Who Makes Babies First Birthday Cake in Huntsville, Al?
The British men in the business organisation of colonizing the Due north American continent were and so sure they "owned any country they state on" (yes, that'south from Pocahontas), they established new colonies by simply drawing lines on a map.
So, anybody 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, maybe the virtually famous is the Mason-Dixon Line.
What is the Mason-Dixon Line?
The Mason-Dixon Line besides called 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 up the entire southern edge of Pennsylvania.
Only information technology as well took on additional significance when it became the unofficial border between the Due north and the Southward, 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's Black Marker
Where is the Mason-Dixon Line?
For the cartographers in the room, the Mason and Dixon Line is an eastward-westward line located at 39ยบ43'twenty" N starting southward 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′ N.
For the rest of united states of america, it's the edge betwixt Maryland, W Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania–Maryland border was defined equally the line of breadth 15 miles (24 km) south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia.
Stonemason-Dixon Line Map
Accept a wait at the map below to see exactly where the Mason Dixon Line is:
Why Is it Chosen the Mason-Dixon Line?
It is called the Stonemason and Dixon Line because the two men who originally surveyed the line and got the governments of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland to concord, 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 down to London to be taken on past the Purple Society, just at a fourth dimension when his social life was getting a bit out of paw.
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'due south early life was more than sedate by comparison. At the historic period of 28 he was taken on by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich as an assistant. Noted as a "meticulous observer of nature and geography" he after became a fellow of the Purple Guild.
Bricklayer and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on 15 November 1763. Although the state of war in America had concluded some two years earlier, in that location remained considerable tension between the settlers and their native neighbours.
The line was not chosen the Mason-Dixon Line when it was get-go drawn. Instead, information technology got this name during the Missouri Compromise, which was agreed to in 1820.
It was used to reference the purlieus betwixt states where slavery was legal and states where it was non. After this, both the name and its understood meaning became more widespread, and it eventually became part of the border between the seceded Amalgamated States of America and Union Territories.
Why Do We Have a Mason-Dixon Line?
In the early days of British colonialism in N America, land was granted to individuals or corporations via charters, which were given by the king himself.
However, even kings can brand mistakes, and when Charles Two 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 on advocate of commonwealth and religious freedom, notable for his skillful relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans.
Under his direction, the metropolis of Philadelphia was planned and adult. Philadelphia was planned out to be grid-similar 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 utilise the names of trees for the cross streets considering Pennsylvania means "Penn's Woods".
But in his defense, the map he was using was inaccurate, and this threw everything out of whack. At showtime, information technology wasn't a huge outcome since the population in the area was so thin there were not many disputes related to the edge.
But 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 mod 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 state they had a right to claim and which belonged to someone else (of course, they didn't seem to listen likewise much when that 'someone else' was a tribe of Native Americans).
The dispute had its origins almost a century earlier in the somewhat disruptive proprietary grants by Male monarch Charles I to Lord Baltimore (Maryland) and by Male monarch Charles Two to William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware). Lord Baltimore was an English nobleman who was the start Proprietor of the Province of Maryland, ninth Proprietary Governor of the Colony of Newfoundland and 2nd of the colony of Province of Avalon to its southeast. His title was "Get-go Lord Proprietary, Earl Palatine of the Provinces of Maryland and Avalon in America".
A trouble arose when Charles II granted a charter for Pennsylvania in 1681. The grant defined Pennsylvania'southward southern border as identical to Maryland's northern border, but described it differently, as Charles relied on an inaccurate map. The terms of the grant clearly indicate that Charles 2 and William Penn believed the 40th parallel would intersect the Twelve-Mile Circle around New Castle, Delaware, when in fact it falls due north of the original boundaries of the City of Philadelphia, the site of which Penn had already selected for his colony's capital city. Negotiations ensued afterwards the problem was discovered in 1681.
As a issue, solving this border dispute became a major outcome, and it became an even bigger deal when vehement disharmonize broke out in the mid-1730s over state claimed by both people from Pennsylvania and Maryland. This piffling effect became known as Cresap's 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 describe a boundary line to which everyone could agree.
But Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon just 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 paper. Always read the fine impress!
This agreement made it easier to settle the dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland because they could use the now established boundary betwixt Maryland and Delaware every bit a reference. All they had to practice was extend a line due west from the southern purlieus of Philadelphia, and…
The Mason-Dixon Line was born.
Limestone markers measuring up to 5ft (1.5m) high – quarried and transported from England – were placed at every mile and marked with a P for Pennsylvania and 1000 for Maryland on each side. So-called Crown stones were positioned every v miles and engraved with the Penn family'south glaze of artillery on one side and the Calvert family's on the other.
Later, in 1779, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed to extend the Mason-Dixon Line west past 5 degrees of longitude to create the border between the 2 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, five degrees from the Delaware River.
Rittenhouse's crew completed the survey of the Stonemason–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, West Virginia.
In 1863, during the American Ceremonious War, West Virginia separated from Virginia and rejoined the Marriage, just the line remained as the border with Pennsylvania.
Information technology'southward updated several times throughout history, the most recent beingness during the Kennedy Assistants, in 1963.
The Mason-Dixon Line's Place in History
The Mason–Dixon line along the southern Pennsylvania border afterward became informally known as the boundary between the gratis (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states.
Information technology is unlikely that Bricklayer and Dixon ever heard the phrase "Mason–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 utilize when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 named "Mason and Dixon's line" as office of the boundary betwixt slave territory and costless territory.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was United States federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery'due south expansion by admitting Missouri as a slave state in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March iii, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March six, 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 first place…a problem more lines aren't probable to solve.
But despite its lowly status as a line on a map, information technology somewhen 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 first took on this significant in 1780 when Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Over time, more northern states would do the same until all the states north of the line did not allow slavery. This fabricated it the edge between slave states and gratis states.
Perhaps the biggest reason this is significant has to do with the surreptitious resistance to slavery that took identify almost from the institution's inception. Slaves who managed to escape from their plantations would attempt to make their manner northward, by the Bricklayer-Dixon Line.
Still, in the early years of United States history, when slavery was still legal in some Northern states and avoiding slave laws required anyone who found a slave to return him or her to their owner, meaning Canada was often the terminal destination. Yet it was no secret the journey got slightly easier later 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 liberty.
Today, the Mason-Dixon Line does not have the same significance (obviously, since slavery is no longer legal) although information technology still serves as a useful demarcation in terms of American politics.
The "South" is notwithstanding considered to start beneath the line, and political views and cultures tend to change dramatically in one case past the line and into Virginia, Westward Virginia, Kentucky, Due north Carolina, and and then on.
Beyond this, the line yet serves equally the border, and anytime 2 groups of people tin can agree on a edge for a long time, everyone wins. There's less fighting and more peace.
The Line and Social Attitudes
Because when studying the Usa history the most racist stuff always comes from the South, it's like shooting fish in a barrel to fall into the trap of thinking the N was equally progressive as the S was racist.
But this simply isn't true. Instead, people in the Northward were just as racist, but they went almost 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, especially when it 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 1 of the first states to abolish slavery.
Every bit a result, to say the Mason-Dixon Line separated the land by social attitude is a gross mischaracterization.
formulanone from Huntsville, U.s. [CC By-SA 2.0
It'south true that blacks were generally safer in the North than in the South, where lynchings and other mob violence were quite common all the manner upwardly until the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the Mason-Dixon Line is all-time understood every bit the unofficial border between the North and the Due south as well every bit the divider betwixt gratuitous and slave states.
The Future of the Mason-Dixon Line
Although it still serves as the border of three states, the Stonemason-Dixon Line is most probable waning in significance. Its unofficial part every bit a border between the N and S only really remains considering of the political differences between usa on each side.
Yet, the political dynamic in the country is irresolute rapidly, peculiarly as demographics shift. What this volition do to the divergence betwixt N and South, who knows?
Jbrown620 at English Wikipedia [CC Past-SA 3.0
If we use history as a guide, information technology's safe to say the line volition continue to serve some significance if in nothing else except our commonage consciousness. Merely maps are redrawn constantly. What's a timeless border today tin be a forgotten boundary tomorrow. History is withal being written.
READ MORE:
The Great Compromise of 1787
The 3-Fifths Compromise
Who Makes Babies First Birthday Cake in Huntsville, Al?
Source: https://historycooperative.org/mason-dixon-line/
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