A brief history of the Mason-Dixon Line
John Mackenzie[1]
In 1763-67 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed and marked most of the boundaries between Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Three Lower Counties that became Delaware. The survey, commissioned by the Penn and Calvert families to settle their long-running boundary dispute, provides an interesting reference point in the region’s history. This paper summarizes the background of the boundary dispute, the execution of Mason and Dixon’s survey, and the symbolic role of the Mason-Dixon Line in American civil rights history.
Historical background
When George Calvert, England’s Secretary of State under King James I, publicly declared his Catholicism in 1625, English law required that he resign. James awarded him an Irish baronetcy, making him the first Lord Baltimore. Although Calvert was an investor in the Virginia Company, he was barred from Virginia because of his religion. He then started his own “Avalon” colony in Newfoundland, but the climate proved inhospitable. So Calvert persuaded James’s successor, Charles I, to grant his family the land north of the Virginia colony that became Maryland.
The 1632 grant gave the Calverts everything north of the Potomac to the 40th parallel, and from the Atlantic west to the source of the Potomac. George Calvert died later in 1632, and his sons started the Maryland colony, named in honor of Charles I’s consort Henrietta Maria. On May 27th, 1634, Leonard Calvert and about 300 settlers arrived in the Chesapeake Bay at St. Mary’s.
While the Calverts were settling on the Chesapeake Bay, Swedish colonists arrived in the Delaware Bay (named in 1610 by Captain Samuel Argail in honor of Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, the governor of the Jamestown colony). The Swedes established Fort Christina at what is now Wilmington in 1638.
The 1642 revolution in England stalled English colonial expansion. During England’s Parliamentary Commonwealth period, Dutch soldiers from New Amsterdam (Manhattan) captured Fort Christina in 1651. Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant purchased the land between the Christina River and Bombay Hook from the Indians, and built Fort Casimir at what is now New Castle. Following the first English-Dutch war (1652-54), the Swedes captured Fort Casimir, but the Dutch reestablished local control in 1656.
English colonial expansion resumed after the Restoration brought Charles II to the English throne. In 1664 the Duke of York, Charles II’s brother James, captured New Amsterdam, renaming it New York, and seized the Swedish-Dutch colonies on the Delaware River as well. The Dutch briefly recaptured New York in 1673, but after their 1674 defeat in Europe in the third Dutch War, they ceded all their American claims to England in the Treaty of Westminster. Having regained his American territories, the Duke of York granted the land between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to his friends George Carteret and John Berkeley in 1675, and they established the colony of New Jersey.
Sir William Penn had served the Duke of York in the Dutch wars, and had loaned Charles II about £16,000. Penn’s son William, who had become a Quaker, petitioned Charles for a grant of land north of the Maryland colony as repayment of the debt. In 1681 Charles granted Penn all the land extending five degrees west from the Delaware River between the 40th and 43rd parallels, excluding the lands held by the Duke of York within a twelve-mile radius of New Castle and extending southward—the recaptured Dutch and Swedish colonies. But the twelve-mile radius arc does not intersect the 40th parallel, and the Calvert family never bothered to have the 40th parallel surveyed or marked. In somewhat un-Quakerly fashion, Penn took maximum advantage of these ambiguities.
Penn was eager to get his colony better access to the Atlantic, and in 1682 he leased the Duke of York’s lands from New Castle down to Cape Henlopen. Penn arrived in New Castle in October 1682 to take official possession of the “Three Lower Counties” on the Delaware Bay. He renamed St. Jones County to Kent County, and Deale County to Sussex County, and the Three Lower Counties were annexed to the Pennsylvania colony.
Penn negotiated with the third Lord Baltimore at the end of 1682 at Annapolis, and in April 1683 at New Castle, to establish and mark a formal boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania including the Lower Three Counties. The Calverts wanted to determine the 40th parallel by astronomical survey, while Penn suggested measuring northward from the southern tip of the Delmarva peninsula (about 37o 5’ N), assuming 60 miles per degree as Charles II had suggested. (The true distance of one degree of latitude is about 69 miles.) This would give Pennsylvania the uppermost part of the Chesapeake.
After the negotiations failed, Penn took his case to the Commission for Trade and Plantations. In 1685 the Commission determined that the land lying north of Cape Henlopen between the Delaware Bay and the Chesapeake should be divided equally; the western half belonged to the Calverts, while the eastern half belonged to the crown, i.e., to the Duke of York, and thus to Pennsylvania under Penn’s lease. The boundary between Maryland and the Three Lower Counties was now legally defined, but the east-west boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland remained unresolved.
Charles II died in 1685, and was succeeded by his brother James II, a Catholic convert. Three years later, William of Orange, the Dutch grandson of Charles I and husband of James II’s protestant daughter Mary, seized the throne. The Calverts lost control of their Maryland holdings, and Maryland was declared a royal colony. Penn’s ownership of Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties was also suspended from 1691 to 1694. The Calverts did not regain their proprietorship of Maryland until 1713 when Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, renounced Catholicism.
Penn revisited America in 1699-1701, and reluctantly granted Pennsylvania and the Lower Three Counties separate elected legislatures. He also commissioned local surveyors Thomas Pierson and Isaac Taylor to survey and demarcate the twelve-mile radius arc boundary between New Castle and Chester counties. Pierson and Taylor completed the survey in ten days using just a chain and compass. The survey marks were tree blazes, and once these disappeared, the location of the arc boundary was mostly a matter of fuzzy recall and conjecture.
Geodetic science was in its infancy. Latitude could be estimated by sextant and compass, but longitude could only be guessed at. As England’s naval power and colonial holdings continued to expand, the demand for better maps and navigation intensified. Parliament set a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the “longitude problem” in 1712. The challenge was to determine a longitude in the West Indies onboard a ship with less than half a degree of longitude error. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude details how clock-maker John Harrison eventually won the prize with his precision chronometers.
Penn died in 1718, disinheriting his alcoholic eldest son William Jr., and leaving the colonies to his second wife Hannah, who transferred the lands to her sons Thomas, John, Richard and Dennis. Thomas outlived the others and accumulated a two-thirds interest in the holdings.
In 1731, the fifth Lord Baltimore petitioned King George II for an official resolution of the boundary dispute. In the ensuing negotiations the Calverts tried to hold out for the 40th parallel, but in 1732 the parties agreed that the boundary line should run east from Cape Henlopen to the midpoint of the peninsula, then north to a tangency with the west side of the twelve-mile radius arc around New Castle, then around the arc to its northernmost point, then due north to an east-west line 15 miles south of Philadelphia. It was a bad deal for the Calverts. The east-west line would turn out to be about 20 miles south of the 40th parallel, actually intersecting the arc. And the map appended to the agreement mistakenly placed Cape Henlopen at what is now Fenwick Island, almost 20 miles to the south as well. But litigation over interpretation and details dragged on.
The border conflict led to sporadic local violence. In 1736 a mob of Pennsylvanians attacked a Maryland farmstead. A survey party commissioned by the Calverts was run off by another mob in 1743.
In 1750, the Court of Chancery ordered the creation of a bipartisan commission to survey and mark the boundaries per the 1732 agreement. The commissioners hired local surveyors to mark an east-west transpeninsular line from Fenwick Island to the Chesapeake in 1750-51, and then determine the middle point of this line, which would mark the southwest corner of the Three Lower Counties. The rivers, swamps and dense vegetation made the work difficult, and there were continuing disputes, e.g., should the line stop at the inundated marsh line of the Chesapeake or at open water?
The transpeninsular survey and its middle point were not officially approved in London until 1760. In 1761, the colonial surveyors began running the north-south “tangency” line from the middle point toward a target tangent point on the twelve-mile arc. With poor equipment and some miscalculations, their first try at a tangency line passed a half-mile east of the target point on the arc. Their second try was 350 yards to the west. The disputants required much higher standards of accuracy, and they consulted the royal astronomer James Bradley at the Greenwich observatory for advice on getting the survey done right.
The Mason and Dixon survey
Bradley recommended Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to complete the boundary survey. Mason was Bradley’s assistant at the observatory, an Anglican widower with two sons. Dixon was a skilled surveyor from Durham, a Quaker bachelor whose Meeting had ousted him for his unwillingness to abstain from liquor. In 1761 Mason and Dixon had sailed together for Sumatra, but only made it to the Cape of Good Hope, to record a transit of Venus across the sun to support the Royal Society’s calculations of distance by parallax between the Earth and sun. Their major tasks in America would be to re-survey the tangent line northward from the middle point of the transpeninsular line to the twelve-mile arc, and survey the east-west boundary five degrees westward along a line lying fifteen miles south of the southernmost part of Philadelphia.
Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia on November 15th 1763. The Seven Years’ War had spilled over to North America as the French and Indian Wars, and although the Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, had put an official end to the hostilities, conflicts between colonists and Indians continued.
The Iroquois League, or Six Nations (Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida and Tuscarora), had supported the British against their longtime enemies, the Cherokee, Huron, Algonquin and Ottawa, whom the French had supported in their attacks on colonists. Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, had organized a large-scale attack on Fort Detroit on May 5th 1763, and some 200 settlers were massacred along the western frontier.
Local reaction to the news was brutal. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a mob of immigrants known as the “Paxton boys” attacked a small Conestoga Indian village in December, hacked their victims to death and scalping them. The remaining Conestogas were brought to the town jail for protection, but when the mob attacked the jail the regiment assigned to protect the Indians did nothing to stop them. The helpless Indians—men, women and children—were all hacked to pieces and scalped in their cells. Mason and Dixon were shocked at the news, and Mason would visit the scene of the murders a year later. As the survey progressed, racial violence and the relentless dispossession of Indians were frequent background themes.
Mason had brought along state-of-the-art equipment for the survey. This included a “transit and equal altitude instrument,” a telescope with cross-hairs, mounted with precision adjustment screws, to sight exact horizontal points using a mounted spirit level, and also to determine true north by tracking stars to their maximum heights in the sky where they crossed the meridian. The famous “zenith sector,” built by London instrument-maker John Bird, was a six-foot telescope with lens cross-hairs, mounted on a six-foot radius protractor scale, with fine tangent screws to adjust its position; it was used to measure the angles of reference stars from the zenith of the sky as they crossed the meridian. These measurements could be compared against published measurements of the same stars’ angles of declination at the equator to determine latitude. The zenith sector traveled on a mattress laid on a cart with a spring suspension.
Mason and Dixon also brought a Hadley quadrant, used to measure angular distances; high-quality survey telescopes; 66-foot long Gunter chains comprised of 100 links each, along with a precision brass measure to calibrate the chain lengths; and wood measuring rods or “levels” to measure level distances across sloping ground. A large wooden chest contained a collection of star almanacs, seven-figure logarithm tables, trigonometric tables and other reference materials; Mason was skilled at spherical trigonometry.
Mason had acquired a precision clock so that the local times of predicted astronomical events could be compared against published Greenwich times. Each one-minute local time difference implies a 15-second longitude difference. John Harrison’s “H4” chronometer had sailed to Jamaica and back in 1761, losing only 39 seconds on the round trip; the longitude calculations in Jamaica based on his clock were well within the accuracy standards Parliament had set for the £20,000 longitude prize. But Nevil Maskelyne, who had succeeded Bradley as royal astronomer, and the Royal Society remained skeptical about the reliability of chronometers in complementing astronomical calculations of longitude. Maskelyne insisted on the superiority of a purely astronomical approach, a computationally complex “lunar distance” method based on angular distances between the moon and various reference stars. Harrison wouldn’t collect his entire prize until 1773. Mason and Dixon would test the reliability of chronometric positioning, although Mason was skeptical of it.
The southernmost part of Philadelphia was determined to be the north wall of a house on the south side of Cedar Street (the address is now 30 South Street) near Second Street. Mason and Dixon had a temporary observatory erected 55 yards northwest of the house, and after detailed celestial observations and calculations, they determined the latitude of the house wall to be 39o56’29.1”N. Since going straight south would take them through the Delaware River, they then surveyed and measured an arbitrary distance (31 miles) due west to a farm owned by John Harland in Embreeville, Pennsylvania, at the “Forks of the Brandywine.” They negotiated with Harland to set up an observatory, and set a reference stone, now known as the Stargazer’s Stone, at the same latitude. They spent the winter at Harland’s farm making astronomical observations on clear nights and enjoying local taverns on cloudy nights. The Harland house still stands at the intersection of Embreeville and Stargazer roads, and the Stargazer’s Stone is about 100 yards north of the house. Its latitude is 39o56’18.9”N.
At Harland’s farm they observed and timed predicted transits of Jupiter’s moons, as well as a lunar eclipse on March 17th 1764. The average (sun) time of these events was 5 hours 12 minutes and 54 seconds earlier than published predicted times for the Paris observatory (longitude 2o20’14”E). So they were able to estimate the longitude of Harland’s farm as (5:12:54)/(24:00:00) x 360o = 78o13’30”west of Paris, and thus 78o13’30” - 2o20’14” = 75o53’6” west of Greenwich. They published these findings in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1769.
The clock used in this experiment was actually 37 seconds fast, so at fifteen arc seconds of longitude per clock second, their calculated longitude was 9’15” or about eight miles too far west. That standard of accuracy could win Parliament’s longitude prize, but the margin of error was still a thousand times larger than the margin of error in their latitude calculations. Fortunately, Mason and Dixon’s principal tasks involved more local positioning than global positioning. They proposed measuring a degree of longitude for the Royal Society as part of their survey of the parallel between Pennsylvania and Maryland; although the Society never funded that project, it would fund their measurement of a degree of latitude in 1768.
In the spring of 1764 the survey party ran a line due south exactly 15 miles from the latitude of Harland’s farm, measured with the survey chains and levels, with a team of axmen clearing a “visto” or line of sight eight or nine yards wide the entire way. They arrived in April 1764 at a farm field owned by Alexander Bryan in what is now the Possum Hill section of Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park. After verifying the distance, they placed an oak post called “Post mark’d West” at a latitude of 39o43’ 26.4”N. This point is now marked by a stone monument accessible by a short spur trail off the Bryan’s Field trail, about 600 yards downhill (due south) from the ruins of the farmstead. The easiest access point is from the east (gravel road) parking lot at Possum Hill off Paper Mill Road. The Post mark’d West would be the eastern origin and reference latitude point for the west line.
Mason and Dixon then headed south to the middle point of the transpeninsular line that the colonial surveyors had marked, and they spent the rest of 1764 surveying the north-south boundary line. With a team of axmen clearing the vistos ahead of them, they resurveyed and marked the tangency line northward from the middle point toward the target tangency point on twelve-mile arc 82 miles to the north. They crossed the Nanticoke River, Marshyhope Creek, Choptank River, Bohemia River, and Broad Creek. Where their survey chains could not span a river, they measured the river width by triangulation, using the Hadley quadrant on its side to calculate the angle between two points on the opposite side. They arrived at the 82-mile point in August 1764.
Mason and Dixon then ran an exact twelve-mile line from the New Castle courthouse to the tangency line, setting the tangent point marker at the 82-mile point of the tangency line; this is located about 600 meters south of the Delaware-Maryland boundary on Elkton Road, about 100 meters north of the rail lines. It was 17 chains and 25 links west of the tangency point targeted by the 1761 survey. Since the tangency line runs slightly west of true north, the tangent point lies south and slightly east of the arc’s westernmost point.
After joining the tangency line perpendicularly to the twelve-mile radius line from New Castle in August 1764, they returned south to the middle point, checking and correcting marks as they went. On this re-check, their final error at the middle point, after 82 miles, was 26 inches. They returned north again, making final placements of the marks. During this phase of the survey, their base of operations in Delaware was St. Patrick’s Tavern in Newark, where the Deer Park Tavern now stands. Tavern scenes in Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon are consistent with at least one contemporary account of their enjoyment of the taproom.
Mason and Dixon began the survey of the west line from the “Post mark’d West” in March, 1765. The Arc Corner Monument, located at the north side of the W.S. Carpenter Recreation Area of White Clay Creek State Park, just off Hopkins Bridge Road, marks the start of the actual Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary line. Mason and Dixon spent the next couple of years surveying this line westward. Again, their axmen cleared vistos, generally eight yards wide. They would survey, measure and provisionally mark about twelve miles in succession, then make detailed astronomical calculations to correct their latitude and, clearing additional vistos as necessary, backtrack to fix their marks exactly on the 39o 43’ 17.4” N latitude. It was exacting work, because the parallels on a sphere do not follow a straight line-of-site except at the equator; in the northern hemisphere proceeding westward, they gradually curve to the right.
The survey crossed the two branches of the Christina Creek, the Elk River, and the winding Octoraro several times. They reached the Susquehanna in May, then returned to Newark to survey the north line from the tangent point, completing the north-south boundary between Maryland and the Three Lower Counties.
From the tangent point, the survey proceeded due north, intersecting the arc boundary again about a mile and a half further up at a point marked by the “intersection stone” behind the DuPont Company’s Stine-Haskell labs. The north line ended at a perpendicular intersection with the west line in a tobacco field owned by Captain John Singleton. Mason and Dixon recorded this corner boundary point as five miles, one chain and ten links due north of the tangent point, and two miles, 79 chains and 27 links due east of the Post mark’d West. The locations of the final mile points on the tangent and north lines, and the slight eastward inflection of the Maryland/Delaware boundary at the tangent point, are shown on the Newark West 7.5-minute USGS topographic map. Mason and Dixon set the stone markers in their final positions at the tangent point and at the northeast corner of Maryland. The corner marker is about 200 meters east of Rt. 896 at the MD/PA boundary.
In June 1765 Mason and Dixon met with the survey commissioners representing the Penn and Calvert families in June at Christiana Bridge (now the village of Christiana). They then resumed the survey of the west line from the Susquehanna. As they went along, the locals learned whether they were Marylanders or Pennsylvanians. That year they completed a total of 117 miles of the west line, stopping at Cove Mountain near Mercersburg PA. From the summit they could see that the winding Potomac to the west was entirely within Maryland. Had the Potomac had wound further north into Pennsylvania, the western piece of Maryland would have been cut off from the rest of the colony. The survey party returned east in the fall, checking and resetting their marks, and Mason and Dixon spent the winter of 1765-66 back at the Harland farm.
They resumed the survey from Cove Mountain in March 1766, and reached Sideling Hill at mile 135 at the end of April. It was wilderness from there on, and the wagons with the marker stones couldn’t make it over the mountain so they marked with oak posts from there onward. They reached mile 162 in June, near the eastern continental divide, and backtracked for corrections and final placement of marks. They arrived back in Delaware in September. In January 1767 they joined the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and Mason spent the late winter and early spring traveling through Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. He met the chief of the Tuscaroras in Williamsburg.
The survey was supposed to extend a full five degrees of longitude (about 265 miles) to the west, but the Iroquois wanted the survey stopped. After negotiations that lasted well into 1767, and a payment of £500 to the Indians, Mason and Dixon were authorized to resume the survey in June 1767. They started out with more than 100 men that summer, including an Indian escort party and a translator, as they continued the survey westward from mile 162.
As they pushed westward, the Indians grew increasingly resentful of the intrusion into their lands. The survey team reached mile 219 at the Monongahela River in September. Twenty-six men quit the crew in fear of Indian reprisals, leaving only fifteen axmen to continue clearing vistos for the survey. On October 10th the survey reached the Great Warrior Path, the main north-south Indian footpath in eastern North America, at mile 230. The Mohawks accompanying the survey insisted it be terminated there. Realizing they had gone as far as they could, Mason and Dixon set up their zenith sector and corrected their latitude, and backtracked about 25 miles to reset their last marks. They left a stone pyramid at the westernmost point of their survey, 233 miles 17 chains and 48 links west of the Post mark’d West in Bryan’s field.
Mason and Dixon returned east, arriving back at Bryan’s farm on December 9th 1767, and reported their work to the commissioners at Christiana Bridge later that month. Their final project, funded by the Royal Society, was to measure the distance of a degree of latitude. They used calibrated rods to measure the distance from Harland’s farm through the Post mark’d West to the middle point at the south end of the tangent line. They already knew precise latitudes for these points, so the calculation of the length of a degree latitude would be straightforward once they had the precise measures of distance. They spent about four months on this project, completing the measurement in early June 1768. In Mason’s final calculation, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1768, a degree of latitude on the Delmarva Peninsula was 68.7291 miles.
On August 16th 1768 they delivered 200 printed copies of their boundary map, as drawn by Dixon, to the commissioners in Philadelphia. They were elected to the American Philosophical Society. After settling their accounts, they enjoyed a few weeks of socializing in Philadelphia and then sailed for London on September 11th 1768.
In May 1769 Dixon went to Hammerfest, above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and Mason to went Cavan, Ireland, to record the June 4th transit of Venus, which occurred simultaneously with a lunar eclipse. In America, David Rittenhouse and members of the American Philosophical Society conducted parallel observations.
Dixon was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1773. He remained a bachelor, retired to Cockfield, Durham, and died in 1779 at age 45.
Mason remarried in 1770, and continued to work for Nevil Maskelyne at the Royal Observatory, although he was never elected to the Royal Society. He returned to Philadelphia with his second wife and eight young children in July 1786, died there on October 25th, and was buried in the Christ Church burial ground on Arch Street.
Less than a decade after the 1763-67 survey settled their long-running boundary dispute, the Penns and Calverts lost their colonies to the American Revolution. Mason and Dixon’s tangent, north and west lines became the boundaries between the new states of Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The Mason-Dixon Line
The west line would not become famous as the “Mason-Dixon Line” for another fifty years as America slowly and haltingly addressed longstanding inequities in civil rights.
The piedmont Lenni Lenape tribes of Delaware and Pennsylvania were completely dispossessed, and the remnants of the tribes were eventually relocated by a series of forced marches: to Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and finally to the Indian Territory which became Oklahoma. Hannah Freeman (1730-1802), known as “Indian Hannah,” was the last of the Lenni Lenape in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
The tidewater Nanticoke communities were dispersed from Delaware and Maryland by 1750, and the last tribal speaker of the Nanticoke, Lydia Clark, died before 1850. Some migrated as far north as Canada and were assimilated into other tribes, and some were relocated west. The remnant that remains in the area holds an inter-tribal pow-wow each September in Sussex County.
With Indians almost entirely displaced from the eastern states, the national debate focused on slavery and abolition. As new states entered the Union, should they be free states or slave states? The Missouri Compromise of 1820 designated Mason and Dixon’s west line as the national divide between “free” and “slave” states east of the Ohio River.
Delaware’s 1776 state constitution had banned the importation of slaves, and state legislation in 1797 effectively stopped the export of slaves by declaring exported slaves automatically free. The state’s population in the 1790 census was 15 percent black, and only 30 percent of these were free blacks. By the 1820 census, 78 percent of Delaware’s blacks were free. By 1840, 87 percent were free.
Both escaped slaves and legally free blacks living anywhere near the line were vulnerable to kidnapping by slave-catchers operating out of Maryland. One of the most famous kidnappers was Patty Cannon, a notoriously violent woman who, with her son-in-law Joe Johnson, ran a tavern on the Delaware-Maryland line near the Nanticoke River. The Cannon-Johnson gang seized blacks as far north as Philadelphia and transported them south for sale, hiding them in her house or supposedly shackled to trees on a small island in the Nanticoke River, and then transporting across the Woodland ferry or loading them onto a schooner to be shipped down the Nanticoke for eventual sale in Georgia. In 1829 Cannon and Johnson were arrested and charged with kidnapping, and Cannon was charged with several murders, including the murder of a slave buyer for his money. Johnson was flogged, and Cannon died in jail before trial, reportedly a suicide by poison. Her skull is kept in a hatbox at the Dover Public Library.
For free blacks in Delaware, freedom was quite restricted. Blacks could not vote, or testify in court against whites. After Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia triggered rumors and panic about a black insurrection in Sussex County, the Delaware legislature banned blacks from owning weapons, or meeting in groups larger than twelve.
Through the first half of the 19th century the Mason-Dixon Line represented the line of freedom for tens of thousands of blacks escaping slavery in the south. The Underground Railroad provided food and temporary shelter at secret way-stations, and guided or sometimes transported northbound slaves across the Line. The spirituals sung by these slaves included coded references for escapees: the song “Follow the drinking gourd” referred to the Big Dipper from which runaways could sight the North Star; the River Jordan was the Mason-Dixon Line; Pennsylvania was the Promised Land. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed slave owners to pursue their escaped slaves into the north, the line of freedom became the Canadian border, “Canaan” in the spirituals, and abolitionists created Underground Railroad stops all the way to Canada.
Thomas Garrett, a member of Wilmington’s Quaker community, was one of the most prominent conductors on the Underground Railroad. In 1813, while Garrett was still living in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a free black employee of his family’s was kidnapped and taken into Maryland. Garrett succeeded in rescuing her, but the experience reportedly made him a committed abolitionist, and he dedicated the next fifty years of his life to helping others escape slavery.
Garrett moved to Wilmington in 1822 and lived at 227 Shipley Street, where he ran a successful iron business. He befriended and helped Harriet Tubman as she brought group after group of escaping slaves over the line; his house was the final step to freedom. Garrett was caught in 1848, prosecuted and convicted, forthrightly telling the court he had helped over 1,400 slaves escape. Judge Roger Taney ordered Garrett to reimburse the owners of slaves he was known to have helped, and it bankrupted him, but he continued in his work, assisting approximately 1,300 more slaves to freedom by 1864. Taney went on to become Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, and wrote the majority decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), declaring that no blacks, slave or free, could ever be US citizens, and striking down the Missouri Compromise.
In the buildup to the Civil War, Delaware was a microcosm of the country, sharply split between abolitionists in New Castle County and pro-slavery interests in Sussex County. A series of abolition bills were defeated in the state legislature by a single vote. Like other Union border states, Delaware remained a slave state during the war, although its slave population had fallen to only a few hundred. President Abraham Lincoln offered a federal reimbursement of $500 per slave (far more than their market value) to Delaware slave-owners if Delaware would abolish slavery, but the state legislature stubbornly refused.
Lincoln’s January 1st 1863 Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in the Confederate states, but not in the Union border states. After the Civil War, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas outlawed slavery on or before their individual ratifications of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. New Jersey had technically abolished slavery in 1846, although it only ratified the Amendment in 1866. So as the Thirteenth Amendment neared ratification by 27 of the 36 states on December 6th 1865, America’s last two remaining slave states were Kentucky and Delaware. Delaware didn’t ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth or Fifteenth amendments until 1901.
In the middle of the 20th century the Mason-Dixon Line was the backdrop for one of the five school desegregation cases that were eventually consolidated into the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. Until 1952, public education in Delaware was strictly segregated. Since the late 19th century, property taxes paid by whites in Delaware had funded whites-only schools, while property taxes paid by blacks funded blacks-only schools. In the 1910’s, P.S. duPont had financed the construction of schools for black children throughout Delaware, and effectively shamed the Legislature into providing better school facilities for whites as well. There was only high school for black children in the entire state—Howard High School. Persistent income disparities between blacks and whites insured persistent inequalities in public education.
In 1950 the Bulah family had a vegetable stand at the corner of Valley Road and Limestone Road, and Shirley Bulah attended Hockessin Colored Elementary School 107, which had no bus service. The bus to Hockessin School 29, the white school, went right past the Bulah farm, and the Bulahs merely asked if Shirley could ride the bus to her own school. But Delaware law prohibited black and white children on the same school bus.
Shirley’s mother Sarah Bulah contacted Wilmington lawyer Louis Redding, who had recently won the Parker v. University of Delaware case forcing the University to admit blacks. In 1950, the Wilmington chapter of the NAACP had launched an effort to get black parents in and around Wilmington to register their children in white schools, but the children were turned away. Redding chose the Bulahs as plaintiffs in one of two test cases, and convinced Sarah Bulah to sue in Delaware’s Chancery Court for Shirley’s right to attend the white school (Bulah v. Gebhart). Parents of eight black children from Claymont filed a parallel suit (Belton v. Gebhart). The complaints argued that the school system violated the “separate but equal” clause in Delaware’s Constitution (taken from Plessy v. Ferguson) because the white and black schools clearly were not equal.
Redding knew that a court venue on the Mason-Dixon Line, with its local legacies of slavery and abolitionism, would be most likely to support integration. He argued the cases pro bono and the Wilmington NAACP paid the court costs. In 1952, Judge Collins Seitz found that the plaintiffs’ black schools were not equal to the white schools, and ordered the white schools to admit the plaintiff children. The Bulah v. Gebhart decision did not challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine directly, but it was the first time an American court found racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The state appealed Seitz’s decision to the Delaware Supreme Court, where it was upheld. The state’s appeal to the US Supreme Court was consolidated into the Brown v. Board case, which also upheld the decision.
The town of Milford, Delaware, had riots when it integrated its schools immediately after the Brown decision. Elsewhere in Delaware, school integration proceeded slowly; the resistance to it was passive but pervasive. A decade after Brown, Delaware still had seventeen blacks-only school districts. As Wilmington’s schools were integrated, upscale families, both black and white, were moving to the suburbs, leaving behind high-poverty, black-majority city neighborhoods. Wilmington’s public school system, now serving a predominantly black, low-income population, was mired in corruption and failure.
Following a second round of civil rights litigation in the 1970’s, the US Third Circuit court imposed a desegregation plan on New Castle County in 1976, under which schools in Wilmington would teach grades 4, 5 and 6 for all children in the northern half of the county, while suburban schools would teach grades 1-3 and 7-12. Wilmington children would have nine years of busing to the suburbs; suburban children would have three years of busing to Wilmington. After the 1976 desegregation order, a spate of new private schools popped up in the suburbs. One third of all schoolchildren living within four districts around Wilmington now attend non-public schools.
In 1978 the Delaware legislature split the northern half of New Castle County into four large suburban districts, each to include a slice of Wilmington. The Brandywine, Red Clay Consolidated and Colonial districts are contiguous to Wilmington and serve adjacent city neighborhoods. The Christina district has two non-contiguous areas: the large Newark-Bear-Glasgow area and a high-poverty section of Wilmington about 10 miles distant on I-95.
In 1995, the federal court lifted the desegregation order, declaring that the county had achieved “unitary status.” Wilmington’s poorest communities remain predominantly black, but the urbanized Newark-New Castle corridor now has far more minority households than Wilmington. The school districts are committed to reducing black-white school achievement gaps as mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (the 2000 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act).
Louis Redding and Collins Seitz both died in 1998. The city government building at 800 North French St. in Wilmington is named in Redding’s honor.
Miscellany
An 800-acre triangular area known as the Wedge lies just below the west line, bounded by the north line on the west and the southern extension of the arc on the east. It is located west of Wedgewood Road, and is intersected by Rt. 896 in Delaware just before the road crosses the very northeast tip of Maryland into Pennsylvania. Although the Delaware legislature has included representatives from the Wedge since the mid-19th century, jurisdiction over the Wedge remained ambiguous. A joint Delaware-Pennsylvania commission assigned it to Delaware in 1889, and Pennsylvania ratified the assignment in 1897, but Delaware, sensitive to Wedge residents who preferred to be Pennsylvanians, didn’t vote accept the Wedge as part of Delaware until 1921. Congress ratified the compact in 1921. Through most of the 19th century the Wedge was a popular hideout for criminals, and a place for duels, gambling and other amusements, conveniently beyond the reach of local authorities. A historic marker on Rt. 896 summarizes its history.
Until fairly recently, the area around Rising Sun, Maryland, had sporadic activity from a local Ku Klux Klan group whose occasional requests for parade permits attracted a lot of media attention. In his book Walkin’ the Line, William Ecenbarger recounts watching a Klan rally in Rising Sun 1995. Local Klan leader Chester Doles served a prison sentence for assault, and then left Cecil County for Georgia. Whatever Klan is left in this area has been very quiet since.
The Mason-Dixon Trail is a 193-mile hiking trail, marked in light blue paint blazes. It begins at the intersection of Pennsylvania Route 1 and the Brandywine River in Chadds Ford, PA; runs southeast through Hockessin and Newark, DE; eastward though Elkton to Perryville and Havre de Grace, MD (although pedestrians are not allowed on the Rt. 40 bridge!); then northward up the west side of the Susquehanna and northwest through York County, PA, through Gifford Pinchot State Park to connect with the Appalachian Trail at Whiskey Springs. The Mason-Dixon Trail does not actually follow any line that Mason and Dixon surveyed, but it’s an interesting trail over diverse terrain.
The stone markers used in the Mason-Dixon survey were quarried and carved in England and shipped to America. The locations of many of these markers are noted on USGS 7.5-minute topographic maps. Roger Nathan and William Ecenbarger have both explored these markers and written readable histories of them. Many markers are lost, but some are still accessible (with landowner permission).
Bibliography (including references)
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon in 1997 generated a resurgence of interest in Mason and Dixon. It’s a demanding but rewarding read. Pynchon paints Mason and Dixon as naïve, rather picaresque characters surrounded by an odd cast including a talking dog. They seem to personify America’s moral compass, slowly realizing how their survey line defiles a wild, innocent landscape, opening the west to the violence and moral ambiguities that accompany “civilization.”
The University of Delaware Library’s special collections include a number of items including survey journals and other Mason-Dixon materials, as well as many documents relating to Thomas Garrett, the local Underground Railroad and the struggle for racial equality in Delaware. Charles Mason’s survey journal was published in 1969 by the American Philosophical Association.
Edwin Danson’s book provides the clearest technical explanations of the survey along with a readable narrative of it. Roger Nathan’s focus is the history of Delaware’s boundaries, in which Mason and Dixon play the largest part. William Ecenbarger narrates a delightful tour of the tangent, north and west lines, with local vignettes of slavery and civil rights interspersed with brief descriptions of the survey. Hubertis Cummings’s book, written for the bicentennial of the survey, is a good mix of technical detail and narrative.
Cope, Thomas D. 1949. Degrees along the west line, the parallel between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93(2):127-133 (May 1949).
Cummings, Hubertis Maurice, 1962. The Mason and Dixon line, story for a bicentenary, 1763-1963. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Harrisburg, PA.
Danson, Edwin, 2001 Drawing the line : How Mason and Dixon surveyed the most famous border in America. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Ecenbarger, William, 2000. Walkin' the line: a journey from past to present along the Mason-Dixon. M. Evans, New York.
Latrobe, John H. B. 1882. The history of Mason and Dixon's line: contained in an address, delivered by John H. B. Latrobe of Maryland, before the Historical society of Pennsylvania, November 8, 1854. G. Bower, Oakland, DE.
Mason, A.H. (ed.) Journal of Charles Mason [1728-1786] and Jeremiah Dixon [1733-1779]. 1969. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society vol. 76). American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
Nathan, Roger E. 2000. East of the Mason-Dixon Line: a history of the Delaware boundaries. Delaware Heritage Press, Wilmington, DE.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1997. Mason & Dixon. Henry Holt, New York.
Sobel, Dava. 1996. Longitude: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time. Walker & Co., New York.
[1] Associate Professor, Delaware Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Delaware, Newark, DE; and Member, Christina School District Board of Education, 600 North Lombard Street, Wilmington, DE. Corresponding address: johnmack@udel.edu or John Mackenzie, 215 Townsend Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19717.