Mason-Dixon : crucible of the nation / Edward G. Gray.

Title :

Mason-Dixon : crucible of the nation

Author:

Gray, Edward G., 1964-2023,

Format:

Books

Summary:

"A grand narrative history of the boundary that began as a simple demarcation between the feuding Pennsylvania and Maryland colonies but became a byword for the fundamental national division between the slavery-preserving South and abolitionist North"--

Language:

English

ISBN - ISSN:

9780674987616

0674987616

Physical Description:

xiii, 440 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Contents:

Part I: Marchlands in Motion. Lord Baltimore's Northern Problem -- William Penn's Unlikely Empire -- The Battle for Maryland's Far North -- Part II: Marchlands into Borderlands. The Squatters' Empire -- An American Bloodlands -- The Science of Borders -- Part III: A Border Emerges. The Making of States, Free and Slave -- Borderlands as Heartland -- Fugitive Diplomacy -- The Fall of Greater Baltimore -- Part IV: The Age of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Second Fugitive Slave Act -- Border War along the Underground Railroad -- Borderlands into Border States -- The End of the Line.

Subject:

Borderlands -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century.

Borderlands -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century.

Slavery -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

Mason-Dixon Line -- History.

First Title value, for Searching:

Mason-Dixon : crucible of the nation / Edward G. Gray.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Freed-Montrose	Adult	Non-fiction	New books	975.03 G778	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"A magisterial yet highly nuanced account that ventures back and forth across Mason and Dixon's fabled demarcation line as audaciously as 18th-century raiding parties once did."--Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal

The first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line--a dramatic story of imperial rivalry and settler-colonial violence, the bonds of slavery and the fight for freedom.

The United States is the product of border dynamics--not just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America's colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America's defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland--complicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives--had led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line's history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans--enslaved and free--faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line's significance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold.

Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors--all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A study of how the eponymous demarcation line has long been seen as far more than just an abstract border. The surveying party led by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon was organized in the aftermath of the French and Indian War to settle border disputes among Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The region, writes Florida State historian Gray, had long been torn by war: neighbor against neighbor, white against Indigenous, with spectacular violence committed against the peaceful peoples of the Susquehanna River area. Indeed, "the story of the Line is really a story of Americans and their relationship to government," a relationship largely marked by hostility and antagonism, and by the usual ironies: The settlers along the borderlands demanded security from the government but resisted paying the taxes to underwrite that protection. Ironically, the Mason-Dixon line, which took that name decades after the survey was completed, would eventually come to be seen as the dividing line between North and South, between slavery and freedom--ironically, that is, because, as Gray notes in this data-rich narrative, for much of the 18th century New York had nearly three times more enslaved people than Pennsylvania, whose Quaker leaders took to abolitionism early on. During the Civil War, though they remained in the Union, Delaware and Maryland allowed slavery, at least in a roundabout way. Their politicians opposed the slave trade but not slavery itself, which had the effect of raising the prices of enslaved people. Delaware defied emancipation, albeit "the position of Delaware's Democrats was more the stuff of farce than even the rudest form of political posturing." Finally, if briefly, the Line marked the division between free and slave states, long after it had acquired ethnic partition lines that more or less continue today, grouping a few Indigenous communities, a small number of African Americans, and sometimes contending European populations dominated by Protestant German and Scots-Irish farmers. A rich history of regional distinctions, especially as they shaped the antebellum Republic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

List of Maps and Illustrations	xi
Note on Terms	xiii
Prologue	1
Introduction	7
Part I Marchlands in Motion
1 Lord Baltimore's Northern Problem	23
2 William Penn's Unlikely Empire	44
3 The Battle for Maryland's Far North	61
Part II Marchlands into Borderlands
4 The Squatters' Empire	85
5 An American Bloodlands	109
6 The Science of Borders	135
Part III A Border Emerges
7 The Making of States, Free and Slave	167
8 Borderlands as Heartland	198
9 Fugitive Diplomacy	225
10 The Fall of Greater Baltimore	244
Part IV The Age of the Mason-Dixon Line
11 The Second Fugitive Slave Act	277
12 Border War along the Underground Railroad	294
13 Borderlands into Border States	311
14 The End of the Line	342
Epilogue	365
Abbreviations	377
Notes	379
Acknowledgments	417
Index	419

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Table of Contents