Title: Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America Author: Edwin Danson ISBN: 0-471-38502-6

chapter 1

In the Reign of George the Third

Seventeen sixty-three had been one of those years. Every ship from England brought news of another irksome tax or stifling regula- tion to the American colonists. The long war with France was over, but the conciliatory terms of the peace treaty had brought down the British government and the cost of the war had crippled the Exche- quer. The new prime minister was the unpopular Sir George Grenville, intent on rejuvenating the Treasury by taxing the colonies. He was also rumored to be planning restrictions on settlement west of the Alleghenies to appease the Indians. In the frontier lands, far to the west, there was serious trouble and reports of Indian massacres. For the small cluster of people gathered on the quay at Philadel- phia, watching a longboat pull away from the ship moored out in the river, there was at least some good news. The Falmouth packet had arrived on the afternoon tide with a group of immigrants, Pennsylva- nia traders returning home, and London merchants with an eye to business. Among the passengers also disembarking that gray Novem- ber afternoon were two English surveyors, recently engaged by the landowners who held the royal grant, the so-called proprietors of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The appointment of the surveyors had been a secret, a last hope for settling the disputed border between the two colonies and ending eighty years of acrimony and bloodshed. Later in history, the two men’s names would become irrevocably linked with the boundary itself: the Mason-Dixon line, the border line that separates Maryland from Pennsylvania. The line’s true origin has become obscured by time and is now best remembered as the symbolic

5 6 drawing the line divide between the North and the South during the Civil War, the partition between slave and free states. In human terms, the Mason-Dixon line was the eighteenth cen- tury’s most ambitious geodetic survey, and a project without prece- dent. The men who finally solved the boundary line problem were astronomers, men of science. They could measure latitude and longi- tude with great precision, but only on dry land. At sea, the problem was quite different and the astronomer’s methods just would not work. Navigators could find the latitude by observing the stars, and followed it with reasonable certainty, but longitude was abstract. To find the longitude, seafarers needed a way of measuring the difference in time between a ship’s position and some point of reference. Solving the lon- gitude problem would save lives, safeguard valuable cargoes, and pro- tect His Majesty’s navy from shipwreck. It was the burning issue of the day and attracted a prize of £20,000 for the man who solved the riddle. Before he accepted the American assignment, Charles Mason worked at the Greenwich Observatory, where he was a colleague of Reverend Nevil Maskelyne’s, and shared with him the view that there could only be an astronomical answer to the longitude problem. However, there was a competing solution, devised by a simple clockmaker called John Harrison, a mechanical device called a chronometer. The protracted battle between Harrison and Maskelyne for the longitude prize is leg- endary, but in 1763 the chronometer was still a strange and uncertain thing. Maskelyne put his faith in lunar distances, rather than mechan- ical contraptions. Lunars endured a hundred years before finally suc- cumbing to the chronometer, and their success owed much to the consummate skills of Charles Mason. As the world took shape beneath the back staffs and quadrants of seventeenth-century roving seafarers, so knowledge of its size im- proved and the ghostly lines of longitude became less ethereal. Simi- larly, latitude was better measured and understood, and science began to take a closer interest in both of these earthly measures. Today, the intersection of a line of latitude with a line of longitude far from the nearest shore can be established with a certainty of a few meters at the touch of a button, using a piece of electronics costing a few hun- dred dollars. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the same position might have been measured to a few tens of miles in latitude, in the reign of george the third 7 but with only the vaguest idea of longitude. By the end of the century, both latitude and longitude could be found to within a few miles—if the navigator could afford the expensive technology. While mathematicians and astronomers began to make sense of the world, so religion and politics tried to pull it apart. In the seven- teenth century, the new English lords of America owed their good fortunes as much to their religious affiliations as they did to their enor- mous wealth. Tension between Catholic and Protestant interests waxed and waned throughout the period as monarch succeeded monarch. Toward the end of the century, the Dutch prince William of Orange became king and finally established in England the supremacy of Protestantism and Parliament, and the modern era began. British America grew apace as settlers poured into the territories and vast new trading patterns emerged. Colonial expansion outpaced the political processes, and when Mason and Dixon stepped ashore in Philadelphia on that gray November day, the America they found was substantially different from the one they expected. At home in England, most people, and certainly most members of Parliament, regarded the American colonies as if they were distant English shires. On the long voyage to the New World, Mason and Dixon learned from homebound Americans that the colonists had nei- ther the vote nor representation in the English Parliament. Discontent and anger was growing toward the way the British government, and especially King George III, was running American affairs. At the time, the British Empire as such did not exist and the nineteenth-century plantation regime, with its exceptional brutality, was still in its infancy. To be sure, there were slaves in America, but they were not all black. The colonial broadsheets contained almost as many advertisements requesting the apprehension of white convicts and indentured servants as they did for black slaves. In the same month that Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia, Richard Purchase, a thirty-year-old London convict, was sold into bondage to Thomas Harrison of Baltimore. Two years later he escaped and attracted a reward of £5 for “whoever will take up and secure the said Servant.” Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of slaves were kidnapped African natives, or their progeny. Dutch traders in 1619 were among the earliest to sell slaves to the set- tlers of Virginia. At first, these unfortunate souls were regarded akin 8 drawing the line to indentured servants brought from England, and were treated simi- larly. After a period of servitude, the Africans were often granted man- umission, but this state of affairs proved only temporary. In 1750, the Merchants Trading to Africa Company, the last major London company engaged in the nefarious trade, began slaving out of Bristol. In the year Mason and Dixon voyaged to America, slaving was at its height, with more than 150 ships transporting forty-five thou- sand Africans annually across the Atlantic to the American colonies. Thirty-five percent went to the settlements of New England, but the majority went to the middle and southern provinces; 10 percent of Maryland’s population was made up of African slaves working the tobacco fields. Although at its peak in the colonies, slavery was becoming mor- ally unacceptable, at least in England. In 1772, Chief Justice William Murray, the earl of Mansfield, heard the case of James Somersett, a fugitive Virginian slave who had escaped to England. The judgment in Somersett’s favor was not in itself a direct blow to slavery, but rather a victory for common decency; no longer could a slave be repatriated forcibly to face retributive punishment at the hand of his master. The eighteenth-century poet William Cowper was moved to write: Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. Within ten years of Murray’s judgment, the beginning of the true abolitionist movement was under way. Led by indefatigable English Quakers, the movement quickly spread abroad to be embraced by the Friends in Pennsylvania, from where it spread throughout the colonies. The abolitionists were of two camps: those for whom slavery was a moral outrage, and those who feared unrest and, with justification, outright revolt. However, all that lay in the future. During Mason and Dixon’s travels in America, slaves doing sweat labor in the fields would not have been an unfamiliar sight. The American settlers had two non-European races to contend with, neither of which was properly understood. On one hand were the imported African slave laborers, and on the other the indigenous American Indians. Ignorance and fear frequently lead to bigotry or atrocity, and, in this respect, the English settlers were not unique. To in the reign of george the third 9 understand the America of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, one has to cast away contemporary ideas of freedom and one-man-one-vote; there was no vote for the 550,000 emigrants who flooded annually into the coastal provinces. It was a world where European men and women were carving a new land from the wilderness, a world where bravery and strength of spirit went hand in hand with the hardships of everyday life in an untamed environment. Moral yardsticks were imported from the Old World and independence was a new and cher- ished concept that would create a nation where freedom evolved into an article of faith. As an American friend once observed, in the United States, freedom is mandatory and requires an excessive degree of expres- sion. In Europe, these ideas and values were to develop more slowly and with reservations. The fragile peace that followed the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 was a time of transition that would ultimately lead to the transformation of the colonists from European vassals into Ameri- can citizens. It was the era of the two Georges: George III and George Washington. To quote the 1851 edition of A Child’s History of England: “It was in the reign of George the Third that England lost North America, by persisting in taxing her without her own consent. That immense country, made independent under WASHINGTON, and left to itself, became the United States; one of the greatest nations of the earth.” Ten years after Charles Dickens wrote those words, the slaves in the cotton and tobacco fields had helped generate enough wealth to fund the most awful of civil wars, where the Mason-Dixon line acquired a darker, more sinister meaning.