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  • The True Geography of Our Country: Jefferson’s Cartographic Vision by Joel Kovarsky
  • John Rennie Short
The True Geography of Our Country: Jefferson’s Cartographic Vision. By Joel Kovarsky (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014) 200pp. $35.00

The early republic was constituted around property, territory, and land. The surveying of property, the depiction of land, and claims to territorial expansion and annexation were important discourses in the intellectual life of the new republic. In all three areas, Thomas Jefferson, the third president, played an important role. He was following a long family tradition. His great grandfather surveyed county roads. His father Peter, who was a county surveyor and co-producer (with Joshua Fry) of one of the first accurate maps of Virginia, bequeathed his surveying tools to his fourteen-year-old son. Surveying and mapping comprised an important skill set for American landowners, since they had no access to the technicians available to their European counterparts. Land was the basis for wealth and prestige; territorial expansion was the way to personal fortune and national aggrandizement.

Kovarsky provides a good coverage of Jefferson’s cartographic vision. He discusses the regional geography of Notes on Virginia (1785), which contained Jefferson’s map of the state, a compilation of existing sources, and an update of his father’s map. Another chapter describes Jefferson’s extensive library of the geography of America, which was the basis for the Library of Congress. This chapter could have been expanded by considering the Jeffersonian legacy in the creation of the wondrous map collection of the Library.

Kovarsky also discusses Jefferson’s role as sponsor and supporter of expeditions that mapped the West. Jefferson’s encouragement of the Lewis and Clark expedition is well known, but Kovarsky also describes his support of the expedition led by William Dunbar and George Hunter and that led by Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis.

Jefferson’s geographical interests were also embodied in a voluminous correspondence that connected him with writers and scientists in Europe and America. He was part of a republic of letters fascinated by exploration, mapping, and scientific description of new lands. Kovarsky also covers Jefferson’s more detailed cartographic/planning concerns regarding the design of the new capital of Washington D.C. and the University of Virginia.

Jefferson’s interest in cartography and mapping was not simply an intellectual exercise. It was allied to the territorial expansion of the fledgling nation. His cartographic vision was finely calibrated to the continental ambition of the United States, foreshadowing the ideology of Manifest Destiny well before it was first articulated in 1845. He supported and corresponded with the Scots-American mapmaker John Melish whose 1816 map depicted the United States for the first time in a continental frame from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

The book has a number of illustrations that add to its appeal. One criticism, but a major one, however, is that it contains little critical [End Page 128] discussion of the costs and wider social implication of Jefferson’s vision, which condoned slavery and the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. At the time, Virginia had almost 300,000 slaves. Notes on Virginia gives a convoluted and inconsistent justification of slavery. Yet maps and geographies of the time wrestled with the marginalization of blacks and Native Americans. Many of the cartouches for the maps at the time depict slaves working on docks or on plantations. No mention of these images appears in Kovarsky’s account. He seems willfully to have ignored these more compromised positions.

A depiction of Jefferson’s life and work that includes a more profound sense of the blind spots in his vision and a wider appreciation of the social consequences of his support for territorial expansion is not too much to ask in this day and age. Jefferson is too complex a character and too American a figure to dismiss easily as a sinner or to praise simply as an embodiment of uncompromised Enlightenment principles.

John Rennie Short
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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