Overview

The Hotchkiss Map Collection contains cartographic items made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss (1828-1899), a topographic engineer in the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss made detailed battle maps primarily of the Shenandoah Valley, some of which were used by the Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson for their combat planning and strategy. Several of the maps have annotations of various military officers, demonstrating their importance in the military campaigns. The collection also includes maps made or used by Hotchkiss during his post-war years, including maps with information about railroads, minerals and mining, geology and history, most of which focus on Virginia and West Virginia, but also cover other states and even the world.

The collection consists of 341 sketchbooks, manuscripts, and annotated printed maps, the originals of which reside in the Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division. A Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file was created to view the Hotchkiss maps in KML2.2; the zipped file (KMZ) is 41MB.

In 1948, an outstanding collection of American Civil War maps was purchased by the Library of Congress from Mrs. R. E. Christian, granddaughter of Major Jedediah Hotchkiss (1828-1899), a topographic engineer in the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss worked principally in the West Virginia and Virginia areas that he had toured during his earlier geological studies and made detailed battle maps. As annotations demonstrate, these maps were used by Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson in planning their campaigns. Many of these maps were used to compile the War Department's definitive Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (2 vols.; Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891-95). One such map, Hotchkiss' masterpiece, [Map of the Shenandoah Valley], prepared at the request of Stonewall Jackson and presented to the Library by Mrs. Christian in 1964, shows the offensive and defensive points of the Shenandoah Valley from the Potomac River to Lexington, Virginia. Hotchkiss also filled several notebooks with topographic and strategic drawings. The collection includes maps drawn or used by Hotchkiss during his postwar career as a consulting engineer in Staunton, Virginia. The 341 sketchbooks, manuscripts, and annotated printed maps are described in the Hotchkiss catalog compiled by Clara Egli LeGear, which appears in the second edition of Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress prepared by Richard W. Stephenson.

This online presentation includes all the materials in the Hotchkiss Map Collection, some of which also appear in the American Memory collection: Civil War Maps, 1861-1865.

Related Resources

The American Memory collections contain many references to the Civil War in various formats, including photographs, prints, maps, songs, and oral histories. See the collections listed below for specific references.

• The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books contains a book on Virginia with contributions by Jedediah Hotchkiss.
• African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907 contains many pamphlets relating to the Civil War.
• African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920; Selected from the Collections of Brown University includes Civil War-related sheet music.
• "California As I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 contains a number of passages about the Civil War including an account of General William T. Sherman (1820-1891), who went to California during the Mexican War and returned east to play a pivotal role in the Civil War.
• Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865 contains 1,000 images of that war made primarily under the supervision of Mathew B. Brady.
• America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864 contains portraits of major figures the Civil War including Abraham Lincoln.
• Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 has many images of the Civil War including photographs of various Civil War monuments.
• Words & Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years features James Wadsworth's Civil War photograph album, ca. 1861-65, which contains images of many well-known Civil War figures.
• American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 contains first-person accounts of family, education, income, occupation, and political views that mention the Civil War.
• Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present includes drawings and photographs of buildings, monuments, and parks relating to the Civil War.
• Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library is a preview of future online collections of Lincolniana.
• First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 is a compilation of 101 titles published during and after the Civil War documenting the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners.
• Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991 includes images of battlefields and other sites of the Civil War.
• By Popular Demand: Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present has images of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Harrison.
• An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera includes broadsides, leaflets, and pamphets relating to the Civil War.
• Railroad Maps, 1828-1900 contains maps depicting various train lines during the Civil War.
• Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Duke University includes songs about the Civil War.
• "We'll Sing to Abe Our Song": Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War, from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana includes sheet music about Lincoln as well as the Civil War.
• Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910 depicts the Civil War through first-person accounts and local histories.
• Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection includes some of the poet's battlefield accounts.
• Civil War Maps holds over 2000 maps from the Library of Congress Geography & Map Division, the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society covering the Civil War.

Rights And Access

The maps in the Hotchkiss Map Collection were published prior to 1922 (see catalog records that accompany each map for information regarding date of publication and source). The Library of Congress is providing access to these materials for noncommercial, educational, and research purposes and is not aware of any U.S. copyright protection (see Title 17 of the United States Code) or any other restrictions in the Map Collection materials. Note that the written permission of the copyright owners and/or other rights holders (such as publicity and/or privacy rights) is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

For further information on permissions rights, please see our Legal Notices.

Credit Line: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Citing Primary Souces on the Teachers Page.

Photographic copies of maps from the Geography and Map Division are available through the Library of Congress Photoduplication Service. The reproductions in this collection are made from digital images. Digital reproductions in TIFF format are also available.