[United States] The British Colonies in North America. Engraved by William Faden, M.DCCLXXVII

by FADEN, William (1750-1836)

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Book desription: [London]: Faden, 1777. Copper-engraved map with full original colour. 22 x 28 7/8 inches. The Parent Plan of Faden's extraordinary sequence of maps of the United States Faden's sequence of maps of the United States represents one of the most important cartographic depictions of the newly independent republic. The present map, made at the beginning of the Revolution, is the first of what would be fourteen total appellations (this and thirteen subsequent issues), and is one of the extremely rare first five appellations of this series which almost never appear on the market. The Faden sequence comprises a critical and fascinating series of historical documents regarding the political development of the United States, especially since each issue captures a distinct stage in America's process of transformative change. Faden was the mapmaker most closely involved in the cartographical representation of the events of the war, as his great battle plans attest, and this map provided a broad view of the contested land. It is one of the few of the large number of his publications that he engraved himself. Much of the geography derives from John Mitchell's great 1755 map, of which Faden was to published the 5th edition in 1778. A number of corrections and improvements have been made, all of Florida is depicted. But the greatest change in the political geography of the Colonies and what makes this map so extraordinarily interesting is the greatly enhanced Province of Quebec, which has spilled down to the Ohio River. This was the result of the Quebec Act of 1774, in which Parliament established one vast colony of the formerly French possessions. The authors of the Declaration of Independence chose to view this as quite an ominous gesture, saying: "For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies." The British justification was that having one province enjoying uniformity in its laws and governance would be much more efficient. Britain maintained that its primary interest was trading for furs in that region. They may have also seen this monolithic mechanism as a way of elevating the Quebec colony out of the reach of the ever complaining, land-hungry American colonists. And without acknowledging this, the British surely knew that the new colony made the contentious thirteen look very small indeed. In fact, Quebec Province was inhabited primarily by Native tribes. Its French residents were indifferent to both sides in the American conflict, and there were very few English people. The threat is much more imposing on a map than it was in fact. The region below Lake Erie and west and north of the Ohio, the Old Northwest, remained an issue between the Americans and British long after the war had ended. Faden, like his predecessor Jefferys and contemporary Des Barres, made notably readable and concise maps. It was an age that believed in the possibility of certainty. Correctness in speech, conduct, fashion, painting and in every other way including cartography was commonly regarded as an attainable goal. Stevens & Tree, Comparative Cartography in Tooley, The Mapping of America , 80a, McCorkle, 777.8; Fite and Freeman 59; Sellers & Van Ee 732-33; Goss 71

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