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The British men in the business of colonizing the N American continent were so sure they "owned whatever land they state on" (yep, that'southward from Pocahontas), they established new colonies past simply drawing lines on a map.
So, everyone living in the now-claimed territory, became a part of an English colony.
And of all the lines drawn on maps in the 18th century, perhaps the about famous is the Stonemason-Dixon Line.
What is the Bricklayer-Dixon Line?
The Mason-Dixon Line too chosen the Mason and Dixon Line is a boundary line that makes up 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 boosted significance when information technology became the unofficial border between the Northward and the South, and perhaps more than importantly, between states where slavery was allowed and states where slavery had been abolished.
READ MORE: The History of Slavery: America'southward Black Marker
Where is the Stonemason-Dixon Line?
For the cartographers in the room, the Mason and Dixon Line is an east-west line located at 39ยบ43'twenty" Northward starting south of Philadelphia and eastward of the Delaware River. Mason and Dixon resurveyed the Delaware tangent line and the Newcastle arc and in 1765 began running the east-due west line from the tangent point, at approximately 39°43′ Northward.
For the rest of us, it'south the border between Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania–Maryland border was defined as the line of breadth 15 miles (24 km) south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia.
Mason-Dixon Line Map
Take a wait at the map below to see exactly where the Mason Dixon Line is:
Why Is information technology Called the Bricklayer-Dixon Line?
Information technology is chosen the Mason and Dixon Line because the 2 men who originally surveyed the line and got the governments of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland to agree, were named Charles Mason 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 Majestic Society, just at a time when his social life was getting a flake 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 visitor.
Bricklayer's early life was more sedate by comparison. At the age of 28 he was taken on by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich equally an banana. Noted as a "meticulous observer of nature and geography" he later became a fellow of the Purple Society.
Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on fifteen November 1763. Although the war in America had concluded some ii years earlier, there remained considerable tension between the settlers and their native neighbours.
The line was not called the Stonemason-Dixon Line when information technology was first fatigued. Instead, information technology got this name 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 name and its understood pregnant became more widespread, and it somewhen became office of the border between the seceded Confederate States of America and Union Territories.
Why Do We Take a Mason-Dixon Line?
In the early days of British colonialism in Due north America, land was granted to individuals or corporations via charters, which were given by the male monarch himself.
Nevertheless, even kings can make mistakes, and when Charles II granted William Penn a lease for land 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 on member of the Religious Lodge of Friends (Quakers), and founder of the English Due north American colony the Province of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of democracy and religious liberty, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans.
Nether his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed. Philadelphia was planned out to be grid-like with its streets and exist very piece of cake 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 considering Pennsylvania ways "Penn's Wood".
But in his defense, the map he was using was inaccurate, and this threw everything out of whack. At start, it wasn't a huge issue since the population in the area was and then thin in that location were not many disputes related to the edge.
But as all the colonies grew in population and sought to expand westward, the affair of the unresolved border became a much more prominent in mid-Atlantic politics.
The Feud
In colonial times, every bit 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 land they had a correct to claim and which belonged to someone else (of course, they didn't seem to listen too much when that 'someone else' was a tribe of Native Americans).
The dispute had its origins almost 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 start 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 "Outset 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 divers Pennsylvania'south southern edge as identical to Maryland's northern border, but described it differently, as Charles relied on an inaccurate map. The terms of the grant clearly bespeak that Charles Two and William Penn believed the 40th parallel would intersect the Twelve-Mile Circle around New Castle, Delaware, when in fact information technology falls north of the original boundaries of the City of Philadelphia, the site of which Penn had already selected for his colony's capital metropolis. Negotiations ensued after the problem was discovered in 1681.
Every bit a result, solving this border dispute became a major issue, 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 fiddling event became known equally Cresap's State of war.
To stop this madness, the Penns, who controlled Pennsylvania, and the Calverts, who were in charge of Maryland, hired Charles Bricklayer and Jeremiah Dixon to survey the territory and draw a boundary line to which anybody could agree.
But Charles Stonemason and Jeremiah Dixon only did this because the Maryland governor had agreed to a border with Delaware. He later argued the terms he signed to were not the ones he had agreed to in person, merely the courts made him stick to what was on newspaper. Always read the fine print!
This agreement fabricated information technology easier to settle the dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland because they could use the now established purlieus between Maryland and Delaware as a reference. All they had to do was extend a line west from the southern purlieus of Philadelphia, and…
The Mason-Dixon Line was built-in.
Limestone markers measuring upward to 5ft (1.5m) 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 five miles and engraved with the Penn family unit's coat of artillery on one side and the Calvert family's on the other.
Afterwards, in 1779, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed to extend the Mason-Dixon Line west past five degrees of longitude to create the border between the two colines-turned-states (Past 1779, the American Revolution was underway and the colonies were no longer colonies).
In 1784, surveyors David Rittenhouse and Andrew Ellicott and their coiffure completed the survey of the Mason–Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, v degrees from the Delaware River.
Rittenhouse's crew completed the survey of the Mason–Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, five degrees from the Delaware River. Other surveyors connected westward to the Ohio River. The section of the line between the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania and the river is the canton line betwixt Marshall and Wetzel counties, Westward Virginia.
In 1863, during the American Civil State of war, West Virginia separated from Virginia and rejoined the Union, but the line remained as the border with Pennsylvania.
It's updated several times throughout history, the most recent being during the Kennedy Administration, in 1963.
The Stonemason-Dixon Line's Identify in History
The Bricklayer–Dixon line forth the southern Pennsylvania border later became informally known equally the boundary between the free (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states.
It is unlikely that Bricklayer and Dixon ever heard the phrase "Bricklayer–Dixon line". The official report on the survey, issued in 1768, did not even mention their names. While the term was used occasionally in the decades following the survey, it came into popular employ when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 named "Stonemason and Dixon'south line" as part of the purlieus between slave territory and free territory.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was United States federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery'south expansion by admitting Missouri equally a slave state in substitution for legislation which prohibited slavery due north of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March half-dozen, 1820.
At starting time glance, the Bricklayer and Dixon Line doesn't seem similar much more than than a line on a map. Plus, it was created out of a conflict brought on by poor mapping in the showtime place…a problem more lines aren't likely to solve.
But despite its lowly condition as a line on a map, information technology eventually gained prominence in U.s.a. history and collective memory because of what information technology came to hateful to some segments of the American population.
It commencement took on this meaning in 1780 when Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Over time, more than northern states would do the same until all usa northward of the line did non allow slavery. This made it the edge between slave states and complimentary states.
Peradventure the biggest reason this is significant has to practise with the hugger-mugger resistance to slavery that took place almost from the establishment's inception. Slaves who managed to escape from their plantations would effort to make their way north, past the Mason-Dixon Line.
However, in the early years of United States history, when slavery was notwithstanding legal in some Northern states and avoiding slave laws required anyone who found a slave to return him or her to their owner, significant Canada was often the final destination. Notwithstanding information technology was no cloak-and-dagger the journey got slightly easier afterwards crossing the Line and making it 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 liberty.
Today, the Mason-Dixon Line does non take the same significance (obviously, since slavery is no longer legal) although information technology still serves every bit a useful demarcation in terms of American politics.
The "South" is still considered to starting time below the line, and political views and cultures tend to change dramatically once past the line and into Virginia, Westward Virginia, Kentucky, Due north Carolina, so on.
Beyond this, the line still serves equally the border, and anytime ii groups of people can concord on a edge for a long time, everyone wins. There's less fighting and more peace.
The Line and Social Attitudes
Considering when studying the United States history the nearly racist stuff e'er comes from the South, information technology'due south easy to fall into the trap of thinking the North was as progressive equally the South was racist.
But this just isn't true. Instead, people in the N were just as racist, but they went about it in different means. They were more than subtle. Sneakier. And they were quick to judge Southern racist, pushing attending abroad from them.
In fact, segregation still existed in many northern cities, peculiarly when it came to housing, and attitudes towards blacks were far from warm and welcoming. Boston, a city very much in the Northward, has had a long history of racism, yet Massachusetts was i of the outset states to abolish slavery.
As a result, to say the Bricklayer-Dixon Line separated the state past social attitude is a gross mischaracterization.
formulanone from Huntsville, United states [CC BY-SA two.0
It's true that blacks were by and large safer in the N than in the Due south, where lynchings and other mob violence were quite common all the manner up until the civil rights motion in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the Mason-Dixon Line is all-time understood as the unofficial border between the North and the South also as the divider betwixt costless and slave states.
The Future of the Stonemason-Dixon Line
Although information technology still serves as the edge of three states, the Stonemason-Dixon Line is most likely waning in significance. Its unofficial function every bit a border betwixt the North and South only really remains considering of the political differences between usa on each side.
However, the political dynamic in the country is irresolute rapidly, especially as demographics shift. What this volition do to the deviation between North and South, who knows?
Jbrown620 at English language Wikipedia [CC BY-SA three.0
If we use history every bit a guide, it'southward prophylactic to say the line will continue to serve some significance if in nothing else except our collective 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 Iii-Fifths Compromise
Source: https://historycooperative.org/mason-dixon-line/