MDDM Ch. 25: This Case

[Dave Monroe]

... continuing on in Edwin Danson, Drawing the Line:
How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in
America (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), on to Ch.
3, "The Great Chancery Suit," pp. 18-26 ...

"On February 6, 1685, King Charles II died suddenly. 
His despotic brother James, a Catholic convert, became
King James II and Catholic aspirations rose.  In June,
the earl of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles
II, and a small force of Protestant loyalist landed at
Lyme Regis to launch an inauspicious rebellion ..."
(p. 18)

   "The king had gotten off to a bad start,  and over
the following two years he set in motion a series of
events that were his eventual undoing." (p. 18)

  "On June 30 [1688] .... the earl of Danby and the
bishop of London, Hnery Compton, together with five
other conpirators, invited the Dutch Protestant
prince, William of Orange, to seize the throme of
England and avert the inevitable Catholic
succession....  In December the king fled London for
France in what became known as the bloodless Glorious
Reolution.  James's flight was treated as an
abdication, and William and his wife Mary were crwoned
joint monarchs the following year.
   "In an attempt to reain his crwon, James landed in
Ireland with a moderate force ....  The battle of the
Boyne ....  the day was William's and the Jacobite
forces ... withdrew to pursue the war in Ireland .... 
It is the battle of the Boyne that is best remembered
as an event that sparked off three hundred years of
Anglo-Irish tumult ....  It also sowed the seeds of
the 1715 and 1745 Jocobite rebellions, which
stimulated another flood of emigrants across the
Atlantic." (p. 19)

   "With a new Protestant king and queen on the throne
of England, serious politics came to the fore.... 
Lord Baltimore was deprived of his Maryland grant and
the land reverted to a royal province, a situation
that remained until 1713.  William Penn also suffered
a similar fate in 1691, but with freinds in high
places, and offering no real threat, had his lands
restored in 1694, the same year Queen Mary succumbed
to smallpox and died childless." (p. 20)

"... on March 8 [1702], King William died and the
deposed King James's youngest daughter, the Lady Anne
Stuart, was crowned queen of England.
   "In 1714, during the last year of Anne's reign,
Parliament passed the famous act offering an enormous
prize of [20,000 pounds] to anyone who solved the
longitude problem.  The more successful solutions to
the problem would indirectly help resolve the Penn and
Baltimore boundary dispute." (p. 20)

"... in 1727 .... Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord
Baltimore, petitioned the newly crowned king [George
II] to instruct the proprietors of Pennsylvania to
join him in the demarcation of their mutual boundary. 
His Majesty referred the matter to the commissioners
of the Board of Trade and Plantations ....  The
meetings were disagreeable, both sides trading insults
and accusations....   The committe concluded in 1732
that commissioners should be appointed to conduct a
proper survey.  Futher, they stated that the decree of
1685 stood ..." (p. 22)

   "Meantime, the boundary dispute was growing beyond
teh realms of a legal wrangle and turning into a
bloody cross-border conflict." (p. 23)

"... in 1750, Lord Hardwicke in London pronounced
judgment in the Great Chancery Suit....  In 1751 a new
survey was commissioned ...." (p. 23)

"... by 1760 the legal situation had clarified enough
for surveyors ... to begin the task of setting out the
first boundary lines.... The first part of the task
was completed on December 2, 1761, when the survey
team stood down for the winter.
   "Beginning on May 25, 1762, a second trail line was
run ..." (p. 24)

"By the time local surveyors reached the end of their
last line, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had
already been hired to compltet the task and were
preparing to leave London.... in early October ...
Mason and Dixon were on their way." (p.25)

"Beneath the surface of both colonies was a yearning
for political indepenence from the shackles of the
proprietorial system ..." (p. 26)

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 246.2 "This case ... languish'd in court for eighty
> years." The border dispute between Pennsylvania and
> Maryland?

So, from petitioning King Charles betwixt 1683 and
1685 (see previous post) to commissioning of Mason and
Dixon to survey the West (PA/MD) and Tangent (MD/DE)
Lines in 1763 (Danson, p. 84), "This case" indeed
"languish'd in court for eighty years" ...






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