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In the nineteenth century, nationalism and geography grew in tandem. A large theoretical literature has shown how various facets of geography helped nation-states appear as a "natural" part of the inevitable march of progress. Indeed, geographers (particularly those specializing in cartography) provided some of the most potent symbols of the nation. Maps, atlases, gazetteers, and surveys symbolized political control of a territory or region; boundaries and demarcations on such documents elegantly denoted the "we" and the "other" so essential to nationalism.1 In the United States, widely circulated maps (often reprinted in books, atlases, spellers, and ceramics) became the "logo" of the nation. In the words of Martin Bruckner, maps taught a wide variety of Americans in the early nineteenth century "not only to imagine but to 'read' themselves as parts of the national whole."2 Even lines representing rivers, canals, and railroads fused together economic imagination and nationalistic ambitions, as they indicated "bands of commerce" that united disparate regions and locales into a coherent national economy.3
Southerners were no different than other nineteenth-century Americans. They used geography to create differing, and often competing, versions of nationalism. The seemingly shared experience of a distinctive southern climate and topography helped knit together millions of different individuals into an "imagined community." In the antebellum period, nationalistic southerners used the nation's river system as powerful symbolism of the economic interdependence of the North, South, and West.4 Once outside the union, Confederate secessionists believed the Souths unique climate and geography helped provide a basis for nationhood. The frequent Confederate invocation of "King Cotton," for example, not only emphasized the importance of cotton to the world economy but also underscored how geography and climate contributed to southern exceptionalism.5 Geography also provided secessionists with a template for spreading slavery throughout the western hemisphere; southern intellectuals conceived of the Gulf of Mexico as the Souths Mediterranean, which would become the center of both slavery and world commerce. Once the Confederacy's bid for independence failed, southerners viewed the Gulf of Mexico as a geographical laboratory of how unfree labor could survive the death of slavery.6
Historians are certainly aware of how geography functioned in tandem with slavery and unfree labor to create and reinforce a unique (if flexible) southern identity, but there has been as...