Technical Notes on the Website, the Archive, and the Map

The data contained in the archive is stored on the Drupal platform. The data began in csv format, with each row containing an individual record of employment. This structure includes certain forms of duplication by design. For example, a U.S. attorney who served for only three years may have multiple records of employment:

• A definitive record from Bicentennial Celebration of the United States Attorneys.
• A record of appointment from the Senate Executive Journal.
• Two records from the published Registers, one during the year following the appointment and another two years later.

The Government Employee Number (GEN) serves as the link between individual records, enabling Drupal to present a unified record of individual employment.

The individual records within this structure contain data in the following general areas:

• A source record of the information about the appointment.
• Information about the appointee (name, where born, etc.).
• Information about the appointment (department, office, etc.).
• Information about the location of employment (location name, location type, etc.).

This map visualizes the spatial distribution of federal employees. Whenever possible, these locations are an individual city or town, and in some cases are as specific as a part of town or even an individual building.

All of this is made possible through a geographic information system, more commonly called GIS. And like the textual data about individual employees, GIS organization requires some explanation.

The data is organized into the following categories:

• Points: specific locations. These range in specificity, as follows:
  • Buildings. Forts and lighthouses constitute most of the buildings shown on this map. In almost all cases, there is a known exact location, producing highly accurate coordinates.
  • Sublocalities. In some cases, the records list a named but unspecific portion of a city or town. This is often the cases with commercial officials located at a port or wharf area. The coordinates for these areas are located at the historic activity center of that sublocality.
  • Locality. A city or town. The coordinates for localities are the historic government center (if known), the historic central square, or another historic municipal center.
  • Waterways. A number of points refer to maritime stations. These stations consist primarily of cutters from the Revenue Cutter Service, as well as revenue boats, light vessels, etc. Because these vessels operated on patrol, a specific set of coordinates is unavailable. For purposes of visualization, these patrol stations are located immediately outside the port where these vessels were based.
• Polygons: political jurisdictions. Some federal officials were not assigned to a specific location, but rather held jurisdiction over broader geographical areas. These polygons visualize those jurisdictions. State and county boundary data comes from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (https://digital.newberry.org/ahcb/), an extraordinary mapping project conducted by the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois, which chronicles the shifting boundaries of U.S. counties. Colonial maps are limited to the British colonies, after which the project maps counties in the United States, expanding as U.S. territorial claims expanded. These maps emerge from British colonial and U.S. sources, and as a result they accurately reflect the claims of those parties. But those claims are not always accurate in displaying governing authority in North America. Mapping data contains the following polygon types.
  • State Boundaries. States serve as an important point of reference for understanding the United States. As a result, this project includes state boundaries. But states rarely served as the basis for the authority of a U.S. official.
    • Digitization Process. Data imported from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
  • Territorial Boundaries. The largest area of federal power was in the federal territories, most of them located in the North American West. The boundaries for these spaces are even more problematic than states. Native Americans remained the governing authority in much of the West, yet the federal government ignored this reality when claiming land. Likewise, the United States and European empires were often at odds over the boundaries. The mapping data therefore accurately reflects what the United States claimed, but not what it actually governed.
    • Digitization Process. Data imported from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.
  • Tax Districts. The United States paid for its operations primarily through import duties on foreign goods. Several times, the federal government established direct taxes on individual citizens. Direct taxes were extremely unpopular, and it took either the risk or the reality of war for Congress to take this drastic step. Congress authorized a direct tax in 1798, when the United States was in the midst of an undeclared naval war with France and mobilizing an army in the event of a formal declaration of war. When the War of 1812 proved both longer and more expensive than federal leaders anticipated, Congress again established a direct tax. In both cases, Congress subdivided the existing states into a series of tax districts, most of them consisting of several counties.
    • Digitization Process. In the summer of 2023, Lee Morrison (a doctoral student in history now conducting his own GIS research on medieval Italy) and Violet DeLuca (a talented undergraduate), research assistants at the Humanities Digital Workshop, reconstructed the tax districts as GIS data. Starting with the federal legislation that established the districts, they used county boundary data from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries to create shapefiles for each tax district.
  • Judicial Districts and Circuits. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, the United States established the foundations of the federal court system that remain with us to this day. The Judiciary Act created a series of judicial districts, each of them overlapping the boundaries of an individual state. The only exceptions were Kentucky (then part of Virginia) and Maine (then part of Massachusetts), which had separate judicial districts. The districts were in turn combined into a series of multi-state judicial circuits. Larger and more populous states were later divided into multiple judicial districts.
    • Digitization Process. Research assistant Sarah Kim created an initial set of judicial boundary data using the state and county data from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries to create shapefiles for each judicial district and circuit. Bryan Haberberger of Habesoftware further developed this data to be interoperative with other mapping data.
  • Postmasters. Many U.S. post offices were defined by locations that are impossible to locate or which no longer exist. While some were in cities or towns, many were defined by smaller villages, waterways, or the stores in which they were located. The postmaster data for this project includes county information, and post offices are represented accordingly.
    • Digitization Process. The records of early postmasters were often identified by the stores or landmarks where they were located, or by towns that no longer exist.  As a result, localities do not work as a means to georeference early postmasters.  But Post Office records do indicate counties.  As a result, individual post offices are aggregated within their counties, which are colorweighted using county data from the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.

Ambiguities 

Spatial technologies like those in this project operate through the use of highly specific geospatial coordinates. But it’s important to bear in mind that many of the records of federal appointment do not provide that specificity. Forms of ambiguity include the following:

• Conflicts: In some cases, different records identify an individual working in different locations in the same year. This is most often the case for appointment records in the Senate Executive Journal that conflict with work locations in the Registers. In these cases, the locations are usually very close to one another. The protocol for this project in cases where locations conflict but the two locations are adjacent is to standardize the location that appears more often.
• Boundaries: GIS data sources have highly exact boundaries. But North America had no such boundaries. Different governments claimed the same land. Native Americans governed most of North America, but the United States and European empires regularly ignored those realities. Meanwhile, authority in any one place could change from year to year. North America was therefore a place of borderlands rather than borders. Although the map shows a western boundary of the United States, it is crucial to understand that boundary as an expression of what federal leaders claimed they governed, not what they actually governed.
• Native American diplomacy: Federal documents record numerous U.S. officials who conducted negotiations with Native Americans, but those records often do not specify the location of those negotiations. To geolocate these individuals, this project followed a series of protocols:
  • When negotiators concluded their work with a treaty, the location where that treaty was signed serves as the location.
  • When negotiations did not produce a treaty or the treaty has no record of a location, the Indian agency, factory, or similar facility for the native nation serves as the location.
• Judicial Complexity: The federal judiciary was organized around spaces. Judicial districts encompassed entire states or portions of states, and judicial circuits included multiple states. Courts often rotated between different locations. For example, the District Court in Tennessee met in Knoxville and Nashville. The meeting places for other courts changed over time. While the archive lists courts that met in multiple locations, the map uses a different protocol, locating each court either in the space where it met for the longest period of time or the more populace locality (localities with larger populations usually produced more court business).

Technical Notes about the Map

This project combines two different digital architectures: the Drupal platform for the main project site and archive, and a custom-built GIS platform for the map using Leaflet. Leaflet is open source and promotes web friendly habits such as the usage of formal geographic data encodings like GeoJSON and usage of regularized georeferenced basemaps. The underlying spreadsheet data was converted into GeoJSON and interrelated for metadata properties where appropriate.

Leaflet offers a mechanic for metadata pop ups when interacting with the shapes which is where data in the pop ups come from with no real customization needed.  It reads metadata from the GeoJSON properties attached to each shape. Leaflet also has plugins available to help with the visualization of shapes, such as the Cluster Plugin used for an enhanced UI when interacting with locations in close proximity to each other.

The time slider is a completely custom component that interacts with the GeoJSON layers in Leaflet to toggle the visibility of geographic boundaries based on the start and end dates recorded for those boundaries. This functionality is not readily available in other web mapping platforms even with the dates encoded along with the coordinates.  Having the data in a standardized, web friendly format with the dates included helps to combat the proprietary nature of this component and functionality, but custom coding for UIs that use time based dimensions will always be necessary in web mapping scenarios.