what is the mason-dixon line?

Answer 1

Alhough the Mason-Dixon line is most commonly associated with the division between the northern and southern (free and slave, respectively) states during the 1800s and American Civil War-era, the line was delineated in the mid-1700s to settle a property dispute. The two surveyors who mapped the line, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, will always be known for their famous boundary.
In 1632, King Charles I of England gave the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, the colony of Maryland. Fifty years later, in 1682, King Charles II gave William Penn the territory to the north, which later became Pennsylvania. A year later, Charles II gave Penn land on the Delmarva Peninsula (the peninsula that includes the eastern portion of modern Maryland and all of Delaware).

The description of the boundaries in the grants to Calvert and Penn did not match and there was a great deal of confusion as to where the boundary (supposedly along 40 degrees north) lay.

The Calvert and Penn families took the matter to the British court and England's chief justice declared in 1750 that the boundary between southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland should lie 15 miles south of Philadelphia. A decade later, the two families agreed on the compromise and set out to have the new boundary surveyed. Unfortunately, colonial surveyors were no match for the difficult job and two experts from England had to be recruited.

Over fifty years later, the boundary between the two states came into the spotlight with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Compromise established a boundary between the slave states of the south and the free states of the north (however its separation of Maryland and Delaware is a bit confusing since Delaware was a slave state that stayed in the Union). This boundary became referred to as the Mason-Dixon line because it began in the east along the Mason-Dixon line and headed westward to the Ohio River and along the Ohio to its mouth at the Mississippi River and then west along 36 degrees 30 minutes North.

The Mason-Dixon line was very symbolic in the minds of the people of the young nation struggling over slavery and the names of the two surveyors who created it will evermore be associated with that struggle and its geographic association.

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Answer 2

The Mason–Dixon Line (or "Mason and Dixon's Line") is a line of demarcation between four states in the United States. It forms part of the borders of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, surveyed when they were still British colonies. After Pennsylvania began abolishing slavery within the Commonwealth, in 1781, this line, and the Ohio River, became most of the border between the free and slave states. Popular speech, especially since the Missouri compromise of 1820, uses the Mason-Dixon line symbolically as a supposed cultural boundary between the Northern United States and the Southern United States.

Answer 3

As a matter of interest, Jeremiah Dixon, one half of the Mason-Dixon Line, came from the small settlement of Cockfield in south Durham, about 10 miles from where I sit typing this reply.

Answer 4

Yes, it was the symbolic border between the Yankees and The Confederates in the Civil War. South of "Dixey" was the slave area.

Named after an old colonial survey I think.

Answer 5

as above