During the Revolutionary War, printed maps provided the public with the only pictorial representation of battles being fought in the American colonies. Through a powerful combination of text and image, maps conveyed precise details of battles and the geographic settings in which they took place. The majority of battle maps were printed in London where the printing trade was well-established. Printers in the colonies lacked the expertise, equipment, and supplies needed to produce maps.
The process of creating a printed map began when a trained military surveyor drew a map of a battle in North America and sent it to London. A trans-Atlantic journey took an average of seven weeks at the time. Once the hand-drawn map arrived in London, an engraver would transfer it as a reverse image onto a copper plate using tracing paper and a wax coating on the plate. Metal tools were used to scratch every last detail—text and images—into the plate. Maps were printed by inking the plate and rolling it on a sheet of damp paper through a hand-operated press. This took time and considerable physical exertion.
The demand for battle maps of the American Revolution was so great that, despite the time, cost, and effort required to produce them, London publishers profited from their sale. Because the timeliness of a map was a key selling point, publishers made a point of noting the map’s date—year, month, and day—on the map.
In Robert Sayer and John Bennett’s The Seat of War in New England by an American Volunteer (London, 1775), the battle of Bunker Hill is depicted in detail while also being placed within the larger context of military operations in Massachusetts between April and June 1775. Troop movements and engagements are represented through text descriptions, hand coloring, and drawings of troops, transport vehicles, and buildings.
This map, printed on September 2, 1775, less than three months after the Battle of Bunker Hill, is one of the first battle maps to be printed during the Revolutionary War.
This post is by Nina Nazionale, Director of Library Operations & Curator of Printed Collections, and curator of Mapping America’s Road from Revolution to Independence, an exhibition on view at the New-York Historical Society through March 11, 2018. All of the maps featured here are on view in the exhibition, which was originally organized by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. Through a digital partnership, high resolution images of the maps are available online at collections.leventhalmap.org.
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