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The British men in the business of colonizing the North American continent were and then sure they “endemic whatever land they state on” (aye, that’s from Pocahontas), they established new colonies by but drawing lines on a map.

Then, everyone living in the at present-claimed territory, became a part of an English colony.

And of all the lines drawn on maps in the 18th century, maybe the most famous is the Mason-Dixon Line.

What is the Mason-Dixon Line?

The Mason-Dixon Line also called the Bricklayer and Dixon Line is a boundary line that makes upward the border between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Over fourth dimension, the line was extended to the Ohio River to brand up the entire southern border of Pennsylvania.

Only information technology also took on additional significance when it became the unofficial border between the North and the Southward, and maybe more importantly, between states where slavery was immune and states where slavery had been abolished.

READ More than:
The History of Slavery: America’south Black Mark

Where is the Mason-Dixon Line?

For the cartographers in the room, the Mason and Dixon Line is an east-w line located at 39º43’20” Due north starting s of Philadelphia and east of the Delaware River. Mason and Dixon resurveyed the Delaware tangent line and the Newcastle arc and in 1765 began running the eastward-west line from the tangent bespeak, at approximately 39°43′ Due north.

For the rest of u.s.a., it’south the edge betwixt Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania–Maryland border was divers as the line of latitude 15 miles (24 km) south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia.

Mason-Dixon Line Map

Take a await at the map below to encounter exactly where the Bricklayer Dixon Line is:

Why Is information technology Called the Bricklayer-Dixon Line?

Information technology is called the Mason and Dixon Line because the two 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. He showed a talent early on for maths and then surveying. He went downward to London to be taken on by the Purple Society, simply at a fourth dimension when his social life was getting a fleck out of hand.

He was a bit of a lad by 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.

Stonemason’s early on life was more sedate by comparison. At the age of 28 he was taken on by the Majestic Observatory in Greenwich as an assistant. Noted as a “meticulous observer of nature and geography” he later became a fellow of the Majestic Gild.

Bricklayer and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on 15 Nov 1763. Although the war in America had concluded some 2 years before, there remained considerable tension between the settlers and their native neighbours.

The line was not called the Bricklayer-Dixon Line when it was starting time drawn. Instead, information technology got this proper noun during the Missouri Compromise, which was agreed to in 1820.

Information technology was used to reference the purlieus between states where slavery was legal and states where it was not. After this, both the name and its understood meaning became more widespread, and it eventually became part of the border betwixt the seceded Amalgamated States of America and Union Territories.

Why Do We Have a Bricklayer-Dixon Line?

In the early days of British colonialism in North America, country was granted to individuals or corporations via charters, which were given past the king himself.

Withal, fifty-fifty 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 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 democracy and religious freedom, 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 easy to navigate, unlike London where Penn was from. The streets are named with numbers and tree names. He chose to employ the names of trees for the cross streets because Pennsylvania means “Penn’s Forest”.

But in his defense, the map he was using was inaccurate, and this threw everything out of whack. At start, information technology wasn’t a huge issue since the population in the area was so sparse at that place were not many disputes related to the border.

Merely as all the colonies grew in population and sought to aggrandize westward, the matter of the unresolved border became a much more 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 land they had a right to merits 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 before 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 nobleman who was the starting time 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 Two granted a charter for Pennsylvania in 1681. The grant defined Pennsylvania’s southern border as identical to Maryland’s northern border, merely described information technology differently, as Charles relied on an inaccurate map. The terms of the grant conspicuously indicate 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 north of the original boundaries of the City of Philadelphia, the site of which Penn had already selected for his colony’s capital letter city. Negotiations ensued later the problem was discovered in 1681.

As a result, solving this border dispute became a major issue, and it became an even bigger deal when fierce conflict broke out in the mid-1730s over land claimed past both people from Pennsylvania and Maryland. This picayune event became known as Cresap’south State of 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.

Merely Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon only 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, only the courts made him stick to what was on paper. Ever read the fine print!

This agreement fabricated it easier to settle the dispute betwixt Pennsylvania and Maryland considering they could use the now established boundary between Maryland and Delaware as a reference. All they had to do was extend a line westward from the southern boundary of Philadelphia, and…

The Mason-Dixon Line was built-in.

Limestone markers measuring upwardly to 5ft (ane.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’south coat of arms on i side and the Calvert family unit’due south on the other.

Later, in 1779, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed to extend the Stonemason-Dixon Line west past five degrees of longitude to create the border between the two 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, five 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 between Marshall and Wetzel counties, Due west Virginia.

In 1863, during the American Civil State of war, West Virginia separated from Virginia and rejoined the Wedlock, but the line remained as the border with Pennsylvania.

Information technology’s updated several times throughout history, the almost recent existence during the Kennedy Administration, in 1963.

The Mason-Dixon Line’due south Identify in History

The Mason–Dixon line along the southern Pennsylvania border
after became informally known equally the purlieus between the free (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states.

It is unlikely that Mason and Dixon ever heard the phrase “Stonemason–Dixon line”. The official report on the survey, issued in 1768, did not fifty-fifty mention their names. While the term was used occasionally in the decades following the survey, information technology came into pop employ when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 named “Stonemason and Dixon’s line” as part of the boundary between slave territory and free territory.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was The states federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery’s expansion by admitting Missouri equally a slave state in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. The 16th United states of america Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.

At offset glance, the Mason and Dixon Line doesn’t seem similar much more than a line on a map. Plus, information technology was created out of a disharmonize brought on by poor mapping in the kickoff identify…a problem more lines aren’t likely to solve.

Simply despite its lowly status every bit a line on a map, it eventually gained prominence in The states history and collective retentivity because of what it came to mean to some segments of the American population.

It beginning took on this meaning in 1780 when Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Over time, more northern states would do the same until all the states north of the line did non allow slavery. This made information technology the border betwixt slave states and free states.

Mayhap the biggest reason this is meaning has to do with the secret resistance to slavery that took place almost from the establishment’s inception. Slaves who managed to escape from their plantations would try to brand their way north, past the Mason-Dixon Line.

Still, in the early years of United states of america 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 possessor, meaning Canada was often the last destination. Yet it was no secret the journeying got slightly easier afterward crossing the Line and making it into Pennsylvania.

Because of this, the Mason-Dixon Line became a symbol in the quest for liberty. Making it beyond significantly improved your chances of making information technology to freedom.

Today, the Bricklayer-Dixon Line does not have the same significance (obviously, since slavery is no longer legal) although it notwithstanding serves as a useful demarcation in terms of American politics.

The “Southward” is still considered to kickoff below the line, and political views and cultures tend to change dramatically once past the line and into Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, then on.

Beyond this, the line notwithstanding serves every bit the edge, and anytime two groups of people tin agree on a border for a long time, everyone wins. There’s less fighting and more peace.

The Line and Social Attitudes

Because when studying the United States history the near racist stuff ever comes from the South, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the North was as progressive equally the S was racist.

Simply this simply isn’t true. Instead, people in the Northward were just as racist, just they went virtually 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 withal existed in many northern cities, particularly when it came to housing, and attitudes towards blacks were far from warm and welcoming. Boston, a metropolis very much in the North, has had a long history of racism, yet Massachusetts was ane of the first states to abolish slavery.

As a event, to say the Mason-Dixon Line separated the country by social attitude is a gross mischaracterization.

It’s truthful that blacks were generally safer in the Northward than in the Due south, where lynchings and other mob violence were quite common all the style upwards until the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the Mason-Dixon Line is best understood every bit the unofficial border betwixt the Northward and the Due south as well as the divider betwixt free and slave states.

The Future of the Mason-Dixon Line

Although information technology still serves equally the border of three states, the Bricklayer-Dixon Line is most likely waning in significance. Its unofficial role as a border between the North and S merely really remains because of the political differences betwixt usa on each side.

However, the political dynamic in the country is changing quickly, especially as demographics shift. What this will do to the difference betwixt North and Due south, who knows?

If nosotros utilise history as a guide, information technology’southward condom to say the line volition 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 Three-Fifths Compromise