“The best for military purposes of any map available”: The Ludwig von Buchholtz revisions to the Wood–Bőÿe map and the Civil War

Within a short time after it was published in 1826, John Wood’s and Herman Bőÿe’s map became outdated. The population growth of Virginia in the Antebellum period and the expansion of internal improvements across the Commonwealth made it necessary for the General Assembly to commission the Board of Public Works (BPW) to carry out revisions of the Wood–Bőÿe map in 1849. The project would take a decade to complete, and the results would play a significant role in shaping cartography in Virginia during the Civil War.¹

Under the direction of Claudius Crozet, the BPW began revising the 1826 map. Crozet was a French former artillery officer and veteran of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée who had been captured at the Battle of Borodino in September 1812. Released in 1814, he moved to the United States in 1816 and began teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He would be appointed the principal engineer of the BPW, as well as chief engineer of the Blue Ridge Railroad Company, with the revision of the Wood-Bőÿe map occurring during his tenure with the latter. Serving as Virginia’s Principal Engineer in the Board of Public Works, Crozet had a chance to review the manuscript map of Virginia, showing that Bőÿe was not working in a vacuum. Crozet noted that the best authorities were consulted by Bőÿe: he determined numerous valuable astronomical observations, he determined the longitude and latitude, and fixed the relative position of many remarkable points “by which means he circumscribed the inaccuracies of the surveys furnished him within narrow limits. With the help of these and by active enquiries as well as by personal observations Mr. B. possessed himself of extensive and correct information… to rectify several defective surveys; many of the counties had to be resurveyed and Crozet, in his official duties, used the corrected copies and could testify to their accuracy.”²

When assigned the project to update the 1826 map, Crozet was serving as the chief engineer of the Blue Ridge Railroad Company while also taking on a project of mapping the internal improvements in Virginia. He turned to two emigrant Hungarian army Captains to assist him: Anthony Kanalassi and William J. Vaisz. Kanalassi collected data for the map of internal improvements and Vaisz acquired boundary survey data for those 42 counties created since the publication of the 1826 map. Additionally, Crozet worked with officers of the United States Coast Survey on proper latitude and longitude measurements and with Virginian civil engineer Andrew Talcott on certain astronomical observations. Upon Kanalassi’s death in 1852, German artillery and ordinance officer Ludwig von Buchholtz was hired as his replacement.³

With Crozet engaged in other projects, Buchholtz first oversaw the completion of the internal improvements map and then completed the revisions to the Wood–Bőÿe map. The state hired Selmar Siebert and Company of Washington, D.C., to add revisions to the original copper plates. The revised maps were published in 1859 in the same nine-sheet and reduced four-sheet formats as the Wood–Bőÿe map.⁴

A Map of the State of Virginia’s most glaring flaw was its use of the original copper plates, which limited its accuracy. The General Assembly had insisted on this to save money. Selmar Siebert added “Corrected by order of the Executive by L. v. Buchholtz, 1859” to the map’s title.⁵ The text on Virginia’s geology was unchanged despite the Commonwealth having carried out its first state geological survey from 1835-1842. Published on the cusp of the Civil War, both sides would soon find these lackluster revisions of the outdated Buchholtz map frustrating.⁶

With the outbreak of war in the spring of 1861, both Union and Confederate planners would find that the Buchholtz maps were a serious obstacle to carrying out major military operations in the Commonwealth. During the 1850s, then-U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had focused the U.S. Army’s mapping program on the territories in the West, with an emphasis on routes for the future transcontinental railroad. This lack of vision was noted by historian T. Harry Williams, who wrote that “One of the most ironic examples of American military unreadiness was the spectacle of Northern–and Southern–generals fighting in their own country and not knowing where they were going or how to get there.”⁷ Given all of its drawbacks, one Union officer who had a copy of the reduced four-sheet Buchholtz map wrote that it was “the best for military purposes of any map available in the Federal Army.”⁸

The shortcomings of the Buchholtz map, while a problem for both sides at the beginning of the war, spurred significant cartographic innovation during the conflict, such as the employment of observation balloons. Another technological leap came in the form of photographic printing to copy maps. The Confederate Topographical Department run by Albert H. Campbell and chief engineer Jeremy F. Gilmer began experimenting with the idea in 1864, exposing copies of maps to sun-printing on sharp negatives. This process allowed for faster copying and production of maps. Many of Campbell’s and Gilmer’s numerous maps were destroyed at the end of the war, although Gilmer preserved about two hundred of them, and “The Lost War Maps of the Confederates” would resurface many years later.⁹

While Ludwig von Buchholtz and his team (thanks to the constraints put on by the Virginia General Assembly) ultimately failed to produce an accurate and useful map of the Commonwealth, their failure spurred incredible innovation in cartography during the ensuing Civil War. Virginia’s landscape would be forever changed both physically, and cartographically.