Thursday Things: Great Divide Edition
7 September 2023. Vol 5 No 36. By Dan McGirt. #213
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Divide and divide again
Take a look at this amazing map:
“Our Country as Traitors & Tyrants Would Have It” map. 1864 (H.H. Lloyd & Co.) Image: Boston Rare Maps via Atlas Obscura.
By intention and design, we don’t discuss politics here at Thursday Things. But we do cover history and cool maps! History and cool maps are two of our favorite topics.
This week I stumbled across a fantastic map from the Civil War era that I had never seen before. I’ll let Atlas Obscura set this up:
IT’S 1864, AND THE CIVIL War is raging. But southern secession isn’t the only danger threatening the Union. The United States has plenty of other enemies, foreign and domestic. If they got their way, this is what the formerly united states would look like—not two, but four nations jostling for space and supremacy on the land mass between the Pacific and Atlantic.
The map title reads: Our Country as Traitors & Tyrants Would Have It; or Map of the Disunited States.” It was published in New York by H.H. Lloyd & Co. In blue, it shows a maximalist version of the Confederate States of America (CSA).
The article goes on to describe the map in detail, which I’ll skip because you can just look at the map.
In 1864, the Civil War1 was still raging. This was the year of the Siege of Petersburg and Sherman’s March to the Sea. So while the inevitable outcome of the war was coming into focus, it probably didn’t look quite as inevitable to the people of 1864 as it does to us now.
In that context, this map is a fascinating piece of wartime propaganda, expressing — and probably inciting — a certain amount of hysterical paranoia that is not unknown to us today, though with different causes.
The fear so vividly and colorfully expressed via this map is that Southern secession, and the resulting war, was only the beginning of further divisions that might see the United States broken apart and supplanted by not only the rebellious Confederate States of America (with more territory than it ever held in the real world) but with the “Interior States”, “Pacific States”, and "Atlantic States” forming their own separate groupings. The USA would be erased entirely!
Was there remotely any chance something like this would happen?
None whatsoever.
But does this map not look familiar to us today? Sadly it does.
Especially interesting — at least to me — is the not so subtle shade thrown on the foreign “tyrants” presumably scheming to bring about America’s downfall.
I’ll let Boston Rare Maps make the point:
To emphasize the many threats to the Union, at lower right a bust of South Carolina secessionist John Calhoun rests on a plinth flanked by a snake, the “tyrant” of Great Britain is represented by a crowned lion gazing hungrily at the Great Lakes states, and at lower left Napoleon III of France presents a crown to another tyrant, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
Today we in the US think of Great Britain (aka the UK) and France as two of our staunchest allies.2 But in the 1860s, both countries were eyeing the US nervously as a rising power that might one day overtake them on the world stage. (Spoiler alert: That’s exactly what happened.)
Both countries were sympathetic to the Confederacy, not from any affection for slavery, but because a divided America was weaker and thus less of a threat. That’s just cold-eyed great power politics, and France and Britain were great powers from way back!
Both countries also took advantage of the US being distracted by its internal strife to meddle in the Americas. As the illustration on the map indicates, Napoleon III3 was busy trying to prop up a French-backed puppet emperor in Mexico.4
As for the British — well, the War of 1812 was as recent a memory in 1864 as the Vietnam War is today. There was serious concern that Britain might enter the war in support of the CSA and open a second front with an invasion from Canada. The US and Britain were not buddies back then:
Cable news and social media didn’t exist in 1864, so if you wanted to irresponsibly spread fear and distrust you had to send a telegram.
Or publish a wild-eyed map.
The media hasn’t changed much since the mid-19th century, except to get bigger and louder. Public hysteria and exaggerated fears of foreign menaces hasn’t changed much either, except to swap out who the menaces are. Change the color scheme on this map and it could be something you’d see today.
To me it’s both an interesting artifact of the Civil War era … and a reminder that human nature remains a constant in all eras.
Also, this map would be an awesome jumping off point for an alternate history story!
Your new robot kidney
Human nature may not have changed since the Civil War, but thank goodness medical science has!
This is huge if it works out:
Scientists develop artificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis
A team of dedicated scientists from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is driving this revolution with their groundbreaking creation: an artificial kidney…
Imagine a device that can perform the functions of the kidney, only without the need for cumbersome machines or exhaustive transplant procedures. The UCSF team has brought this vision to life with their implantable bioreactor, a device that promises not just to mimic but to enhance the functions of a human kidney.
"At its core, this bioreactor represents a beacon of hope for those tethered to dialysis machines or waiting interminably for a transplant," notes a medical insider.
Read the full article for all the science details but basically the bioreactor incorporates kidney cells into the device to help it perform the filtering and other functions of a kidney. The point that has researchers especially excited is this:
What makes the bioreactor stand out is its compatibility with the body. In initial experiments, the device, when implanted in pigs, showed no adverse reaction from the animals' immune systems. This is a significant milestone considering the immunological challenges associated with transplants.
Further animal studies are ahead before human safety trials can begin. As always, success is not certain. But if the artificial kidney bioreactor does prove itself, that will be great news for millions with kidney disease and make kidney dialysis as obsolete as Civil War surgical methods.
Thank you for reading!
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Still known to some as the War for Southern Independence or “the late unpleasantness”.
Well, France can be sulky sometimes. But they usually come through.
The Fredo of Napoleons.
Napoleon III didn’t get much for his efforts. But we got the drinking excuse of Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates a Mexican victory against French forces in that conflict.
Cinco de Mayo celebrates Mexican American culture, not independence
Cinco de Mayo marks the anniversary of the 1862 victory by Mexican troops over invading French forces at the Battle of Puebla. The triumph over the better equipped and more numerous French troops was an enormous emotional boost for the Mexican soldiers led by Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza.
Historical reenactments and parades are held annually in the central Mexico city of Puebla to commemorate the inspirational victory over the Europeans, with participants dressed in historical French and Mexican army uniforms.