After passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, a number of maps were produced illustrating the danger that slavery would spread to newly admitted states in the West. Some of those maps shaded the western territories - even Mexico and Cuba - in a color close to the black of the slave states, heightening the apparent threat. See ID # 1058 and 1059. After the war began, however, northern mapmakers had an incentive to minimize the threat from the south this map does that by limiting the area shaded black (the "Disloyal" states) and including Mexico and Cuba in the map shaded white, the color of the "Loyal States."
Whatever optimism was reflected in this map and the accompanying text was unlikely to have survived the bloody Battle of Shiloh just one month later. Although a victory in the end for the Union, Shiloh left "the nation — two nations as it were, for the moment — convulsed, horrified, at the results. . . . the overarching significance of Shiloh was to impress on everyone that there was never going to be one neat, brilliant, military maneuver that would end the war — or even come close to winning it. It was as if Shiloh had unleashed some tremendous, murderous thing that was going to 'drench the country in blood,' as Sherman had prophesied on the eve of secession." (Groom 2012).
