[Footnote 1:  There was a long dispute, however, with Lord Baltimore, over the south boundary line, which was not settled till 1763-67, when two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, came over from England and located it as at present.  In later years, when all the Atlantic seaboard states north of Maryland and Delaware had abolished slavery, this “Mason and Dixon’s Line” became famous as the dividing line between the slave and the free Atlantic states.]

%51.  The Three Lower Counties:  Delaware.%—­If you look at the map of the British Colonies in 1764, you will see that Pennsylvania was the only English colony which did not have a seacoast.  This was a cause of some anxiety to Penn, who was afraid that the settlers in Delaware and New Jersey might try to prevent his colonists from going in and out of Delaware Bay.  To avoid this, he bought what is now Delaware from the Duke of York.

The three lower counties on the Delaware, as the tract was called, had no boundary.  Lawfully it belonged to Lord Baltimore.  But neither the Dutch patroons who settled on the Delaware in 1631, nor the Swedes who came later, nor the Dutch who annexed New Sweden to New Netherland, nor the English who conquered the Dutch, paid any regard to Baltimore’s rights.  At last, after the purchase of Delaware, the heirs of Baltimore and of Penn (1732) agreed on what is the present boundary line.  After 1703 the people of the three lower counties were allowed to have an assembly or legislature of their own; but they had the same governor as Pennsylvania and were a part of that colony till the Revolution.[1]

[Footnote 1:  For Pennsylvania read Janney’s Life of William Penn or Dixon’s History of William Penn; Proud’s or Gordon’s Pennsylvania; Lodge’s Colonies, pp. 213-226.]

%52.  Georgia.%—­The return of the Carolinas to the King in 1729 was very soon followed by the establishment of the last colony ever planted by England in the United States.  The founder was James Oglethorpe, an English soldier and member of Parliament.  Filled with pity for the poor debtors with whom the English jails were then crowded, he formed a plan to pay the debts of the most deserving, send them to America, and give them what hundreds of thousands of men have since found in our country,—­a chance to begin life anew.

[Illustration]

Great numbers of people became interested in his plan, and finally twenty-two persons under Oglethorpe’s lead formed an association and secured a charter from King George II. for a colony, which they called Georgia.  The territory granted lay between the Savannah and the Altamaha rivers, and extended from their mouths to their sources and then across the country to the Pacific Ocean.  Oglethorpe had selected this tract in order that his colonists might serve the patriotic purpose of protecting Charleston from the Spanish attacks to which it was then exposed.

Money for the colony was easily raised,[1] and in November, 1732, Oglethorpe, with 130 persons, set out for Charleston, and after a short stay there passed southward and founded the city of Savannah (1733).  It must not be supposed that all the colonists were poor debtors.  In time, Italians from Piedmont, Moravians and Lutherans from Germany, and Scotchmen from the Highlands, all made settlements in Georgia.