Why is the Mason-Dixon line associated with the Civil War’s division of North and South? When, clearly, it was states below the Potomac River which defined the South! Besides, isn’t a natural boundary easler to define and clearly identify? This has always bugged me. Can anyone clue me in? - Jinx
The Mason-Dixon line is the boundary between Pa. and Md, surveyed by Mason and Dixon 100 years before the Civil War.
Mason-Dixon Line sounds cool.
Maryland was a slave state, so, after slavery was abolished in the North, it remained everywhere south of Pennsylvania, hence, south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Maryland was a border state which had very divided sympathies and could have easily decided to succeed. It was a slave state. Usage of the Mason-Dixon line as a boundary between slave and free states, or more colloquially, between the northern and southern states predated the Civil War.
I mean secede, of course. Which they succeeded at avoiding.
The Mason-Dixon line became important when various territories asked to be admitted as new states. The question was: Would the state be slave or free. And if it were free and a southerner wanted to move to that state would he be allowed to take his “property” (i.e. slaves) with him? This whole question was the subject of prolonged and bitter arguments in and out of Congress.
Look up the history of the Missouri Compromise and The Kansas-Nebraska Act. The question of new states being slave or free was vital to the South. As things stood in the 1850’s, the South and North were equally divided in the Senate so southerners felt they had political power to stop what to them were onerous restrictions on their affairs. However, if new states were free vs. slave, they could see that political lever slipping away and they were determined not to let that happen. When it began to occur, they decided that secession was their only course.
This is only a cursory look and historians are still sorting the whole thing out.
The way I understand it, MD could have and would have seceeded except that its legislature at the time only met every other year, and couldn’t be called into session in an off-year without a decree by the governor. Being able to read a map, he realized that secession, however popular it might have been in Baltimore and the southern counties, would at the least have meant swift occupation and seizure of many types of property (slaves and otherwise). At worst, it would have meant that MD would become a battlefield with all the destruction and devastation that war brings. Thus, he refused to call the legislature into session until MD’s status as a non-seceeding state was decided in a de facto manner by the flood of Federal troops into this “friendly” territory.
The border between Pennsylvania and Maryland had not been clearly established in colonial times; the Crown comissioned Mason and Dixon to survey and definitively establish this boundary between the two then-colonies. IIRC, this was sometime in the 1760’s.