Lewis' free soil, slavery, and territorial map of the United States

Exhibited: "America Votes: Mapping the Political Landscape" organized by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, 2012.

Relief shown by hachures.

Includes text and decorative border with the seals of numerous states.

This date is inferred.

The war with Mexico changed the country’s contours. Following the war, a major concern was the status of these newly acquired lands – would they be slave or free? And what rights of citizenship would their residents receive? While state boundaries are not shown on the map itself, the presence of state symbols surround the map and underscore its message: Would the tenuous balance of slave and free states, which had held since the country’s founding, continue or be upset as states were carved out of this new territory?