How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [19]
His name, however, along with that of his surveying partner, lived on, engraved in the American psyche as the border between North and South. Its earliest recorded use for this purpose may well have been when Virginia Congressman John Randolph ominously declared in 1824 that “we who belong to that unfortunate portion of this confederacy which is south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and east of the Allegheny Mountains, have to make up our mind to perish … or we must resort to the measures which we first opposed to British aggressions and usurpations.”
Why was this said in 1824, as opposed to, say, 1800? Very likely because the 1820 Missouri Compromise established a line above and below which slavery was prohibited or permitted in the Louisiana Purchase. That line was the latitude 36°30’ (with the compromise exception of Missouri). No such boundary existed in the eastern states. Indeed, when Randolph made his reference to the Mason-Dixon Line, slavery was still allowed in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. But—and herein the reason for Randolph’s reference—three of those states had already enacted laws for the gradual abolition of slavery. New Hampshire did not enact a law to end slavery until 1857, and Delaware remained a slave state through the Civil War, though of course it was not a Confederate state.
But the Mason-Dixon Line to which Randolph referred didn’t include its transpeninsular and tangent lines defining Delaware. He meant only the line dividing Pennsylvania, the nation’s southernmost free state, from Maryland, the nation’s northernmost slave state. As for the exceptions—Delaware extending slightly north of Maryland, and New Hampshire with (as per the 1800 census) a total of eight slaves—neither was enough to stand in the way of a catchy phrase.
CONNECTICUT, PENNSYLVANIA
ZEBULUN BUTLER
Connecticut’s Lost Cause
Whereas the petition of Zebulon Butler and others, claiming private right of soil under the State of Connecticut, and within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania … the claims of Zebulon Butler and others be, and hereby are, repealed.
—JOURNALS OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, SEPTEMBER 21, 1785
Zebulon Butler was Connecticut’s foremost military leader in its boundary war with Pennsylvania over Wyoming. Connecticut and Pennsylvania fighting over Wyoming? Didn’t these people have maps? Didn’t they notice that New York and the northern end of New Jersey are in between Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and that Wyoming hadn’t even been invented?
They did have maps-pretty good ones, by then—and the Wyoming they were fighting over was the original Wyoming, which was the name of a valley along the Susquehanna River. The conflict resulted from the fact that Connecticut’s colonial charter gave it reason to lay claim to Pennsylvania’s northern tier. The dispute led to warfare-forts, cannons, deaths-three times over thirty years. Though Connecticut ultimately lost, those battles that it won were led by Zebulon Butler.
Butler grew up in Lyme, Connecticut. The hilly and rocky nature of the area likely contributed to his purchasing, at the age of twenty-nine, newly available land being sold by Connecticut’s Susquehanna Company in the fertile Wyoming Valley. Like his fellow pioneers, Butler knew that Pennsylvania disputed the legality of their purchases. Pennsylvania’s reasons were quite simple. The land being sold and deeded in Connecticut was well within the borders stipulated in Pennsylvania’s 1681 charter.
The boundaries in Connecticut’s 1662 charter, however, overlapped those of Pennsylvania. It had granted