NOTES
[1] The ferry landings were near the Brandywine Flour Mills on one side, and at the foot of King Street on the other.
[2] Mrs. John Connel afterward went to France, and was the guest of the Lafayette family for six months. She was presented at the Court of Louis Philippe, and the King gave her a handsome lace fan, which is still preserved in the family.
How Once Upon A Time
Mason And Dixon
Ran A Boundary
OF ALL the States belonging to the United States of America, there are no two that are of the same size or shape. Some are big and some are little. One is almost square. One is shaped like a boot.
Delaware, has two boundaries, one on the west and one on the south, that are perfectly straight. On the east the boundary follows the line of the Delaware River and bay. The northern line of the State is an arc, or part of a circle. If you put a pin through the little dot on the map that is marked “New Castle,” and tie a thread to it and measure, you will find how perfect this arc of the circle is, and you will also find that New Castle is the centre of the circle.
Why should Delaware have this queer curved northern boundary? It is because, many years ago, as this book has told once before, in 1681, King Charles the Second of England gave what is now Pennsylvania to William Penn. In that grant, Penn was given “that extensive forest lying twelve miles northward of New Castle, on the northern side of the Delaware,” the southern boundary of which was a circle drawn twelve miles distant from New Castle northward and westward.
Penn, at first, was contented with this grant from King Charles. But when he looked over his land grant carefully, he saw that it would be much better for Pennsylvania to have at least a strip of land that would run along one side of the Delaware River and down to the Delaware Bay. This land had been already given by the King, to his brother, the Duke of York.
If Penn only had that strip of land, his ships could sail up the river more safely. He could also carry on a better trade with the Indians along its banks. So he asked the Duke of York to let him have this river land. We have already read how the Duke of York answered him,—how the Provinces on the Delaware were given to Penn on lease, for a certain share of rents and profits, and a rose to be presented to the Duke every Michaelmas, on demand. This lease was to run ten thousand years, which was the same as if it were a gift out and out.
So what is now our State of Delaware came into the possession of William Penn, and in the deeds its boundaries were laid out; the northern one was still to be the arc of the circle drawn around New Castle. Its western boundary was to be a straight line drawn on down from the rim of this “twelve mile circle,” till it should meet another line, a straight one, which was to be drawn from Cape Henlopen across to the Chesapeake, and was to be the southern boundary of the State. If you will look at the map in the front of the book, you can see how the arc of the twelve-mile circle and the two straight lines to the south and the east give Delaware its present shape. The eastern part of the land within the twelve mile circle extended all the way to low water mark on the New Jersey shore, and also to the center of the bay south of the circle. The grant gave Penn the Pea-Patch Island too, where Fort Delaware was afterward built.
The Duke of York gave the land to William Penn. But years and years before that, long before the Duke of York himself owned the Provinces on the Delaware, there was another Englishman who claimed them as his own.
This was Lord Baltimore. In 1632, the King had given him a grant not only of Maryland, but of what is now Delaware, as well. The grant was given on the word of Lord Baltimore, that no Christian people had ever settled on the peninsula. But, as we know, about one year before that DeVries had landed at Zwannendael, had bought the land there and had started his little settlement. Probably Lord Baltimore knew nothing of this. Whether he knew or not, the King was very angry when he found what a mistake had been made, and that the Dutch had made a settlement in Delaware years before. There was even a great deal of doubt as to whether Lord Baltimore’s grant would hold good.
Perhaps it was because of this doubt that Lord Baltimore did not make any claim to these Delaware lands until 1659. At that time, his brother, Lord Calvert, was the Governor of Maryland. The Dutch were living along the Delaware, and had built forts there.
In that year (1659) five or six Dutch soldiers deserted from the Dutch fort at New Amstel[1] and fled down into Maryland.
The Dutch Director-General sent a message to Lord Calvert, asking him to send the deserters back to him.
Lord Calvert answered the Dutchman very politely. He was very willing to send the soldiers back, he said, but at the same time he wished to warn the Director that New Amstel and Altona,[2] and all the land along the Delaware up to the fortieth degree, belonged to Lord Baltimore.
When this message was brought to the Dutch Director and his council, they were surprised indeed. This was the first they had heard of the English having any claim to the land at all. They could hardly believe it, and yet they were so afraid of getting into trouble with the English that some of the councillors wanted to leave New Amstel at once, and move up to the Hudson, where they would be safe.
It was not long before they heard again from Maryland. In August, Colonel Utie came over from St. Mary’s,[3] bringing letters and messages from Lord Calvert. The message that he brought was that the Dutch must move away at once. They must give over all the land to the English. However, they might stay on one condition. That was that they would obey English rules, and would agree that Lord Baltimore was the owner of the land and their ruler.
Before the Director and his council could agree to this condition, they said they would have to consult with Governor Stuyvesant.
Colonel Utie was quite willing for them to consult their governor, and he gave them three weeks to send their messengers to New Amsterdam and learn from Governor Stuyvesant what they were to do.
Three weeks later, to a day, the Director and his council met together, and three weeks later, to a day, Colonel Utie came to their meeting to hear what they had to say. They had heard from Governor Stuyvesant, and his messages were very decided. The Dutch were not to give up the land, and they were not to own Lord Baltimore as their ruler. The land belonged to the Dutch. They had bought it from the Indians; they had been its first settlers and they had “sealed it with their blood” at Zwannendael.
But Stuyvesant did more than send this answer to the English. He quietly sent messengers down along the Delaware, and bought from the Indians all the land that did not already belong to the Dutch, and he built a fort at Hoornkill, and made ready to protect his land.
Lord Calvert did not force him to fight for his rights, however. The English governor seemed quite as unwilling as the Dutch had been to carry the dispute any further.
But the Dutch were not to keep the land very much longer, in spite of the friendliness of Lord Calvert. It was soon to be taken from them, and by the English, too, though not by Lord Baltimore.
In 1664, a fleet of vessels was sent over from England by the Duke of York, to take possession of the land. It was his now; the King had given it to him, in spite of the grant made to Lord Baltimore years before.
The Duke of York was a very rich and powerful nobleman. The Dutch did not dare to stand out against him, no, not even the hot-headed Governor Stuyvesant himself. Very quietly, they handed over all the land to the English. Not a single shot was fired any place, except at Fort New Amstel. There the Director-General made one effort to protect the Dutch rights. He tried to hold the fort, but even the townspeople were against him. He was soon forced to yield, and the English soldiers marched in and took possession. English soldiers filled the fort; English farmers tilled the ground; Englishmen made the laws and settled quarrels, and then, during the time when their government was being established, the great tract of land north of the Delaware Province was made over to William Penn, and a little later the Provinces on the Delaware were sold to him, too.
But now Lord Baltimore began again to push his claims to the land. While the Dutch had it, he was willing to let the matter rest. As long as the Duke of York owned it, he had been afraid to dispute about it; but now it belonged to William Penn, and William Penn was only a private gentleman.
At one time, Lord Baltimore sent Colonel George Talbot over from Maryland with a band of soldiers. They seized a farm near New Castle that belonged to a Mr. Ogle. On the farm Colonel Talbot built a fort with palisades, and he put a force of armed men in to defend it. He declared he was holding it for Lord Baltimore.
Soon after this, Penn heard that Lord Baltimore had sailed back to England, there to make claims on the land before the King’s Privy Council. Penn then took ship and went back to England, too, to present his side.
After the Privy Council had heard everything there was to be said, and had read all the papers on the question, they gave their decision. The decision was that Lord Baltimore had no right to any of the three Provinces on the Delaware. They were to belong to William Penn. The boundaries were to be the lines marked out by the Duke of York,—half the peninsula down to Cape Henlopen, and a line to be drawn across from Cape Henlopen to meet the Western boundary.
But somehow the quarrel did not end. Years passed and Lord Baltimore died, and William Penn died, and still the boundary dispute went on. Finally the same old question was decided in exactly the same way by the Lord Chancellor of England in 1750, in favor of William Penn’s children, and the thing was settled at last. But it was not as easy to mark out the boundary lines on real land as it is on a map. So because the marking of them was very difficult, and because Penn’s heirs and Frederick, the new Lord Baltimore, wanted the lines settled once for all, two very good surveyors came over from England in 1763, to run the boundary. The names of these two surveyors have been famous ever since. They were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.
It was not an easy task that these two surveyors had undertaken to do. A great part of the land was still wild and unbroken. Savages and wild beasts lurked in the forests. At night, as they sat beside their camp fires, they could hear the long cry of the catamounts off in the wood. Often an Indian warrior would glide out from the thickets, and stand watching their work, and then glide away again, silent as a shadow. The savages seemed friendly, and indeed some of them went with the white men as guides, but there was no knowing when they would turn against the white men. At one time, word was brought to Mason and Dixon that the Indians meant to attack their camp, and twenty-six of their workmen left, and made their way back to safety. All work stopped for a while. Then fresh men came out to take their places, and the chopping and surveying went on. Great trees were cut down and rocks were rolled from their beds. A path eight yards wide was made through the wilderness, and in this “vistoe” as they called it, stones were set up to mark the boundary line. Some of the stones had Penn’s coat-of-arms carved on them; some were carved upon one side with “P” for Pennsylvania, and on the other with “M” for Maryland.
Months slipped by, years passed, and still the work was not finished.
Then one day the surveyors came to a path through the forest that crossed the “vistoe” they were marking out. It was a path worn by the passing of many Indian feet. Here the savages who were acting as their guides stopped.
“It is not the will of the Six Nations[4] that you should go further,” they said.
The white men were very anxious to finish the line. They had been working on it for over four years, and it needed thirty-six more miles to complete it, but the Indians would guide them no further. “It is not the will of the Six Nations,” they repeated.
The white men were afraid to push on further without permission. They were afraid they would be massacred, so they were obliged to turn back leaving the line incompleted, and many, many years passed by before that line was finally finished.
But Mason and Dixon’s line[5] still marks the boundaries between the three States of Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and here and there a stone still stands where they set it up in their “vistoe,” more than a hundred and fifty years ago. One stone is preserved in the rooms of the Delaware Historical Society, at Tenth and Market streets, in Wilmington.
The lines they marked out were those between Pennsylvania on the north, and Delaware and Maryland on the south, and between Maryland and Delaware[6] and they did their work so well that it has never had to be done again.
