Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.
Sketch of Charleston Harbor.
Boston: L. Prang; W. A. Williams, 225 Merchants Row, [ca. 1862]. Hand-colored lithograph, 9.25” x 9.75”, plus margins. CONDITION: Good, light dampstains in margins, one stain intruding into image at lower right, eight small holes in margins apparently from mounting with corresponding light areas from strips that covered the heads of the tacks, chip and short tears to upper margin. An engaging news map of the important rebel-held Charleston Harbor in South Carolina published as the Union blockade grew more effective in 1862. The second-largest city in the Confederacy after New Orleans, Charleston played a crucial role for the Confederacy. Its political significance as the “cradle of secession” and the scene of the opening shots of the war made shutting down the port a primary objective for the U.S. Navy. Charleston was blockaded by Union warships beginning in July 1861, initially with minimal effect. As the first year of the war proceeded and the Navy amassed a larger fleet, rebel troops built up the defenses of Charleston Harbor with forts and heavy gun batteries. While the city and its surrounding fortifications were repeatedly targeted by the Union, Charleston did not fall to Union forces until the final months of the war. Featuring distance circles emanating from Fort Sumter at the center, this map of Charleston Harbor shows rebel fortifications and batteries (shaded in red), Charleston and its streets hand-colored red at the upper left, beacons, Confederate ships (the Palmetto State and Chicora State, an ironclad), the South Carolina Railroad, torpedo placements, a few soundings and isolines, and more. The map extends from Folly Island at the bottom to Hog Island at the top, and from James Island at left to Long Island at right. Inset diagrams of the principal rebel forts, Castle Pinckney, Fort Sumpter [sic], and Fort Moultrie, appear in the lower left and right corners, each with a key identifying its main features. Provided for some of the rebel forts are the number of guns each had, such as Fort Sumter’s “104 guns.” There are at least two other issues of this map, both with considerably less detail than depicted here. Over the course of the Civil War, numerous maps of the seat of war, battlefields, sieges, and fortifications, etc. were created by various commercial firms, often to illustrate important events and situations for a public hungry for the latest information. Maps relating to events and places in the news during the war, especially those revolving around Union victories, were reliable income streams for publishers. Such maps were often based on reliable eyewitness accounts, including participants in the conflicts, and narrative text was sometimes added. Louis Prang (1824–1909) was a major lithographer and publisher of prints, books, maps, greeting cards, paper toys and other ephemera in the late 19th century. Based in Boston, Prang enjoyed a career that spanned four decades. Many of his first lithographs were Civil War maps, battle and naval scenes, and portraits of political and military leaders. In 1864, he visited Europe where he studied the latest color lithographic processes, afterwards bringing a group of adept artists back to Boston with him, laying the groundwork for the extensive, high-quality printing operation the firm would become. Among the works of greatest significance Prang produced are Winslow Homer’s Campaign Sketches, a series of Civil War camp scenes that Homer himself drew on the lithographic stones for Prang, and a set of chromolithographs after watercolors by Thomas Moran of scenes in what would become Yellowstone National Park, which accompanied Ferdinand Hayden’s report on his pioneering exploration of the Yellowstone region in 1871. W. A. Williams was a civil engineer based in Boston. He also contributed to Sketch of Pensacola Navy Yard and Fort Pickens from U.S. Coast Surveys (Boston: L. Prang & Co., ca. 1862). REFERENCES: Nank, Thomas E. “Naval Operations in Charleston Harbor” at American Battlefield Trust online; Stephenson, R. W. Civil War Maps (Washington, 1989), pp. 13–21, #385; Last, Jay. The Color Explosion : Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, California, 2005), pp. 122–123.
Item #8858
Price: $650.00
Add to Wish List