I read Miguel’s post about Miami-Dade County renaming South Dixie Highway as Harriet Tubman Highway.
Whatever. It will always be South Dixie Highway in the minds of South Floridians.
Hell, most of us just called it US-1, which is its Federal designation or “Useless-1” if you are every stuck in its famous traffic jams.
As a fan of history, however, I’d like to poke at the ignorance of the Woke Scolds who did this.
Dixie as an appellation for the South, particularly the South Eastern United States does stem from the Mason-Dixon line.
Some will say that it comes from the “Dix” meaning “Ten” in French that was used on Citizens’ Bank of New Orleans issued ten-dollar notes. Except this etymology makes no sense why Dixie referred to east coast states, which had nothing to do with Louisiana, and no other Cajun words or culture drifted that far east.
The Dixie, in reference to Jeremiah Dixon’s demarcation, is the most widely accepted origin.
The Woke Scolds push the idea that Dixie is a racist name and it is an offense to black people because Dixie was slave territory.
It’s not.
The Mason-Dixon line comes from 1767 and was used to define the boundary between Catholic Maryland and Protestant/Quaker Pennsylvania during the colonial era.
The official Federal border between slave states and free states is the Missouri Compromise Line. That starts at the Missouri/Iowa border, heads south along the Mississippi River, and travels along the Kentucky border to West Virginia, separating Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio from the South. It connects to the Mason-Dixon line where West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania touch.
So if anything, we should change the name of the state of Missouri.
But this is where it gets really weird, because Maryland was a slave state but did not secede and join the Confederacy.
Furthermore, while Virginia was a slave state, the western counties of Virginia did not want to secede from the Union and instead broke away from Virginia and stayed with the Union while Virginia joined the Confederacy.
Neither the Missouri Compromise line nor the Mason-Dixon line really defined the border between the Union and the Confederacy.
So what these Woke Scolds are doing is renaming a highway because of a colloquialism with its origin in prerevolutionary colonial America.
But it’s not like these people actually give a shit about history.
Delaware and Kentucky were also slave states that didn’t secede. So there were 4 in all.
The reason that Maryland did not secede is because the day of the vote, Lincoln had federal troops stationed inside the Maryland state house, lots of them.
Lincoln could not take the chance that Maryland would secede because if it did, then Washington DC would be surrounded by the Confederacy.
While the MO line was the official separation of North and South, for many years it was sort of an extension of the Mason-Dixen line moving west. That could just be my weak schooling from the 60’s and 70’s but that was what I was taught.