Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/288

250 economic law, natural law and the laws of the States. Its patriotic purpose was to eliminate sectionalism from the politics of the whole country.

Grave questions of sectional nature had arisen during the colonial period on which the colonies North and the colonies South divided by their respective sections. The original division of the British territorial possessions on the American continent into the geographical designations, North and South, occurred historically in the grants made by King James, 1606; the first to the London Company of the territory south of the 38th degree north latitude, and the other to the Plymouth Colony of the territory north of the 4ist degree north latitude. Both grants extended westward to an indefinite boundary. The Plymouth Settlement afterward subdued the Dutch possessions lying to the south, thus including that territory in the general term North. The settlements of Delaware and Maryland covered the areas lying north of Virginia and they were embraced in the section termed South. The general line of division, somewhat indistinct, lay between the 38th and the 39th degrees north latitude. The Mason and Dixon line 39° 43’ 26&quot; was established by subsequent surveys and was designed to settle certain boundary disputes. In the eighteenth century the original partition of King James was changed by various grants and the English possessions were also extended far down the Atlantic coast by grants of the Carolinas and Georgia. The original &quot;Old South&quot; extended by all these grants along the Atlantic shore from the south line of Georgia to the north of Delaware, and west ward from that wide ocean front certainly to the French possessions on the Mississippi river, including the territory of Virginia in the northwest and embracing a vast area of the best part of America; but by proper construction of these and other original charters which made the western limit &quot;the South sea,&quot; meaning the Pacific ocean, the vast domain of the Old South embraced also