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Delaware ( DEL-ə-wair) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic regions of the United States. It borders Maryland to its south and west, Pennsylvania to its north, New Jersey to its northeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state's name derives from the adjacent Delaware Bay, which in turn was named after Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman and the Colony of Virginia's first colonial-era governor.
Delaware occupies the northeastern portion of the Delmarva Peninsula, and some islands and territory within the Delaware River. It is the second-smallest and sixth-least populous state, but also the sixth-most densely populated. Delaware's most populous city is Wilmington, and the state's capital is Dover, the second-most populous city in Delaware. The state is divided into three counties, the fewest number of counties of any of the 50 U.S. states; from north to south, the three counties are: New Castle County, Kent County, and Sussex County. The southern two counties, Kent and Sussex, have historically been predominantly agrarian economies. New Castle is more urbanized and is considered part of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Delaware is considered part of the Southern United States by the U.S. Census Bureau, but the state's geography, culture, and history are a hybrid of the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Southern regions of the country.
Before the Delaware coastline was explored and developed by Europeans in the 17th century, the state was inhabited by several Native American tribes, including the Lenape in the north and Nanticoke in the south. The state was first colonized by Dutch traders at Zwaanendael, near present-day Lewes, Delaware, in 1631. Delaware was one of the Thirteen Colonies that participated in the American Revolution against Great Britain, which established the United States as an independent nation. On December 7, 1787, Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, earning it the nickname "The First State".
Since the turn of the 20th century, Delaware has become an onshore corporate haven whose corporate laws are deemed appealing to corporations; over half of all New York Stock Exchange-listed corporations and over three-fifths of the Fortune 500 are legally incorporated in Delaware. Over 90% of all U.S. based companies that went public in 2021 incorporated themselves in Delaware.
Delaware was named after its location on the Delaware Bay, which in turn derived its name from Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr (1577–1618), the first governor of the Colony of Virginia. The Delaware people, a name used by Europeans for Lenape people indigenous to the Delaware Valley, also derive their name from the same source.
The name de La Warr was derived from Sussex and is of Anglo-French origin. It came probably from a Norman lieu-dit La Guerre. This toponymic likely derived from Latin ager, the Breton gwern or from the Late Latin varectum (fallow). The toponyms Gara, Gare, Gaire, (the sound [ä] often mutated in [æ]) also appear in historical texts cited by Lucien Musset, where the word ga(i)ra means gore. It could also be linked with a patronymic from the Old Norse verr.
Before Delaware was settled by European colonists, the present-day state was home to the Eastern Algonquian tribes known as the Unami Lenape, or Delaware, who lived mostly along the coast, and the Nanticoke who occupied much of the southern Delmarva Peninsula. John Smith also showed two Iroquoian-speaking tribes, the Kuskarawock and Tockwogh, living north of the Nanticoke—they may have held small portions of land in the western part of the state before migrating across the Chesapeake Bay. The Kuskarawocks were most likely the Tuscarora.
The Unami Lenape in the Delaware Valley were closely related to Munsee Lenape tribes along the Hudson River. They had a settled hunting and agricultural society, and they rapidly became middlemen in an increasingly frantic fur trade with their ancient enemy, the Minqua or Susquehannock. With the loss of their lands on the Delaware River and the destruction of the Minqua by the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the 1670s, the remnants of the Lenape who wished to remain identified as such left the region and moved over the Allegheny Mountains by the mid-18th century.
The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in present-day Delaware in the middle region by establishing a trading post at Zwaanendael, near the site of Lewes in 1631. Within a year, all the settlers were killed in a dispute with Native American tribes living in the area. In 1638, New Sweden, a Swedish trading post and colony, was established at Fort Christina (now in Wilmington) by Peter Minuit at the head of a group of Swedes, Finns and Dutch. The colony of New Sweden lasted 17 years. In 1651, the Dutch, reinvigorated by the leadership of Peter Stuyvesant, established a fort at present-day New Castle and, in 1655, they conquered the New Sweden colony, annexing it into the Dutch New Netherland. Only nine years later, in 1664, the Dutch were conquered by a fleet of English ships by Sir Robert Carr under the direction of James, the Duke of York. Fighting off a prior claim by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, Proprietor of Maryland, the Duke passed his somewhat dubious ownership on to William Penn in 1682. Penn strongly desired access to the sea for his Pennsylvania province and leased what then came to be known as the "Lower Counties on the Delaware" from the Duke.
Penn established representative government and briefly combined his two possessions under one General Assembly in 1682. However, by 1704 the province of Pennsylvania had grown so large their representatives wanted to make decisions without the assent of the Lower Counties, and the two groups of representatives began meeting on their own, one at Philadelphia, and the other at New Castle. Penn and his heirs remained proprietors of both and always appointed the same person Governor for their province of Pennsylvania and their territory of the Lower Counties. The fact that Delaware and Pennsylvania shared the same governor was not unique; from 1703 to 1738, New York and New Jersey shared a governor. Massachusetts and New Hampshire also shared a governor for some time.
Dependent in early years on indentured labor, Delaware imported more slaves as the number of English immigrants decreased with better economic conditions in England. The colony became a slave society and cultivated tobacco as a cash crop, although English immigrants continued to arrive.
Like the other middle colonies, the Lower Counties on the Delaware initially showed little enthusiasm for a break with Britain. The citizenry had a good relationship with the Proprietary government, and generally were allowed more independence of action in their Colonial Assembly than in other colonies. Merchants at the port of Wilmington had trading ties with the British.
New Castle lawyer Thomas McKean denounced the Stamp Act in the strongest terms, and Kent County native John Dickinson became the "Penman of the Revolution". Anticipating the Declaration of Independence, Patriot leaders Thomas McKean and Caesar Rodney convinced the Colonial Assembly to declare itself separated from British and Pennsylvania rule on June 15, 1776. The person best representing Delaware's majority, George Read, could not bring himself to vote for a Declaration of Independence. Only the dramatic overnight ride of Caesar Rodney gave the delegation the votes needed to cast Delaware's vote for independence.
Initially led by John Haslet, Delaware provided one of the premier regiments in the Continental Army, known as the "Delaware Blues" and nicknamed the "Blue Hen's Chicks". In August 1777 General Sir William Howe led a British army through Delaware on his way to a victory at the Battle of Brandywine and capture of the city of Philadelphia. The only real engagement on Delaware soil was the Battle of Cooch's Bridge, fought on September 3, 1777, at Cooch's Bridge in New Castle County, although there was a minor Loyalist rebellion in 1778.
Following the Battle of Brandywine, Wilmington was occupied by the British, and State President John McKinly was taken prisoner. The British remained in control of the Delaware River for much of the rest of the war, disrupting commerce and providing encouragement to an active Loyalist portion of the population, particularly in Sussex County. Because the British promised slaves of rebels freedom for fighting with them, escaped slaves flocked north to join their lines.
Following the American Revolution, statesmen from Delaware were among the leading proponents of a strong central United States with equal representation for each state.
Many colonial settlers came to Delaware from Maryland and Virginia, where the population had been increasing rapidly. The economies of these colonies were chiefly based on labor-intensive tobacco and increasingly dependent on African slaves because of a decline in working class immigrants from England. Most of the English colonists had arrived as indentured servants (contracted for a fixed period to pay for their passage), and in the early years the line between servant and slave was fluid.
Most of the free African-American families in Delaware before the Revolution had migrated from Maryland to find more affordable land. They were descendants chiefly of relationships or marriages between white servant women and enslaved, servant or free African or African-American men. Under slavery law, children took the social status of their mothers, so children born to white women were free, regardless of their paternity, just as children born to enslaved women were born into slavery. As the flow of indentured laborers to the colony decreased with improving economic conditions in England, more slaves were imported for labor and the caste lines hardened.
By the end of the colonial period, the number of enslaved people in Delaware began to decline. Shifts in the agriculture economy from tobacco to mixed farming resulted in less need for slaves' labor. In addition local Methodists and Quakers encouraged slaveholders to free their slaves following the American Revolution, and many did so in a surge of individual manumissions for idealistic reasons. By 1810, three-quarters of all blacks in Delaware were free. When John Dickinson freed his slaves in 1777, he was Delaware's largest slave owner with 37 slaves. In 1840, Delaware's population was 78,085 of whom 2,605 were slaves. By 1860, the largest slaveholder owned 16 slaves.
Although an attempt to abolish slavery in 1847 failed by narrow margins in the legislature, the percentage of Delaware's Black population held as slaves decreased over time. By the 1860 census on the verge of the Civil War, 91.7% of the black population were free; 1,798 were slaves, as compared to 19,829 "free colored persons".
An independent black denomination was chartered in 1813 by freed slave Peter Spencer as the "Union Church of Africans". This followed the 1793 establishment in Philadelphia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by Richard Allen, which had ties to the Methodist Episcopal Church until 1816. Spencer built a church in Wilmington for the new denomination. This was renamed as the African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church and Connection, more commonly known as the A.U.M.P. Church. In 1814, Spencer called for the first annual gathering, known as the Big August Quarterly, which continues to draw members of this denomination and their descendants together in a religious and cultural festival.
During the secession crisis of late 1860 to early 1861, the Southern states sent commissioners to try to convince the legislature to join Delaware's fellow slave states and leave the Union. However, the state lawmakers opposed secession due to Delaware's geographic vulnerability and economic ties to the North, and on January 3, 1861 they passed a resolution condemning secession. While most Delaware citizens who fought in the war served in the Union army, some served in companies on the Confederate side in Maryland and Virginia Regiments. Delaware is notable for being the only slave state from which no Confederate regiments or militia groups were assembled.
Delaware's wartime government was dominated by pro-slavery Democrats, and in February 1865 the legislature voted to reject the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to Black Americans, and the 15th Amendment, granting voting rights, were similarly rejected, but became effective nationwide when a majority of states approved them. The state then enacted Jim Crow laws in the 1870s that would establish legal racial discrimination until the 1960s. Delaware officially ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments on February 12, 1901, decades after they had already come into force.
During the Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War, Democratic Redeemer governments led by the South's Bourbon aristocracy continued to dominate the region and imposed explicitly white supremacist regimes in the former slave states. The Delaware legislature declared Black people to be second-class citizens in 1866, and restricted their voting rights despite the 15th Amendment, ensuring continued Democratic success in the state throughout most of the 19th century. Fearful that the 1875 Civil Rights Act passed by Congress might establish racial equality, Delaware legislators passed Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation in public facilities. The state's educational system was segregated by operation of law. Delaware's segregation was written into the state constitution, which, while providing at Article X, Section 2, that "no distinction shall be made on account of race or color", nonetheless required that "separate schools for white and colored children shall be maintained."
Text from the Wikipedia article “Delaware”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.