The old Rebel yell...

You learn something new every day... but today my sister and I learned something new and cool... That's a little more scarce...

For those who watched Bugs Bunny, there is always talk of the Mason-Dixon line... Yosemite Sam was always chasing Bugs Bunny around, over, and -invariably- getting shot by a cannon through it.

But what was the Mason Dixon line? Who founded it? ...And where is it?

I knew it separated the Free North states from the Slave South states... so... I figured... it must be right between the North and the South somewhere...

It is...simply... not.

I always thought the Mason Dixon line came from a fella named Mason who was a prim and proper upstart from Philadelphia (Because that's where all the Masons' are... Haven't you seen "National Treasure"?), and Dixon, that southern gentleman from Charleston (In Dixie-land... see?). Whom got into a fight one day, probably over a slave or something, and then one shot the other, and then generals all got mad and then there were horses, guns, ships, ironclads, and then it was all "Fore-score and seven years ago"...

But it wasn't...

Let me tell you a story... about an Astronomer and a Mapmaker...

You see, way back in the 1700's (1750's to be exact), there was a whole mess of family problems going on between the folks who owned the area called "Maryland" and the folks who owned the area called "Pennsylvania", both of which were designated British territories and all... The problem was that it was unclear as to where Maryland ended and Pennsylvania began... so a British Magistrate had declared that Maryland began 15 miles south of Philadelphia... But where exactly was that? It was all very rough terrain... and extremely tough to map...

Discovering that Colonial cartographers were unable to actually map this, the leaders of the two territories called in the British Astronomer Charles Mason and the British Cartographer Jeremiah Dixon... who successfully (Well, mostly, anyway... despite er... "assistance" from the local tribes), managed to map out the line between the two territories and even went so far as to define a small part of Delaware and West Virginia too (Hey, it was King Charles' dime, and it would take a long time for someone to sail over the ocean and tell on them so why not?)... Great! Well.. except they really didn't do a very good job as the Mason-Dixon line starts almost directly Southeast of Philadelphia... not South... and it’s 22 miles to the border… not 15… perhaps they had discovered American Whiskey too… Well, everyone seemed to be happy with the results… so perhaps they were all drinking Whiskey…

ahem... anyway...

So, fast forward to 1863... The Union has had it with the slavery thing, and President Abraham Lincoln tells the South to get over it... they don't and the US goes to war... with itself...

States begin to leave the United States, and... someone notices (Probably while drinking even more whiskey...), that the Mythical Line of succession happens to be almost directly aligned (In much the same way as the Leaning tower of Pisa is aligned with “Straight Up”...) with this Mason Dixon cartography line mapped more than 100 years prior (Though not really as Maryland stayed with the Union, whereas Delaware joined the Southern Confederacy which means the line, drawn between the Union State of Pennsylvania and the Union State of Maryland is only 10% actually on the border of North and South... at those two tiny overlaps in West Virginia and Delaware, and it’s on the Western border of Delaware… which isn’t very “South” to me... a better line would have been Interstate 68... but really we needed another 100 years and a different war to prompt that line to be drawn)...

So... a line that was mapped by British folks to help settle a dispute between local landlords became a symbol (Even though it was mostly inaccurate) of the division of a nation, which would then become a symbol for rabbits that shoot handle-barred mustached short fellas with 16th century ship-board cannons...

And we wonder why our children can't get our history straight...

---Me.