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. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line’s history. 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. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America’s colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.Īcclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America’s defining border. 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 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.
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