blazingstar wrote:
The Mason-Dixon Line is called that because it was actually surveyed by Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason. Wealthy individuals contracted with these two men to determine the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware and the Virginias.
Only later was it taken to be the demarcation between North and South during the civil war.
I thought everyone knew that. Am always shocked how folks dont know it.
The individuals who contracted the two surveyers were William Penn (founder of the Pennsylvania colony), and Lord Baltimore (founder of the Maryland colony). It was all LONG before the US existed as an independent country. Just a boundary line between two British colonies that later became two American states. As colonial society evolved Pennsylvania became the bottom of the north (where agriculture was dominated by family farms growing food crops) and Maryland became the "top" of the south were cash crops like tobacco (but not yet cotton) that required slaves dominated. And the two regional cultures of north and south began to diverge. And also were slavery ended as one by one the states of the north outlawed slavery.
So "the Mason Dixon Line" became short hand for "the boundary between the north and south" long before the civil war. And continued to be long after (Twentieth Century Blacks from Harlem traveling south had to start worrying about segregation laws in Maryland, and more so in Viriginia, and still more so in the deep south). Actually it was, and still is, more accurate to think of it as "the Mason Dixon line, plus the Ohio River" as the boundary between north and south.