History of Delaware Timeline

In 1682, Penn arrived in New Castle with two documents: a charter for the Province of Pennsylvania and a lease for what became known as 'the Lower Counties on the Delaware', beginning Pennsylvania's governance of the Delaware territory.

In William Penn's Frame of Government of 1682, he established a combined assembly for his domain by providing for equal membership from each county and requiring legislation to have the assent of both the Lower Counties and the Upper Counties of Chester, Philadelphia and Bucks.

Image source: Frame of Government of Pennsylvania

In 1704, members of the two regions mutually agreed to meet and pass laws separately from then on, giving the Lower Counties on the Delaware their own distinct legislature.

Large parts of southern and western Delaware had been thought to be in Maryland until the legal battles were settled when the heirs agreed to the survey performed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon between 1763 and 1767.

Image source: Mason–Dixon line

The Delaware Constitution of 1776 changed the name of the polity from The Counties of New Castle, Kent and Sussex upon Delaware, also known as the Lower Counties, to The Delaware State.

The American Revolutionary War began in April 1775, and on June 15, 1776, the Delaware Assembly voted to break all ties with Great Britain and simultaneously with Pennsylvania.

Image source: John Dickinson

The engagement began August 30, 1777, about two miles south of Cooch's Bridge, located in present-day Newark, Delaware, during the British campaign toward Philadelphia.

Image source: Battle of Cooch's Bridge

Delaware had a Loyalist insurrection in April 1778 called the Clow Rebellion, reflecting internal divisions within the state during the Revolutionary War.

Image source: Clow Rebellion

In 1783, the independence of the United States and therefore Delaware was confirmed in the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the American Revolutionary War.

Image source: Treaty of Paris (1783)

Éleuthère Irénée du Pont arrived from France in 1800, beginning the du Pont family's long association with Delaware that would shape its economy for centuries.

Image source: Du Pont family

The construction of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal between 1802 and 1829 brought significant shipping interests to Delaware, expanding the state's commercial opportunities.

Image source: Chesapeake & Delaware Canal

In 1804 Éleuthère Irénée du Pont established the largest gunpowder factory in the United States on the banks of the Brandywine River just north of Wilmington.

Image source: Éleuthère Irénée du Pont

Opposition to slavery in Delaware, imported from Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania, led many slaveowners to free their slaves; half of the state's black population was free by 1810, and more than 90% were free by 1860.

Image source: History of slavery in Delaware

The oldest black church in the country was chartered in Delaware by former slave Peter Spencer in 1813 as the 'Union Church of Africans', which is now known as the A.U.M.P. Church.

Image source: African Union Methodist Protestant Church

The Big August Quarterly, which began in 1814, is still celebrated today and is the oldest such cultural festival in the country.

Despite its small size, with a population of only 112,000 in 1860, Delaware supplied more than 12,000 men for the Union army, and the DuPont powder mills in Wilmington were an essential source of gunpowder for the Northern war effort.

Image source: Delaware in the American Civil War

During the secession crisis of late 1860 to early 1861, Southern states sent commissioners to try to convince Delaware to join them in leaving the Union, but the state legislature voted against holding a state secession convention on January 3, 1861.

On February 8, 1865, two months before the end of the Civil War, Delaware voted to reject the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and so voted to continue slavery beyond the Civil War. However, the gesture proved futile when other states ratified the amendment, which took effect in December 1865 and thereby ended slavery in Delaware.

Image source: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Delaware legislature declared blacks to be second-class citizens in 1866 and restricted their voting rights despite the Fifteenth Amendment, ensuring continued Democratic success in the state throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Fearful that the 1875 Civil Rights Act passed by Congress might establish social equality, Delaware legislators passed Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation in public facilities and effectively codified the state's tradition of white supremacy.

A small dispute lingered until 1921 over an area known as the Wedge, where the Mason-Dixon line and the Twelve-Mile Circle left a fragment of land claimed by both Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Image source: Delaware Wedge

Board of Education was the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court which found racial segregation in United States public schools to be unconstitutional, directly affecting Delaware's segregated school system.

Only 456 out of 1,562 students attended the next day in Milford, and the movement gained traction in the nearby town of Lincoln, where 116 of the 146 pupils in the local elementary school boycotted in solidarity.

A mass meeting in Milford in October 1954 attracted a crowd of 3,000 people opposed to school integration following the Brown decision.

The Attorney General later took action to revoke the NAAWP's corporate charter in September 1955, curbing the organization behind the anti-integration movement.

School segregation in the state would not end until 1967, thirteen years after the Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional.