From Sea to Shining Sea: Exploring the ‘Mental Maps’ of America’s Founding Fathers

Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders
By Michael Barone
(Encounter Books, 234 pages, $22.77)

What can geography reveal to us about the lives of America’s Founding Fathers? That would seem an odd question. One might be more prone to ask what politics or philosophy or religion might tell us about the Founders. But geography?

According to Michael Barone, geography can tell us much more than we may think. In his latest book, Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders, Barone explores the lives and ideas of the Founders through the lens of their understanding of the geographic boundaries and topographical works of their time. That understanding in turn would shape the literal boundaries of our nation.

Barone’s book takes readers on a unique exploration of the Founders by examining what he and other scholars call their “mental maps.” Though we’re all familiar with the sight of longitude and latitude lines on the physical maps that we saw in our classrooms, the maps we create in our minds are equally important for understanding human behavior. Those maps are fundamental to each of us. As historian Jerry Brotton puts it, “[T]he urge to map is a basic, enduring human instinct.” And yet, unfortunately, Americans have taken for granted their mental maps as technological advances, most notably GPS, have taken the large burden off our backs of ensuring the accuracy of the maps we use in our everyday lives.

According to Barone and others, these “mental maps” could be simply summed up as the maps that we create in our minds, though that would be too simplistic to the biological reality. Our sense of navigation and knowing where things are has always been part of our biological nature. As Brotton puts it, “From early childhood onwards, we make sense of ourselves in relation to the wider physical world by processing information spatially.” Scientists such as John O’Keefe have studied “place neurons” in the hippocampus, the part of our brain that processes information regarding location and relative distance. This biological component is in all living things. This was noted by journalist Kathryn Schulz, who stated, “[E]very animal on earth knows how to navigate.” As biological creatures, our capacity to understand the world around us has always been a key part in how we are able to properly navigate to and from places. Barone puts it this way: “When we go to the store, go to work, go to school, we start off with an idea of how we will get there and how we will get back.” Thus our “mental maps” are the result of our very nature. In turn, those mental maps collectively have gone on to shape the behavior and worldviews of cultures and nations across history.

That brings us back to the American Founding Fathers. When thinking about the Founders, Barone reveals how their mental maps became their most vital tool as they struggled to comprehend the largely unexplored lands of North America. Their individual mental maps affected the larger geographical map of what became the United States of America, especially given that they (in Barone’s words) had no “reliable maps to guide them. They lived in Atlantic seaboard colonies whose boundaries were not all clearly defined and whose backlands had never been accurately mapped.” Thus, they endeavored to map those new lands.

And it’s here that Barone reveals the pure intellect and genius of the Founders.

Barone dives into the lives of six of America’s most prominent Founders: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Albert Gallatin. Readers will be surprised by how the Founders were very much shaped by their geographic orientation as they sought to gain insight into the unexplored regions of North America. Franklin was well known for his interests in maps, as he often bought the latest maps of his day, and was widely known to have “accumulated more knowledge of the British North American colonies than perhaps any other person.” Jefferson and Washington were both accustomed to the mapmaking industry through their familial ties as well as Washington’s military experience, giving them insights as to the geographic nature of what is today the Midwest and land up to the Mississippi River.

From their travels within the colonies to their times of service in office or the armed forces, the influences that shaped the geographic imagination of the Founders set in motion their ideas that would shape the trajectory of the United States. Besides their knowledge of topography and geography, it would be their geographic orientation that would have the vital role in shaping the newly independent American republic. For the Founders, says Barone, “their mental maps were full of contingencies, of what the new nation they hoped they were creating would look like and be like.” For Franklin, his knowledge of the limitless terrain of North America and the demographic nature of the exponentially increasing population of the colonies led him to envision a “united trans-Atlantic, English-speaking polity” that he believed would be “a potentially equal part of the British Empire.” After America’s independence, Franklin remained optimistic as he began to see Americans travel beyond the Appalachians, extending the young American republic to new boundaries.

For Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin, the future of America laid into the unexplored west, leading them to furnish America’s earliest efforts of westward expansion as they sought access to the prized Mississippi River and city of New Orleans. The geographic imagination of the Founders hence facilitated America’s expansion westward, leading to the most significant political developments in American history, such as the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 and Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

While westward expansion was vigorously sought by some Founders, Alexander Hamilton saw the course of America’s future eastward. Hamilton’s upbringing on the Caribbean island of St. Croix allowed for him to get “in touch with a much larger and more variegated world, a vast network of trading voyages that spread from Europe to North America, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.” The international trade routes that shaped Hamilton’s mental map led him to envision a young American republic reliant upon the productive and innovative nature of merchants and bankers. The calls for more centralization under Hamilton’s mercantile vision would come directly into conflict with Jefferson’s agrarian vision, which favored a decentralized approach to governance, causing the split between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians.

Barone’s exploration of the Founders’ mental maps provides readers with a new lens from which to analyze their worldviews, actions, and enduring legacy. Readers will see how the geographic imagination of the Founders was the main driver for much of the political and economic formation of the early American republic from the rise of states across the Midwest to the development of the railroads that connected America’s inlands in the West to the Atlantic Coast in the East. From their geographic imagination arose the ideas and ambitions that would mold future American leaders, including “The Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, the “cast-iron man” John C. Calhoun, and “Old-Man Eloquent” John Quincy Adams. Despite the division between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, their ideas laid the foundations that would propel the United States to become the most powerful and productive country on earth.

One criticism: While Mental Maps of the Founders offers a new lens to seeing the Founders, readers at times may feel frustrated that the book itself does not have any illustrations or maps. That may be a source of frustration for visual readers and for those expecting a book filled with topographical documents. While the lack of illustration may lessen the book’s appeal, Barone compensates with detailed analysis as to the specific geographic and topographic observations that shaped the political philosophy of the Founders.

Mental Maps of the Founders brings forth a breath of fresh air that engages the intellectual curiosity of readers and fills them with a greater appreciation for America’s Founders. One will see that through their geographic imagination, the Founders set forth America’s trajectory to become the greatest nation on earth from sea to shining sea.

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