Visualizing Slavery in Maps to Counter Southern Revisionist History and Lies

I love old maps.The first map above hangs on my kitchen wall and is entitled  "Napoleon's March"  Created by Charles Joseph Minard, (reproduced by Edward Tufte)  it portrays in detail the shocking deaths suffered by the French Army in Napoleon's 1812 campaign to invade Russia. Starting at the entry point on the Polish-Russian border, a the thick brown band demarcates the armies original size and strength. The band then shrinks ( due to battle,cold, disease, etc) as they march forward toward Moscow. Under these lines, is the retreat( depicted in a black thinning line ) of  Napoleon's army back to France in the bitterly cold winter, along with temperature and time frames.

The other  map is from a New York Times article written by Susan Sculten, entitled "Visualizing Slavery". Created in 1860 by the United States Coastal Survey Department, this amazing map details the slave population in all the Southern states in every county, using (for the first time) the technique called statistical cartography. "Each [state] not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slaves across the region, that "uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion."

This makes a lot of since, as most Americas had no reliable access to current news cycles. Papers were expensive and a lot of people could not even read. So picture yourself a Northerner with no connection to slavery, wondering why so much blood was being spilled between not just American citizens- including African-Americans, but newly arrived immigrants from places like Ireland.

This map also intellectually destroyed the South's clarion call far from America's boarders to the European Power, that they rebelled because of "state's rights" first and foremost and secondarily, to protecting the  "way of life" for the whole American South.  Today the off spring of these confederates and confederate sympathizes argue the same revisionary history similar to those who deny the Nazi Holocaust.

Another historical misnomer, spread by many white liberals and African-Americans ( including myself years ago) is that slavery was the economic engine of the world, located operated in the United States. None of this  true. Slavery was more like pure grade A oil being wasted in a slowly deteriorating social engine that lubricated the way of life for a small wealthy leisure class of the southern population. They in turned trickled down economic corruption and limited growth in greater dosages on down the line, where white workers could not get decent paying jobs due to slave labor. In short, slavery was, over the long term economically inefficient.  Like a dope fiend with a crack rock, the first hit is nothing but euphoria, but leads to an increasingly downward spiral.

This map visually illustrates that states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi, who enslaved the majority of their population, were the first state that rebelled against the American Government. This map also demonstrates that the less slaves a southern state had, the more their citizens supported the United State's Government, which "reinforced President Abraham Lincoln’s belief that secession was animated by a minority and could be reversed if Southern Unionists were given sufficient time and support."

This map( and its message) spread like wild fire and was reprinted through out America as an indictment of the Confederate terrorist, and clearly helped President Lincoln make his case that freeing the slaves would win the war. In fact when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, this map was on his desk.

 Of course this map will not end revisionist history in America and maybe neither will time.