps from the Carey-Guthrie edition, many of the maps by Samuel Lewis, so you can find those on there. We are hoping to digitize the geography at some point. We have not yet as of this recording, but certainly argomaps.org will allow you to see some of these maps that we're discussing today. 

FERTIG: And to see more maps of early America, as George Washington would have seen these maps. 

MONTGOMERY: Yes, one of the parts of the site that we're currently developing. It is there, but there's not much there yet. Again, of this recording, but this will change soon, is a section that will allow you to explore maps that were made and owned by Washington. That's something that I'm very excited about to allow you to get a better sense of the kinds of geographic worlds in which he was inhabiting. 

FERTIG: More exciting work from the Washington Presidential Library. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Montgomery, for joining me here today to talk about maps, geographies, and George Washington. And just a reminder for those of you listening, you can check out our video companion to this series, also titled, The Secrets of Washington's Archives, available on YouTube. So be sure to check that out if you would like to get a shot of this wonderful atlas for yourself.

NARRATOR: The book featured in this podcast is a new system of modern geography by William Guthrie, edited by Mathew Carey. This book was a gift to Mount Vernon for Mrs. Mary Starling Payne in 1893. Both the book and the atlas of maps that accompany it are held at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. The Secrets of Washington's Archives is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared.

Hosted by Dr. Anne Fertig. Researched by Dr. Fertig and Dr. Alexandra Montgomery. Narration and audio production by Kurt Dahl at CD Squared. The music featured in this podcast is from the album, No Kissing Allowed in School, produced by the Colonial Music Institute. You can listen to more from this album and other productions of the Colonial Music Institute on Spotify.