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An extremely rare complete set of the ten maps by Daniel Friedrich Sotzmann, commissioned for an intended atlas to accompany Christoph Daniel Ebeling’s Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika, a comprehensive study of the geography and history of the newly formed United States.

Ebeling (1741-1817), a Hamburg academic, was deeply fascinated by the idea of "free states"—independent republican polities, not to do with the later 19th-century concept of a free-versus-slave state. This intellectual curiosity spurred his long-standing interest in America, culminating in the creation of his magnum opus. Through extensive correspondence with prominent Americans, Ebeling gained access to the most current maps of the United States, which eventually formed the foundation of his map collection, now housed at Harvard University.

Ebeling entrusted Sotzmann, the Geographer of the Berlin Academy, with the production of the maps. Sotzmann is recognized as one of the foremost German cartographers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Originally, the atlas was to contain 18 plates, including 16 of individual states. However, only ten maps were completed, due to Ebeling's advancing age and his dissatisfaction with the accuracy of available sources, particularly for the southern and newly-admitted western states.

Though not fully realized, the project produced some of the most accurate maps of the time, surpassing many American sources. Today, these maps are exceedingly rare, and few institutions hold complete sets, with certain maps such as Maryland being particularly scarce.

Maps

The completed maps, issued between 1796 and 1799, cover the following states:

• Vermont (Plate XVI), 1796
• New Hampshire (Plate II), 1796
• Massachusetts (Plate III), undated
• Maine (Plate IV), 1798
• Rhode Island (Plate V), 1797
• Connecticut (Plate VI), 1796
• New York (Plate VII), 1799
• New Jersey (Plate VIII), 1797
• Pennsylvania (Plate IX), 1797
• Maryland und Delaware (Plate X), 1797

Rarity

The single maps are individually scarce on the market. However, we are unaware of another complete set having been offered.

In institutional collections, the complete set is sometimes bound into composite atlases, such as at Gettysburg College (bound with ten 1814 Matthew Carey maps to complete the run), and at Yale University (bound with 24 other maps by Thomas Jefferys, Eugene Henri Friex, and others, as collected by Noah Webster).