The NOAA announced last week the release of “Charting a More Perfect Union,” a collection of over 400 documents including Civil War-era maps and nautical charts, and annual summaries of the US Coast Survey. It’s available at http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/history/CivilWar/.

You can browse this collection a variety of ways, including keyword, state or region, and year. I did a search for charts in Alabama and got 7 results. The results don’t provide a lot of detail (title, year, links to download in SID or JPG format.) There’s a preview link that brings up the chart in a Flash viewer that’s very nice.

I called up a map of Mobile from 1863 and was able to quickly zoom down so far that I could read the gun count on the noted coastal battery and see where the obstructions and shallow water canal were placed.

In addition to the images, you can also review the Notes on the Coast of the United States. This is a series of eight documents written in 1861, fascinating handwritten items analyzing various state coastlines. (North Carolina, for example, takes up one entire document; 69 pages of analysis and charts.)

There’s also the coastal survey documents for 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865, available as individual PDF documents.

Nice collection here.