William C. Reynolds, Reynolds's Political Map of the United States (1856)

William C. Reynolds’s political map was issued during the presidential election campaign of 1856 and pictured the famous Western explorer John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, and his running mate, William L. Dayton. As its full title indicates, the map was designed to "exhibit the comparative area of the free and slave states and the territory open to slavery or freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise," suggesting that it was a response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed new states in the Louisiana Territory to decide by popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery. As Susan Schulten argues in the book Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, Reynolds made his opinions on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise clear, noting that it meant the "institution of Slavery may be carried into ALL of the Territories--the area of which is greater than that of all the States combined." Reynolds also included an array of statistics on the map, including information on each state from the 1850 census, the results of the 1852 presidential election, congressional representation by state, and the number of slaves held by owners. He arranged his data with the intention of showing the disproportionate power of slaveholders in the South and their drain on the national economy.