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Copyright for Map of the City of Nauvoo, 17 December 1842

Source Note

District, Copyright for Map of the City of Nauvoo, [Springfield, Sangamon Co., IL], 17 Dec. 1842, in Copyright Records Illinois District, Aug. 1821–Sept. 1848, p. [46]; handwriting of ; Early Copyright Records Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.
The copyright is found in a blank book containing eighty-one leaves measuring 7½ × 6¼ inches (19 × 16 cm). Each leaf is ruled with twenty-one lines printed in blue ink. Only 94 of the 162 pages in the volume are inscribed. Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, the volume was rebound in red faux-leather cloth boards. The rebound volume measures 8 × 6½ × ⅞ inches (20 × 17 × 2 cm).
The clerk of the Circuit Court for the District of used this volume to record copyrights from 1821 through 1848. At that point, the volume may have been forwarded to the United States secretary of state, as required by law, or retained by the district court clerk. Regardless, in 1870 a new federal statute ordered that all copyright records—whether in the custody of the Department of the Interior (which then held jurisdiction over copyrights) or still in the custody of district court clerks—be transferred to the Library of Congress. This volume has presumably been in the Library of Congress since the late nineteenth century.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, p. 437, sec. 4.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

  2. [2]

    An Act to Revise, Consolidate, and Amend the Statutes relating to Patents and Copyrights [8 July 1870], Public Statutes at Large, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 230, p. 215, secs. 109–110.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

Historical Introduction

On 17 December 1842, , acting on behalf of JS as trustee-in-trust of the , filed a copyright for a printed map of , Illinois, with the clerk of the Circuit Court for the District of . Printed city maps had become increasingly common in the early nineteenth century and served a variety of functions. For example, these maps assisted land speculators or agents in selling city lots to faraway prospective buyers and helped instill a sense of civic pride and identity in city residents. It is unclear when JS and other civic leaders in Nauvoo conceived of printing a map of their city, but the detailed labeling of lots, blocks, and landmarks as well as the inclusion of images of the and JS on the published map suggest it was designed to serve as a practical guide to the city and as a representation of civic pride.
On 25 June 1842, Latter-day Saint artist delineated a profile portrait of JS for inclusion on the map. By that time, preparations for the map must have been largely complete. On 1 July 1842, left for a mission to the eastern . He apparently took with him a copy of Maudsley’s portrait, a drawing of the city plat by , and a concept drawing of the completed Nauvoo by architect , with instructions to have the map lithographed and printed in . On 24 July, Richards and , the church’s in New York City, visited the lithography shop of John Childs on the corner of Nassau and Fulton streets and contracted Childs to lithograph the map. Over the next few weeks, Richards occasionally stopped by the shop to check on the progress of the map, noting at times his difficulty obtaining funds to pay for the map and the poor quality of the initial proofs. Perhaps at the root of both these challenges was the fact that the map Childs produced was visually and technically ambitious for a city the size of Nauvoo. The level of detail and variety of colors in the map rivaled or exceeded those of published maps of other large western cities at the time.
By October 1842, when began his return to , the map was apparently not yet complete. Nevertheless, after he returned to , Richards began making arrangements to secure the copyright of the map on behalf of JS. The 1831 federal copyright statute required three steps to obtain a copyright: First, an “author or proprietor” had to “deposit a printed copy of the title” of his or her work with the clerk of the district court. The clerk then recorded the copyright in exchange for a fifty-cent fee, and finally the proprietor had to submit a copy of the completed work to the clerk’s office within three months of its publication. The completed work had to incorporate standardized language giving the “information of copyright,” including the year, the name of the copyright holder, and the district in which it was filed. Fulfilling these steps guaranteed proprietors “the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing, and vending” their work for a period of twenty-eight years, with a possibility of renewal for an additional fourteen years. Despite this apparently established process, for most of the nineteenth century copyright laws were all but unenforceable due to widespread irregularities in practices and a lack of bureaucratic oversight.
In December 1842, and other church leaders traveled to , Illinois, to attend to legal business related to JS’s and ’s bankruptcy proceedings and the ongoing efforts to extradite JS to . On 17 December, after they completed their other business in the city and shortly before they left for , Richards stopped by the office of , the clerk of the Circuit Court for the District of . There Richards deposited a printed title of the map with Owings on behalf of JS, fulfilling the first requirement of the 1831 statute, and apparently paid the requisite fifty cents to have the map’s copyright recorded, the second requirement. Owings recorded the copyright based on the form approved by Congress in the 1831 copyright statute, although there were a few minor textual variants. The lithographed map attempted to comply with the statute by including a statement that the map’s copyright had been entered with the district court of Illinois. Contrary to the stipulations of the 1831 statute, this statement did not include the date of the copyright or the name of the copyright holder. Richards or Childs may have excluded these elements because when Richards arranged for the map’s printing he did not know when he would be able to submit a copyright claim or who would hold title to the map. These omissions likely would have invalidated JS’s copyright claim had the issue ever been brought to court. Regardless, JS and many of his contemporaries may have assumed they had complied with the law. It is unknown whether a final copy of the map was ever submitted to the clerk of the district court to complete the copyright process after its publication.
Although and submitted the map to him in July 1842, Childs did not complete it until early 1844. In the meantime, JS apparently granted authority over the eventual distribution and sale of the maps. It is unclear who inherited the copyright for the map after JS’s death. The federal copyright statute assumed individual or familial ownership, but JS filed the copyright as trustee-in-trust for the church, thereby identifying the map as corporate property. Accordingly, after JS’s death the copyright may have fallen under the jurisdiction of later trustees and , which would have negated JS’s arrangement with Young. However, Young apparently desired to maintain proprietary control of the map, and on 20 August 1845, acting as “President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” he submitted a new copyright claim for a map with a title identical to the one JS copyrighted in 1842. It is unclear whether Young was attempting to transfer JS’s copyright to himself or trying to reissue a modified version of the original map.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    Churchill, “Urban Cartography and the Mapping of Chicago,” 1–22.

    Churchill, Robert R. “Urban Cartography and the Mapping of Chicago.” Geographical Review 94, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 1–22.

  2. [2]

    In January 1842, Nauvoo city councilor Wilson Law proposed a vague resolution that the council procure “a Complite plat of the City” for the council’s use. The resolution was referred to the Committee of Ways and Means, headed by JS, which gave a favorable report that recommended “a Map or Plot be procured,” prompting the city council to adopt the resolution. This may have provided the genesis for the Map of the City of Nauvoo, but the city’s records make no further mention of this resolution, the wording of which suggests that the council may have desired to simply obtain a copy of the recorded plat for its own use rather than publish a map for commercial distribution. Additionally, Richards filed the map’s copyright for JS as trustee-in-trust rather than for JS as mayor. (Resolution and Report, [15] and 22 Jan. 1842, Nauvoo, IL, Records, CHL, canceled text in original; Nauvoo City Council Rough Minute Book, 15 and 22 Jan. 1842, 7, 9.)

  3. [3]

    JS, Journal, 25 June 1842; Map of the City of Nauvoo (ca. 1844); Leonard, “Picturing the Nauvoo Legion,” 96–102.

    Leonard, Glen M. “Picturing the Nauvoo Legion.” BYU Studies 35, no. 2 (1995): 95–135.

  4. [4]

    Richards, Journal, 1 July 1842.

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

  5. [5]

    Richards, Journal, 24 July 1842.

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

  6. [6]

    Richards, Journal, 8, 16, and 17 Aug. 1842.

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

  7. [7]

    See, for example, Map of the City of St. Louis (1844); Topographical Map of the City of Cincinnati (1841); Norman’s Plan of New Orleans and Environs (1845); and New Map of Chicago (1855).

    Map of the City of St. Louis, Compiled from Information in Possession of Rene Paul Esqr., 1844. St. Louis: Twichel and Cook, 1844. Copy at David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019. http://www.davidrumsey.com.

    Topographical Map of the City of Cincinnati, from Actual Survey. Doolittle and Munson, 1841. Copy at Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington DC. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4084c.ct001811.

    Norman’s Plan of New Orleans and Environs, 1845. B. M. Norman, 1845. Copy at Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington DC. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4014n.ct000243.

    New Map of Chicago Comprising the Whole City Taken from Lowe’s Map with All the Recent Additions, Subdivisions, Extensions. Chicago: Hall, 1855. Copy at Historical Maps Online digital collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019. https://digital .library.illinois.edu/items/a15f6680-994e-0134-2096-0050569601ca-7.

  8. [8]

    Richards left New York City for Massachusetts on 20 August 1842. He returned to New York City by the end of September and then left for Nauvoo on 4 October 1842. (Richards, Journal, 20 Aug.–4 Oct. 1842.)

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

  9. [9]

    Though JS almost certainly would have sought a copyright for the map regardless of circumstances, part of the urgency to copyright the map in December may have arisen from the publication of John C. Bennett’s The History of the Saints in October 1842. Bennett’s book was copublished by three presses in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati, and the New York publisher was located just two blocks north of Childs’s lithography business. At some point during the publication process, Bennett or his publisher obtained illicit copies of what appears to be an early proof of the map as well as copies of the JS portrait and the Nauvoo temple drawing and then reproduced all three images in Bennett’s book. (Bennett, History of the Saints, frontispiece, 56–57, 188.)

    Bennett, John C. The History of the Saints; or, an Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. Boston: Leland and Whiting, 1842.

  10. [10]

    An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, pp. 436–437, secs. 1–2, 4–5.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

  11. [11]

    McGill, “Copyright,” 167.

    McGill, Meredith L. “Copyright.” In A History of the Book in America, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 158–178. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

  12. [12]

    William Clayton kept a financial account of the Springfield trip, which lists a payment of fifty-six cents for “Sundries sma[ll] [a]rticles” on 17 December. He may have included the recorder’s fee in that list of “sundries.” (“A/c of Expenses to Springfield Decr 1842,” Newel K. Whitney, Papers, BYU.)

    Whitney, Newel K. Papers, 1825–1906. BYU.

  13. [13]

    Map of the City of Nauvoo (ca. 1844); An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, p. 437, sec. 5. In contrast, other lithographs Childs produced around this same time included the correct copyright statement. (See, for example, Clay, The Almighty Lever [1840].)

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

    Clay, Edward Williams. The Almighty Lever. Lithograph. New York City: John Childs, 1840. Copy at Cartoon Print Filing Series, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019. https://lccn.loc.gov/2008661393.

  14. [14]

    An 1834 Supreme Court decision based on earlier copyright legislation held that exact compliance with the statutory requirements was “essential” for a copyright to be valid. Although in practice many authors and publishers, including JS in the 1830s, occasionally skirted around the language stipulated in the 1831 statute, it is unclear whether their copyright claims would have held up had they been challenged in court. An 1848 United States circuit court decision held that a failure to publish the notice “in the manner directed” by the 1831 statute created “a fatal defect” in the copyright title. (An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, p. 437, sec. 5; Wheaton v. Peters, 8 Peters 593 [1834]; see also Doctrine and Covenants, 1835 ed., [ii]; and Baker and Scribner v. Taylor [S.D.N.Y. 1848], in Blatchford, Reports, 84.)

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

    Peters / Peters, Richard. Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States. 17 vols. Various publishers, 1828–1843.

    Blatchford, Samuel. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Second Circuit. Vol. 2. New York: John S. Voorhies, 1859.

  15. [15]

    In September 1843, Young displayed a proof of the map at a church conference in Boston while requesting funds to finance the map’s publication, which suggests that a lack of money led to the delay in its printing. On 30 April 1844, Young submitted an advertisement to the Nauvoo Neighbor noting that “the long looked for Maps of the City of Nauvoo” had recently arrived from New York and were available for sale at his house. According to the 1831 statute, no one could “engrave, etch, or work, sell, or copy” copyrighted maps or images “without the consent of the proprietor . . . first obtained in writing, signed in the presence of two credible witnesses.” JS and Young may have adhered to this requirement, though no such agreement is now extant. (Boston Conference, Minutes, 11 Sept. 1843, 17–18, Historian’s Office, Minutes and Reports [Local Units], CHL; “Map of Nauvoo,” Nauvoo Neighbor, 1 May 1844, [3]; An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, p. 438, sec. 7.)

    Historian’s Office. Minutes and Reports, 1840–1886. CHL.

    Nauvoo Neighbor. Nauvoo, IL. 1843–1845.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

  16. [16]

    An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, pp. 436–437, sec. 2.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

  17. [17]

    Copyright for the Map of the City of Nauvoo, 20 Aug. 1845, in Roger Wright Harris, Copyright Registry Records for Works concerning the Mormons to 1870, CHL.

    Harris, Roger Wright. Copyright Registry Records for Works concerning the Mormons to 1870, ca. 1974. CHL.

  18. [18]

    While on a mission in the eastern United States shortly after the map was published, Young arranged for Edward Hutawa “to Lithographic the Plat of Nauvoo,” though it is unclear whether Hutawa actually completed any work or why additional work was needed after the publication of the map. All extant copies of this map list “J. Childs” as the lithographer. On 15 August 1845, Richards noted in his journal that he had “prepared a Map of Nauvoo & Temple” for Young’s agents to take to Springfield for a copyright. One of the extant printed copies of the map of Nauvoo at the Church History Library is missing JS’s portrait in the bottom left corner, and remnants of the portrait’s border suggest that the portrait was expunged from a printing stone or plate. Because Richards neglected to describe JS’s portrait in his description of the map he prepared for Young, that map may have been the version Young copyrighted in 1845. (Brigham Young, Pittsburgh, PA, to Mary Ann Angell Young, Nauvoo, IL, 31 May–1 June 1844, CHL; Richards, Journal, 15 Aug. 1845; Map of the City of Nauvoo [ca. 1845].)

    Young, Brigham. Letter, Pittsburgh, PA, to Mary Ann Angell Young, Nauvoo, IL, 31 May–1 June 1844. CHL.

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

    Map of the City of Nauvoo. New York: J. Childs, ca. 1845.

Page [46]

District of ss.
Be it remembered That on this Seventeenth day of December in the year of Our Lord one thousand Eight hundred and forty two Joseph Smith of said District has deposited in this office as sole trustee in trust for the the title of a Map, the title of which is in the words following to wit— “A Map of the City of drawn from Original Surveys by Esq 1842” the right whereof he Claims as sole trustee as aforesaid an[d] proprietor in Conformity with an Act of Congress Entitled a “An act to amend the Several acts respecting Copy rights.[”]
Clk [p. [46]]
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Related Case Documents
Editorial Title
Copyright for Map of the City of Nauvoo, 17 December 1842
ID #
4204
Total Pages
1
Print Volume Location
JSP, D11:288–293
Handwriting on This Page
  • James Owings

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    “Ss.” is a legal abbreviation for scilicet, a Latin adverb meaning “that is to say, to wit, viz.” (“Scilicet,” in Jones, Introduction to Legal Science, appendix, 28.)

    Jones, Silas. An Introduction to Legal Science: Being a Concise and Familiar Treatise . . . to Which Is Appended a Concise Dictionary of Law Terms and Phrases. New York: John S. Voorhies, 1842.

  2. [2]

    An Act to Amend the Several Acts respecting Copy Rights [3 Feb. 1831], Public Statutes at Large, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., chap. 16, pp. 436–439.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

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