Mason-Dixon: Crucible of a Nation (2023) by Edward G. Gray

 Book Review

Mason-Dixon: Crucible of a Nation (2023)

by Edward G. Gray

Harvard University Press

   I always get excited when I see an Audiobook edition of a new work of serious history in the Libby library app.  That was the case for Mason-Dixon: Crucible of a Nation, which is billed as "the first comprehensive narrative of America's defining border."  Sold!  I love a good history of a defining border.  All histories about borders, more or less.  If someone wants to write a whole history book on a specific border, or the idea of borders generally, I'm interested.   Reading the description, I couldn't but help think of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Mason & Dixon, which is, in fact, a comprehensive (773 page) narrative of this very border.  Edward Gray never mentions Pynchon- you would think he could have pulled an epigraph out of a 773 page book about this very subject.

 Alas, humor is not in long supply in Mason-Dixon: Crucible of  a Nation.  Although there are other subjects, the Mason-Dixon line is mostly about slavery- legal on one side, illegal on the over, but importantly, the return of slaves who had escaped from unfree to free is THE theme of this book, and the line itself.   It is clear from the pages of this book- even if the author fails to acknowledge it- that the anti-slavery north aided and abetted the southern slave trade up to the start of the Civil War itself.  Another theme that emerges here is the curious manner in which the states north of the Mason-Dixon line worked to abolish slavery while remaining perfectly comfortable with restricting liberty through fixed terms of servitude, laws barring the free movement of black people and a general expression of distaste for black people, free or unfree. 

  Gray's book covers only the actual line itself- the use of the extended line in American rhetoric is left untouched, while the reader gets chapters and chapters about ongoing litigation between Pennsylvania and Maryland's landowners and squatters.  The Native Americans, of course, do not come out well, but Gray does a good job highlighting the morally ambiguous role of the Iroquois, who were power-brokers in the years before the revolution and were fond of selling the land of other tribes out from under those tribes, rendering them homeless.