DEDelaware History

A circular border and a name borrowed from a lord

Delaware's northern boundary is an arc. It was surveyed as a twelve mile radius swung from the courthouse cupola in New Castle, a figure written into the 1682 deed that handed the Lower Counties to William Penn, and it is the only curved state line in the country. Where the arc failed to meet the line Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon ran in the 1760s it left a leftover triangle, the Wedge, that Pennsylvania and Delaware argued over until 1921. The bay, the river, the state and the displaced nation all carry the name of Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, a governor of Virginia who never set foot on any of them. The people already there called themselves the Lenape and spoke Unami in the north, with Nanticoke communities in the cypress swamps of the south.

New Sweden, then New Netherland, then Penn

The first European attempt was Dutch and it ended badly: around thirty settlers landed at Zwaanendael near present Lewes in 1631 and were dead within a year after a quarrel over a defaced coat of arms. Peter Minuit, dismissed by the Dutch, returned in Swedish employ and landed in March 1638 at a rock outcrop on a creek he renamed the Christina for the child queen. Fort Christina grew into Wilmington, and the Swedes and Finns who followed brought the notched corner log house that later spread across the frontier. Holy Trinity, the Old Swedes church, was finished in 1699 and still stands. New Sweden lasted seventeen years before Peter Stuyvesant took it in 1655, the English took the whole valley in 1664, and the Duke of York deeded the three counties to Penn in 1682.

Two separations and a ride to Philadelphia

The arrangement with Pennsylvania was awkward from the start. New Castle, Kent and Sussex shared Penn's governor but won their own assembly in 1704, so for seventy years Delaware was neither a separate colony nor properly part of another. On June 15, 1776 that assembly voted in one sitting to cut ties both with the British crown and with Pennsylvania, which is why the state still marks Separation Day. Two weeks later the three man delegation in Philadelphia was split, and Caesar Rodney, ill with cancer and asthma, rode roughly eighty miles overnight from near Dover through a thunderstorm to break the tie for independence on July 2. That ride is the image on the state quarter. The only Revolutionary fighting on Delaware soil was a skirmish at Cooch's Bridge on September 3, 1777.

First to ratify, and a slave state that never seceded

Delegates meeting at Battell's Tavern in Dover ratified the federal Constitution on December 7, 1787, unanimously and without proposing a single amendment, ahead of every other state, which is why the licence plates read First State. The state then spent seventy years in an uncomfortable middle position. It permitted slavery and never left the Union. The 1860 census counted roughly 1,800 enslaved people against nearly 20,000 free Black residents, the highest free proportion anywhere slavery was legal. Wilmington was a hinge on the escape routes north, largely thanks to the Quaker merchant Thomas Garrett, fined into bankruptcy in 1848 for helping fugitives, who told the court he would do it again. The legislature rejected Lincoln's compensated emancipation plan in 1862, voted down the Thirteenth Amendment in February 1865, and did not ratify it until 1901.

Black powder on the Brandywine, then nylon

Eleuthere Irenee du Pont had studied chemistry under Antoine Lavoisier and thought American gunpowder was dangerously bad, so in 1802 he built mills along the Brandywine above Wilmington with their stone walls left open toward the water so that explosions would blow outward. Explosions were frequent. The firm supplied a large share of Union powder, moved into dynamite, then paint and chemicals. At the Experimental Station outside Wilmington the group under Wallace Carothers produced neoprene in 1930 and nylon in 1935, and the first nylon stockings went on sale in 1940 and sold out in hours. For most of the twentieth century Wilmington was effectively a company town.

Chancery, credit cards, and Belton v. Gebhart

The state's other great industry is paperwork. The Court of Chancery, sitting without juries since 1792, and a deliberately flexible General Corporation Law passed in 1899 made Delaware the legal residence of American business, and the fees those entities pay now fund a substantial slice of the state budget. The Financial Center Development Act of 1981 removed the ceiling on consumer interest rates and invited out of state banks in; credit card operations arrived within months. Delaware also supplied one of the five cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education. In Belton v. Gebhart, decided in 1952, Chancellor Collins Seitz ordered Black children admitted to the white schools at Claymont and Hockessin, the only one of the five in which the lower court ruled for the plaintiffs.

Questions people ask about Delaware history

History of the neighbouring states

Other Delaware pages