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The British men in the business of colonizing the Northward American continent were so sure they "owned whatever state they land on" (aye, that's from Pocahontas), they established new colonies by merely drawing lines on a map.
So, everyone living in the now-claimed territory, became a office of an English colony.
And of all the lines drawn on maps in the 18th century, perhaps the nigh famous is the Mason-Dixon Line.
What is the Mason-Dixon Line?
The Mason-Dixon Line also chosen the Mason and Dixon Line is a boundary line that makes upwardly the border between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Over time, the line was extended to the Ohio River to brand upwardly the entire southern border of Pennsylvania.
But it also took on additional significance when it became the unofficial edge between the Northward and the South, and perhaps more importantly, between states where slavery was allowed and states where slavery had been abolished.
READ MORE: The History of Slavery: America'due south Black Mark
Where is the Stonemason-Dixon Line?
For the cartographers in the room, the Mason and Dixon Line is an eastward-west line located at 39ยบ43'twenty" North starting s of Philadelphia and east of the Delaware River. Stonemason and Dixon resurveyed the Delaware tangent line and the Newcastle arc and in 1765 began running the eastward-due west line from the tangent point, at approximately 39°43′ N.
For the rest of united states, it'southward the border between Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania–Maryland border was defined as the line of latitude xv miles (24 km) south of the southernmost business firm in Philadelphia.
Mason-Dixon Line Map
Take a wait at the map below to see exactly where the Bricklayer Dixon Line is:
Why Is it Called the Mason-Dixon Line?
It is called the Mason and Dixon Line because the ii men who originally surveyed the line and got the governments of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland to agree, were named Charles Stonemason and Jeremiah Dixon.
Jeremiah was a Quaker and from a mining family unit. He showed a talent early on for maths and and then surveying. He went down to London to be taken on by the Royal Guild, just at a fourth dimension when his social life was getting a chip out of hand.
He was a chip of a lad past all accounts, not your typical Quaker, and never married. He enjoyed socialising and carousing and was actually expelled from the Quakers for his drinking and keeping loose company.
Bricklayer'south early on life was more than sedate by comparison. At the age of 28 he was taken on by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich equally an assistant. Noted as a "meticulous observer of nature and geography" he later became a swain of the Royal Society.
Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on 15 November 1763. Although the war in America had ended some two years earlier, there remained considerable tension betwixt the settlers and their native neighbours.
The line was non called the Stonemason-Dixon Line when information technology was commencement fatigued. Instead, information technology got this proper noun during the Missouri Compromise, which was agreed to in 1820.
Information technology was used to reference the boundary between states where slavery was legal and states where it was not. After this, both the proper noun and its understood meaning became more widespread, and it eventually became office of the border between the seceded Confederate States of America and Wedlock Territories.
Why Practice We Take a Bricklayer-Dixon Line?
In the early days of British colonialism in North America, state was granted to individuals or corporations via charters, which were given by the king himself.
However, even kings can brand mistakes, and when Charles II granted William Penn a charter for country in America, he gave him territory that he had already granted to both Maryland and Delaware! What an idiot!?
William Penn was a writer, early member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and founder of the English North American colony the Province of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of commonwealth and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans.
Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and adult. Philadelphia was planned out to be grid-like with its streets and be very easy to navigate, unlike London where Penn was from. The streets are named with numbers and tree names. He chose to use the names of trees for the cross streets because Pennsylvania means "Penn's Woods".
Only in his defense, the map he was using was inaccurate, and this threw everything out of whack. At first, information technology wasn't a huge event since the population in the expanse was so thin there were not many disputes related to the border.
Only every bit all the colonies grew in population and sought to aggrandize westward, the matter of the unresolved border became a much more than prominent in mid-Atlantic politics.
The Feud
In colonial times, as in modern times, too, borders and boundaries were critical. Provincial governors needed them to ensure they were collecting their due taxes, and citizens needed to know which country they had a correct to claim and which belonged to someone else (of course, they didn't seem to mind too much when that 'someone else' was a tribe of Native Americans).
The dispute had its origins well-nigh a century earlier in the somewhat confusing proprietary grants by King Charles I to Lord Baltimore (Maryland) and by King Charles II to William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware). Lord Baltimore was an English language nobleman who was the offset Proprietor of the Province of Maryland, ninth Proprietary Governor of the Colony of Newfoundland and second of the colony of Province of Avalon to its southeast. His title was "Offset Lord Proprietary, Earl Palatine of the Provinces of Maryland and Avalon in America".
A problem arose when Charles II granted a charter for Pennsylvania in 1681. The grant defined Pennsylvania's southern border as identical to Maryland's northern edge, just described it differently, as Charles relied on an inaccurate map. The terms of the grant conspicuously point that Charles II and William Penn believed the 40th parallel would intersect the Twelve-Mile Circle around New Castle, Delaware, when in fact it falls n of the original boundaries of the City of Philadelphia, the site of which Penn had already selected for his colony'southward uppercase metropolis. Negotiations ensued afterward the problem was discovered in 1681.
Equally a result, solving this border dispute became a major event, and it became an even bigger deal when violent conflict broke out in the mid-1730s over land claimed by both people from Pennsylvania and Maryland. This little event became known equally Cresap'southward War.
To stop this madness, the Penns, who controlled Pennsylvania, and the Calverts, who were in charge of Maryland, hired Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to survey the territory and draw a boundary line to which everyone could concur.
But Charles Bricklayer and Jeremiah Dixon simply did this because the Maryland governor had agreed to a edge with Delaware. He later argued the terms he signed to were not the ones he had agreed to in person, but the courts made him stick to what was on newspaper. Always read the fine print!
This agreement made information technology easier to settle the dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland because they could apply the now established boundary between Maryland and Delaware every bit a reference. All they had to do was extend a line west from the southern purlieus of Philadelphia, and…
The Mason-Dixon Line was born.
Limestone markers measuring upwardly to 5ft (one.5m) high – quarried and transported from England – were placed at every mile and marked with a P for Pennsylvania and M for Maryland on each side. So-called Crown stones were positioned every v miles and engraved with the Penn family's coat of arms on one side and the Calvert family's on the other.
Later on, in 1779, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed to extend the Stonemason-Dixon Line due west by five degrees of longitude to create the border between the ii colines-turned-states (By 1779, the American Revolution was underway and the colonies were no longer colonies).
In 1784, surveyors David Rittenhouse and Andrew Ellicott and their crew completed the survey of the Mason–Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, 5 degrees from the Delaware River.
Rittenhouse's crew completed the survey of the Mason–Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, 5 degrees from the Delaware River. Other surveyors continued west to the Ohio River. The section of the line between the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania and the river is the county line betwixt Marshall and Wetzel counties, Westward Virginia.
In 1863, during the American Civil War, West Virginia separated from Virginia and rejoined the Spousal relationship, merely the line remained as the border with Pennsylvania.
It's updated several times throughout history, the near recent being during the Kennedy Assistants, in 1963.
The Mason-Dixon Line's Place in History
The Bricklayer–Dixon line along the southern Pennsylvania border later on became informally known as the boundary between the free (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states.
It is unlikely that Mason and Dixon always heard the phrase "Bricklayer–Dixon line". The official report on the survey, issued in 1768, did non fifty-fifty mention their names. While the term was used occasionally in the decades following the survey, it came into popular use when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 named "Bricklayer and Dixon's line" as part of the boundary between slave territory and free territory.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was U.s.a. federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery'due south expansion by albeit Missouri as a slave state in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery n of the 36°xxx′ parallel except for Missouri. The 16th The states Congress passed the legislation on March iii, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.
At first glance, the Mason and Dixon Line doesn't seem like much more than a line on a map. Plus, it was created out of a disharmonize brought on by poor mapping in the showtime place…a problem more lines aren't probable to solve.
But despite its lowly condition as a line on a map, it eventually gained prominence in Usa history and collective memory because of what information technology came to mean to some segments of the American population.
It first took on this meaning in 1780 when Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Over time, more than northern states would do the same until all the states due north of the line did not allow slavery. This made it the edge between slave states and gratuitous states.
Perchance the biggest reason this is significant has to do with the surreptitious resistance to slavery that took place almost from the institution'due south inception. Slaves who managed to escape from their plantations would try to brand their way north, past the Stonemason-Dixon Line.
However, in the early on years of Us history, when slavery was still legal in some Northern states and fugitive slave laws required anyone who institute a slave to return him or her to their owner, meaning Canada was often the final destination. Withal information technology was no hole-and-corner the journey got slightly easier afterward crossing the Line and making information technology into Pennsylvania.
Because of this, the Mason-Dixon Line became a symbol in the quest for freedom. Making it across significantly improved your chances of making it to freedom.
Today, the Mason-Dixon Line does not have the same significance (obviously, since slavery is no longer legal) although it still serves as a useful demarcation in terms of American politics.
The "South" is all the same considered to start below the line, and political views and cultures tend to alter dramatically once by the line and into Virginia, W Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and so on.
Beyond this, the line still serves as the border, and someday two groups of people can agree on a edge for a long time, anybody wins. There's less fighting and more peace.
The Line and Social Attitudes
Because when studying the U.s.a. history the most racist stuff always comes from the S, information technology'southward like shooting fish in a barrel to fall into the trap of thinking the N was as progressive every bit the S was racist.
Merely this just isn't true. Instead, people in the North were just equally racist, just they went about it in different ways. They were more subtle. Sneakier. And they were quick to judge Southern racist, pushing attention away from them.
In fact, segregation still existed in many northern cities, particularly when information technology came to housing, and attitudes towards blacks were far from warm and welcoming. Boston, a city very much in the North, has had a long history of racism, yet Massachusetts was one of the first states to abolish slavery.
As a upshot, to say the Mason-Dixon Line separated the country by social mental attitude is a gross mischaracterization.
formulanone from Huntsville, Usa [CC BY-SA 2.0
It's true that blacks were generally safer in the North than in the South, where lynchings and other mob violence were quite common all the mode up until the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Only the Mason-Dixon Line is best understood as the unofficial border betwixt the Northward and the South as well equally the divider between gratis and slave states.
The Future of the Mason-Dixon Line
Although it still serves every bit the border of three states, the Mason-Dixon Line is most likely waning in significance. Its unofficial role every bit a border between the Northward and South only really remains because of the political differences between the states on each side.
However, the political dynamic in the country is changing rapidly, especially equally demographics shift. What this will do to the difference between North and South, who knows?
Jbrown620 at English Wikipedia [CC By-SA three.0
If nosotros utilise history as a guide, it'due south safety to say the line will continue to serve some significance if in nada else except our commonage consciousness. But maps are redrawn constantly. What's a timeless border today can be a forgotten boundary tomorrow. History is still being written.
READ MORE:
The Great Compromise of 1787
The Three-Fifths Compromise
Source: https://historycooperative.org/mason-dixon-line/
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