My Mason-Dixon Line Analogy

Most of the African people in the English Colonies of North America from 1619 through 1777 were enslaved. Slavery was legal in every English Colony in North America for its duration.

The definition of the Underground Railroad that is widely accepted by present day historians is: a network of people, who utilized a variety of strategies, routes and modes of transportation, to assist fugitive slaves from the Southern states in the United States where slavery was legal, to reach the British Commonwealth of Canada, where slavery was illegal. The Underground Railroad operated more or less in conjunction with the Abolitionist Movement which began in the United States around 1777 and lasted until 1865.

Three major events contributed to the establishment of the Underground Railroad: the emergence of the Mason Dixon Line as a boundary, within the United States, between the states where slavery was legal and the states where slavery was illegal. The U.S. Fugitive Slave Law (1793). The Simcoe Act in the Upper Province of Canada (1793.

A misconception persists about the Mason-Dixon Line. The original survey of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1763 had nothing at all to do with the issue of slavery. At that time slavery was legal in all the English Colonies of North America. The purpose of the original Mason-Dixon Line survey was to establish an exact boundary between the lands of William Penn, Lord Proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, and those of Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, Proprietor of the Province of Maryland. In 1763, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were sent from England for the monumental task of resolving the eighty year property dispute.

An attempt to list all the details will not serve our purpose here. For reasons to lengthy to explore in this essay, the Mason-Dixon Survey was extended westward to include the boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia. After numerous problems, the Mason-Dixon survey party finally reached a point two hundred and forty-four miles from the Delaware River, some thirty-six miles from the end of the line, when they came upon an Indian warpath at Duncard's Creek (located at the present day border of Pennsylvania - West Virginia, near Blacksville, West Virginia). Here the Indians of the escort told the surveyors that it was the desire of the Six Nations that they should stop, so the party returned to Philadelphia, reported to the commissioners under the deed of 1760, and were honorably discharged on the 26th day of December, 1767. This ended the original survey of the Mason Dixon Line.

The remaining thirty-six miles of the five degrees of longitude were not run until some eighteen years later (1784). While the following events are not commonly associated with forming the Mason-Dixon Line the following occurred between 1784 and 1820. Provisions in the Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. This dynamic extended Mason Dixon Line between Pennsylvania and the slave states of Maryland and Virginia to the Ohio River which then became the boundary between the states of (Ohio and Virginia), (Ohio and Kentucky), ( Indiana and Kentucky), and (Illinois and Kentucky). the "free" states of the North and the "slave" states of the South. In 1820, during debates in the U.S. Congress over the Missouri Compromise, the term Mason-Dixon Line was used to describe the boundary between the Northern states where slavery was illegal and the Southern states where slavery was legal. At the time the Mason-Dixon Line was extended along the Upper Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois, and in 1846 between Missouri and Iowa. As far as I can determine, the Mason-Dixon Line west of that point had little or no impact on the Underground Railroad.

Back in 1780 when Pennsylvania had abolished slavery, some slaves from Virginia and Maryland crossed into Pennsylvania and claimed that they were “free”. This claim was backed by a large number of Quakers in Pennsylvania. A bitter argument arose in the United States Congress between slave owning states and non slave owning states over the issue of absconding slaves taking up residence in non slave states and achieving freedom. This argument proceeded until 1793 when Congress passed the first federal Fugitive Slave Law. The Fugitive Slave Law gave slave owners the right to pursue and capture fugitive slaves who had fled across the Mason-Dixon Line into non-slave states and territories.

This would have made it very difficult for slave to escape, but in 1793 the Upper Province of Canada (Ontario) abolished slavery. This was followed by the Lower Province of Canada in 1803. Some slaves from the United States began to cross the border into Canada. Canada and Britain refused to extradite the fugitive slaves back to the United States, and this may well have been part of the cause of the War of 1812. At any rate, that was about the time when fugitive slaves began to cross into Canada in numbers large enough to attract attention.

Fugitive slaves still faced the dilemma of avoiding capture across the non-slave states in route to Canada. Some Abolitionists devised the Underground Railroad assist fugitive slaves avoid capture.

How far into the slave states the Underground Railroad extended is still open for debate. I am aware that the Underground Railroad extended south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I also that the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad incrementally
diminished as it extended south. (Comments Welcomed)