How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [16]
Virginia, meanwhile, had been continuing to deed land in the disputed region. These deeds further diminished Maryland’s chances of prevailing before the Supreme Court. Maryland sensed (correctly, as it turned out) that the court would tend to rule in favor of states that had deeded land, despite an incorrectly surveyed border. The court’s privileging of deeded lands protected citizens who would be adversely affected by suddenly having their property in another state.
Maryland made a last-ditch effort in 1818. The state proposed to Virginia that it would accept the North Branch as the boundary if Virginia agreed to a survey to relocate its source—since it is from that point that Maryland’s western boundary is located. (The state that presently shares this boundary with Maryland, West Virginia, was still part of Virginia at the time.) Virginia, sensing advantage, agreed only to a survey that would reestablish the location of the Fairfax Stone, regardless of whether or not that location was truly the source of the North Branch.
In other words, Virginia won.
MARYLAND, PENNSYLVANIA, DELAWARE
MASON AND DIXON
America’s Most Famous (and Misunderstood) Line
The white man’s right to freedom’s wide as universal nature;
But beyond the Mason-Dixon line the black’s ain’t worth a ’tater.
In fact I rayther calkilate that this side of it either,
If white man’s justice had its way, ’tain’t worth a ’tater neither.
—ANONYMOUS 1
The Confederate anthem “Dixie” may contain a reference to Jeremiah Dixon, cosurveyor of the Mason-Dixon Line, but Jeremiah Dixon was not a Southerner, and Charles Mason was not a Northerner. They weren’t even Americans; they were British. And the line they surveyed had nothing to do with slavery or the Civil War. In fact, it’s not even a line—it’s three lines.
In 1763 Mason and Dixon were hired to locate the boundary between Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Why import two Englishmen when surveyors were falling all over each other in America? Why not hire George Washington or Peter Jefferson or his son, Thomas, all of whom were surveyors? The reason was that this boundary’s stipulations had political and mathematical conflicts. Mitigating those conflicts required surveyors who were not only mathematically brilliant but also politically impartial.
The Mason-Dixon line(s)
These conflicts began when Charles II granted a charter for the creation of Pennsylvania in 1681 that included a semicircle at the colony’s southeast corner to provide a twelve-mile buffer around a preexisting Dutch settlement at New Castle. On the other hand, to protect Pennsylvania’s navigation to the sea, it was given hegemony over Delaware and therefore would negotiate on behalf of Delaware if a boundary dispute should arise. One did, since the region that comprises Delaware had been included fifty years earlier in Maryland’s charter. But Maryland had never governed the region, because Holland had controlled it since 1631. The British had recently ousted the Dutch regime, but Delaware’s Dutch settlers, who were Protestant, opposed control by Catholic Maryland. All these complications, however, eventually became even more complicated.
Pennsylvania’s access to the sea
First, England sought to solve the problem by creating Delaware as a separate entity and leasing it to Pennsylvania. Delaware was defined as including all the land below its semicircular northern border extending to the latitude of Cape Henlopen. Then it was discovered that the borders in Pennsylvania’s charter didn’t connect. To make matters worse, Pennsylvania’s southern border at 40° N latitude turned out to be above Philadelphia, whose downtown is 39°57’ N latitude.
Again both sides presented