1865 Spamer View of the United States, U.S. Civil War

An intriguing view of the United States of America during the U.S. Civil War, printed by Bär and Hermann and published by Otto Spamer for Constantin Sander's book Geschichte des vierjährigen Bürgerkrieges in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.

A Closer Look

Looking northwards from the Gulf of Mexico, this view extends to the Great Lakes, taking in the contemporary United States of America minus its western states and territories. It adopts an exaggerated perspective to highlight cities and rivers. States are noted as slave states when applicable, while cities, towns, railways, mountains, and waterways are illustrated and labeled.

German Interest in the U.S. Civil War

The U.S. Civil War was a topic of keen interest to readers in the German states. For one thing, many German immigrants had come to the U.S. in the preceding years, especially with the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, and over 200,000 German-born troops fought in the war, generally on the Union side. The Union also boasted prominent German-born generals like Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz (both 'Forty-Eighters'). Germans were by and large opposed to slavery, and German lands were less reliant on southern cotton than Britain, for instance, so there was little sympathy for the Confederacy. German intellectuals also associated the goal of preserving the Union with their own project of German national unification. A final motivation, the one directly related to this map's production, was German (and specifically Prussian) military interest in the conflict. Sander was a Prussian artillery officer, and there was a debate among Prussian military minds at the time as to whether rifled artillery made fortifications obsolete. Therefore, Sander's account included extensive technical discussions on the impact of artillery on fixed fortifications.

Publication History and Census

This view was printed by Bär and Hermann (fl. c. 1861 - 1941) and published by Otto Spamer, both of Leipzig, for Constantin Sander's Geschichte des vierjährigen Bürgerkrieges in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1865). The view has no known presence in institutional collections nor history on the market, while the book (OCLC 26780930) is quite scarce, especially in North America, though a precise census is difficult to establish given the intermingling of physical examples and microfiche copies.