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How Much Money Does America Pay England

The British men in the business concern of colonizing the N American continent were then sure they "owned whatever land they land on" (yes, that's from Pocahontas), they established new colonies by simply drawing lines on a map.

Then, everyone living in the now-claimed territory, became a role of an English colony.

Map of British territory in North America
A map of the British dominions in N America, c1793.

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

What is the Mason-Dixon Line?

Stargazer's stone
The "Stargazer's Stone." Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon used this equally a base bespeak while plotting the Mason and Dixon line. The name comes from the astronomical observations they made there.

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

Just it besides took on additional significance when information technology became the unofficial edge between the North and the South, and perhaps more importantly, betwixt states where slavery was allowed and states where slavery had been abolished.

READ MORE: The History of Slavery: America's Black Mark

Where is the Bricklayer-Dixon Line?

For the cartographers in the room, the Mason and Dixon Line is an east-w line located at 39ยบ43'xx" N starting due south 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 east-due west line from the tangent point, at approximately 39°43′ N.

For the residuum of us, it's the border between Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania–Maryland border was defined equally the line of latitude 15 miles (24 km) south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia.

Mason-Dixon Line Map

Take a look at the map below to see exactly where the Mason Dixon Line is:

Mason-Dixon Line

Why Is information technology Chosen the Mason-Dixon Line?

It is chosen the Mason and Dixon Line considering 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. He showed a talent early on for maths and then surveying. He went down to London to exist taken on by the Regal Society, merely at a time when his social life was getting a bit out of hand.

He was a scrap 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's early life was more sedate past comparing. 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 afterward became a beau of the Regal Society.

Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on 15 November 1763. Although the war in America had concluded some ii years before, in that location remained considerable tension betwixt the settlers and their native neighbours.

A Plan of the West Line
"A Plan of the West-Line or Parallel of Breadth" by Charles Mason, 1768.

The line was not called the Mason-Dixon Line when it was showtime drawn. Instead, it got this name during the Missouri Compromise, which was agreed to in 1820.

It was used to reference the purlieus between states where slavery was legal and states where it was not. After this, both the proper noun and its understood significant became more than widespread, and it eventually became part of the border between the seceded Confederate States of America and Marriage Territories.

Why Do Nosotros Accept a Mason-Dixon Line?

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

However, even kings can make mistakes, and when Charles Ii granted William Penn a charter 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 Guild 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 urban center of Philadelphia was planned and adult. 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 use the names of trees for the cross streets considering Pennsylvania means "Penn's Woods".

Charles II of England
King Charles II of England.

But in his defense, the map he was using was inaccurate, and this threw everything out of whack. At first, it wasn't a huge issue since the population in the expanse was so sparse in that location were not many disputes related to the border.

But as all the colonies grew in population and sought to expand west, the matter of the unresolved border became a much more prominent in mid-Atlantic politics.

The Feud

In colonial times, as in modern times, also, 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 mind besides 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 past King Charles Ii to William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware). Lord Baltimore was an English language nobleman who was the first 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 "Get-go 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'southward southern border every bit identical to Maryland's northern border, just described information technology 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 information technology falls north of the original boundaries of the City of Philadelphia, the site of which Penn had already selected for his colony'due south majuscule city. 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 fifty-fifty bigger bargain when violent conflict bankrupt out in the mid-1730s over country claimed by both people from Pennsylvania and Maryland. This little result became known as Cresap'due south War.

Cresaps War
Map showing the area disputed between Maryland and Pennsylvania during Cresap'south War.

To stop this madness, the Penns, who controlled Pennsylvania, and the Calverts, who were in accuse of Maryland, hired Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to survey the territory and draw a boundary line to which anybody could agree.

But Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon merely did this because the Maryland governor had agreed to a border with Delaware. He later argued the terms he signed to were non the ones he had agreed to in person, simply the courts made him stick to what was on paper. Always read the fine print!

This agreement made it easier to settle the dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland because they could use the at present established boundary between Maryland and Delaware as a reference. All they had to do was extend a line west from the southern boundary of Philadelphia, and…

The Mason-Dixon Line was built-in.

Limestone markers measuring upwardly to 5ft (1.5m) high – quarried and transported from England – were placed at every mile and marked with a P for Pennsylvania and One thousand for Maryland on each side. Then-called Crown stones were positioned every five miles and engraved with the Penn family's coat of arms on i side and the Calvert family's on the other.

Later, in 1779, Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed to extend the Bricklayer-Dixon Line west past v degrees of longitude to create the border betwixt 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, v degrees from the Delaware River.

Rittenhouse'due south crew completed the survey of the Mason–Dixon line to the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, v 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 canton line between Marshall and Wetzel counties, W Virginia.

In 1863, during the American Civil War, West Virginia separated from Virginia and rejoined the Union, but the line remained as the edge with Pennsylvania.

It's updated several times throughout history, the most contempo being during the Kennedy Administration, in 1963.

The Mason-Dixon Line'due south Place in History

The Mason–Dixon line along the southern Pennsylvania border afterwards became informally known as the boundary between the costless (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states.

It is unlikely that Bricklayer and Dixon ever heard the phrase "Mason–Dixon line". The official written 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, information technology came into popular use when the Missouri Compromise of 1820 named "Mason and Dixon'southward line" as part of the boundary between slave territory and complimentary territory.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was United States federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery'southward expansion by albeit Missouri as a slave country in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery n of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. The 16th Us Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March six, 1820.

At showtime 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 conflict brought on past poor mapping in the first place…a problem more lines aren't probable to solve.

But despite its lowly status equally a line on a map, it eventually gained prominence in United states 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 northern states would exercise the same until all u.s. due north of the line did non let slavery. This fabricated information technology the border between slave states and gratuitous states.

Perchance the biggest reason this is significant has to practice with the underground resistance to slavery that took place almost from the institution's inception. Slaves who managed to escape from their plantations would try to brand their fashion n, by the Mason-Dixon Line.

Underground Railroad map
Map of the Hugger-mugger Railroad. The Mason-Dixon line drew a literal barrier between slave and free states.

However, in the early years of United States history, when slavery was all the same legal in some Northern states and avoiding slave laws required anyone who found a slave to render him or her to their owner, meaning Canada was oft the concluding destination. All the same it was no undercover the journey got slightly easier after 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 information technology to freedom.

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

The "Southward" is nonetheless considered to start beneath the line, and political views and cultures tend to change dramatically once past the line and into Virginia, Westward Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, then on.

Across this, the line nevertheless serves equally the border, and anytime two groups of people can concur on a edge for a long fourth dimension, everyone wins. There's less fighting and more peace.

The Line and Social Attitudes

Because when studying the United states history the most racist stuff always comes from the South, it'south easy to fall into the trap of thinking the North was equally progressive every bit the Due south was racist.

Just this only isn't true. Instead, people in the N were just equally racist, but they went about information technology in dissimilar ways. They were more subtle. Sneakier. And they were quick to judge Southern racist, pushing attending abroad from them.

In fact, segregation notwithstanding existed in many northern cities, especially when information technology came to housing, and attitudes towards blacks were far from warm and welcoming. Boston, a urban center very much in the N, has had a long history of racism, withal Massachusetts was one of the start states to abolish slavery.

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

Mason-Dixon Crownstone Sign
Stonemason-Dixon Crownstone sign in Marydel, Maryland.

formulanone from Huntsville, United States [CC Past-SA two.0

Information technology'southward true that blacks were more often than not safer in the Northward than in the South, where lynchings and other mob violence were quite common all the way up until the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the Mason-Dixon Line is best understood as the unofficial border between the N and the South as well equally the divider between free and slave states.

The Future of the Bricklayer-Dixon Line

Although it notwithstanding serves as the border of three states, the Stonemason-Dixon Line is nearly probable waning in significance. Its unofficial role equally a border between the Northward and South only really remains because of the political differences between u.s. on each side.

Still, the political dynamic in the state is irresolute rapidly, specially as demographics shift. What this will do to the difference between North and Southward, who knows?

Mason Dixon Line Trail
The "Mason Dixon Line Trail" stretches from Pennsylvania to Delaware, and is a popular attraction to tourists.

Jbrown620 at English language Wikipedia [CC By-SA 3.0

If we use history as a guide, it's safe to say the line will continue to serve some significance if in goose egg else except our collective consciousness. Only maps are redrawn constantly. What's a timeless border today tin can be a forgotten boundary tomorrow. History is however being written.

READ More:

The Peachy Compromise of 1787

The Three-Fifths Compromise

Source: https://historycooperative.org/mason-dixon-line/

Posted by: davisthaverom67.blogspot.com

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