John F. Smith, Historical Geography (1888)

Created in 1888 by John F. Smith, this map has two "trees" extending across it, each with a trunk shaped like an arrow to provide a sense of westward movement across the United States. The top tree is labeled "God's Blessing Liberty" and originates from Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a Bible lays, while the bottom tree originates from Jamestown, Virginia, with a barely visible one-dollar coin. As the trees extend across the country, labeled branches extend from each. The top branches are labeled with words like free school, equal rights, and benevolence, and the bottom with words such as ignorance, Kansas Nebraska Bill, and sedition. At the bottom of the map, Smith writes, "The two English colonies that first settled in America furnish a moral lesson that is full of interest and in some respects without a parallel in the history of the world." Of Jamestown and Plymouth, he states, "In 1620 each colony planted a tree. The tree of Liberty, then quite small, was planted by the Pilgrims upon the Bible, at Plymouth, where it received God's blessing, which accounts for its wonderful growth and the excellent quality of its fruit. The tree of slavery was brought from the old world and the people of Jamestown planted it upon mammon [biblical term for riches]...Slavery with its attendant evils would overshadow the land with darkness..." Smith most likely created this map to influence the 1888 presidential election between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, which is reflected in his statement, "Jamestown is no more, but the colony lives in the form of the Democratic party. Plymouth is a flourishing city and her children now form the Republican party of this great country." In her book, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, Susan Schulten points out that amid the intense political partisanship of the Guilded Age, Smith essentially "depicts an active struggle between two competing and incompatible visions of the nation’s future" (p. 65).